0:00
Shanie Zimerman
Give one more minute and we'll go ahead and get started. So stay put and we'll be back in a minute. All right, so hi everyone. For those who are not yet familiar with me, I'm Shani. I manage Strategic Partners over here at Oktopost. And I just want to say thank you again for joining us in what is our seventh episode of our from the Experts series today. Joining me is Colin Day. He is Oktopost managing director over in emea. And we have a very special guest, Jason, the VP of Marketing over at Metadata. And these two are going to be taking you through everything we need to know really about account based marketing. And this is where I have my delight in moving the slides over. Would have been a much nicer introduction with you guys up here. I do just want to remind everyone you are on mute. There is a Q and a box on the zoom. There's a chat box. I have those open. So if anything comes in, we'll be more than happy to answer along the way. And if we don't get to that question along the way, there will be time afterwards. So feel free to drop any questions that you have right in the Q and A box. Jason, I think people already know myself and Colin, we've been here for quite some time, so I would love to hear a little bit from you. And kind of setting the tone for today's conversation, what is it that Metadata do and what is it that you do over at Metadata?
1:34
Jason Widup
Yeah, thanks Jenny. Thanks for having me on. I love to talk about ABM or all other things. B2B marketing. Yeah. So I'm VP of MarketingTadata IO. Let's see, how would I describe this? We're a demand generation platform. We connect to your existing marketing systems and we do a lot of the most critical but repetitive tasks. We do that using our patented AI and machine learning technologies. I'd say like the primary problems we help B2B organizations solve are audience targeting and identification, computer scale testing, optimization to revenue, and then a personal to corporate identity graph that we use to kind of help target and enrich the leads that we gather for you. So you can check us out. Metadata IO My background has primarily been in marketing, operations, technology, analytics, roles at pretty large organizations like Tableau and Microsoft and Workfront. And now I'm at a fun startup for the first time in my career, which I'm startups. Yeah, eating it up. I couldn't be happier. I'm probably doing the best work of my career, at least I think so.
2:51
Colin Day
Don't tell everyone in the past though, Jason. Right. Don't tell all of those people you've worked for in the past that you're doing the best work now. Yeah.
2:58
Jason Widup
If you've worked with me before and you're hearing this now, fast forward. Sometimes it's the context though. You know what I mean? Sometimes it's the context. And yeah, so I'm here and I'm having a great time.
3:10
Shanie Zimerman
Amazing. So there is. We know that abm, it's not a new concept. It's been around forever and likely whether or not you've had a strategy in place, it's something that most organizations are doing whether they know about it or not. But I know from what I've heard from customers and just being in the B2B marketing space, there's a lot of promise around ABM. There's a lot of just essentially promises that ABM can fulfill and there's this dream behind it and coming from an ABM demand generation solution, I'd love to hear a little bit from you about what it means to fulfill the promise or kind of what you need to do in order to get to that fulfillment.
3:50
Jason Widup
Yeah, yeah, this is a good place to start. I mean there's the promise of ABM and then there's the promise of ABM platform. So I'll start with the promise of abm because if we start there, that's like we were talking about like more about the process. And so it's a tactic, it's a process that you're going to use inside of your organization. One of many probably. It's not going to be everything that you do but you know, it's, it's really how businesses have always sold to businesses, but then just, you know, more putting a label on it. Like I actually worked at a B2B marketing agency. It was a 20 year old one. It was like one of the first out there. And that's kind of where I learned B2B. And we were doing this was years ago and we were doing well, we call them TAP programs, you know, just targeted account programs, you know. And it was basically the same thing as abm. So it's something we've been doing for a long time. And it's really about, you know, how do you, how do you really understand who you're selling best to or who could best use your product and using as many different variables, signals in there as possible to really hone that down, taking in account centric approach to marketing and advertising and nurturing those people. So it's like you're still nurturing people, but you know, taking an account approach to that. So it's not like one person, what's the buying committee, you know, at that company and how do I get into their minds and how do I take them through a journey and then at the back end, you know, it's everything that happens after you get a customer as well. And, and so you're still marketing to them. You know, you're marketing to them through adoption, through getting better use of your platform and then all the way out to the renewal and then, you know, after that as well. And so it's really. That's the promise. And the promise of that process. Sorry, that's the process. The promise of the process is that when you take that approach, you'll have higher conversion rates, you'll have better customer experience, you'll have higher asp, et cetera. Yeah. So I think that's the promise and we'll talk about whether or not we're fulfilling that promise yet. But yeah, that's kind of how I see the promise. Colin, what do you think?
6:11
Colin Day
Yeah, I mean, Jason, for me it's really about that fourth point on this slide. Right. And you touched upon it in so much as it's not ABM versus everything else. Right. Or it's not abm, the sacrifice of everything else. The modern day marketing engine or mix or function or group or whatever you want to call. It's really about an integrated campaign strategy. And you talked about your TAP programs from those former employers where you obviously weren't working that hard because you told everyone up front that this was the time of your life. But no, those TAP programs that you were talking about, as marketers, we all have an account based marketing strategy.
7:02
Jason Widup
Right.
7:05
Colin Day
It become very shiny and new and a lovely word to put out there several years back. But even before that we all had account based marketing strategies because we targeted companies, we targeted people, those buying committees that you spoke about. So from a marketing perspective, it really all starts with understanding what the target addressable market is and building that data layer that we then use in order to run those campaign strategies, those integrated strategies against. And where you slacker mentioned slackermio, it's really been about the platform and the process. And the platform was the thing that really started several years back that a lot of vendors jumped on the bandwagon, say hey, I can make more money by saying that I've got account based marketing capabilities with inside my platform or my portfolio.
8:17
Jason Widup
Yeah, yeah. And this is where I think the promise starts to fade away a little bit. And so the way I think about this is I don't know if anyone would debate the like that you should do abm, right? So it's like, you know, because everyone's pretty much doing it different flavors, etc. But you know, where it starts to break down is we've, we have these platforms that we call ABM platforms. And so initially if we took the process definition of ABM first and started there and say, okay, here's how we think about abm. And then we took a look at the platforms that have been essentially laid on top of that. I don't think any of them can do the entire gamut of what we talked about from the process perspective or they can't do the whole thing very well. Like they might do this one well, this one well then leave the other ones outside. And so what's happened is it's like, oh, there's this account based marketing push, you know what I mean? From everywhere we're talking about it more. It's, you know, it's. And so yeah, we do that already. We do a lot of parts of that. And so now we're going to put ourselves into this ABM platform category. And then what happened is the category ended up getting defined by the software vendors that were a part of it and their capabilities and maybe a little bit of their roadmap. And so what happened was these platforms were built to engage accounts at scale in different channels like display, social, etc. Search, maybe. And so then I think what happened is just through trickle down, you know, I need to do abm, here's a platform for me to do it with. Here's how they, and I don't, I mean, I'm not, I know what ABM is, but I'm, but I'm going to listen to this, this vendor because they've laid out an entire path and what it looks like, but that path was really centered around what those platforms were good at. And so I think, and so the promise became, hey, if you engage accounts and the people at those accounts, the right people at the right time, with the right content engage them, that engagement will lead to revenue, closed deals, et cetera, at a much higher rate, with a much higher ASP than using the tactics that you've been using so far. And that's, I think, in my opinion, kind of where the promise starts to fall down a little bit is that we've said that, but we're not looking and seeing that direct connection. I mean, I think we all can Say yes, we need to engage accounts to move them through a funnel, but is it that and is it the ABM platforms and the use of those and all that account engagement and display and impressions, et cetera, Is that what's actually leading to it or is it lot of other things? Which is what I think is the case that plus a lot of other
11:03
Colin Day
things, Jason, I think it all starts, right, with at an organization level, a common understanding of when we say ABM or account based marketing, what do we mean? Because two marketers inside the same marketing team will have a different understanding, right? Or a different definition. And two companies will have a very different definition. So, you know, to me, it all starts with your level setting. What do we mean by it, by abm? And then as you say, right, like the technology should be the last thing that we think about, right? Because it really starts with what's the strategy? What's the definition? What's the strategy? What does that data have? We got to support that strategy? And now how do we leverage technology in order to help implement and execute that strategy at scale? For me, it's really about point three here. It's about historically we've gone fishing with, with our net, right? And it could be a big net, it could be a little net, right? But we've gone fishing with our net like, you know, trying to scoop up as, as many as possible for our salespeople to, to take a look at the fish and say, hey, is this really a fish? Is, is this someone that we can sell to? Nope. Is this. Oh yeah, that's one. It's like, let's put it in the basket, right? So it's about moving from, you know, fishing with a net to really fishing with a fishing rod or, or a fishing pole, as some people would, would call it, right? So it's about right place, right time, right message, right. Right bait. Yeah. If you will, to target the right fish.
13:02
Jason Widup
That's a great analogy. Because if you think about the net, right, the squares are all the same size. It's indiscriminate, right? So it's like wide and indiscriminate because you're basically trying to put everyone through the same square. You got a shark over here, you caught a whale over there, and there a tuna, you got things you don't want in there. You know what I mean? And so that's the exact same. It's a great analogy. I mean, it's the exact same thing that happens. And you know, I've worked at places going back to that Common understanding. It's like, I've worked at places where it's an actual true fact. And here's what I think happens is everyone in market, especially for the larger company, right? Where, like, everyone's kind of put this mask on and they're trying to play the role. If you say, like, hey, we're going to do an ABM program, and if somebody says, wait, what does that mean there? You know what I mean? They're exposing themselves with like, well, what? You don't know what ABM means. And so you already start with, like, this weird. Nobody really wants to say, what if they know what it is or if they don't. Everyone moves forward with assumptions, you know what I mean? And some people might think, oh, it's just ABM is just creating the target account list and going after them. You know, another person might not even understand that or the importance of the target account list. No, it's about surrounding every account with ads, you know, or whatever it is. And so I think that's a great point, is you have to start, and it's not just in marketing. You know, you have to start with, what does this mean for us? And let's all, like, hey, let's put it all on the same playing field. We all know what ABM is, but nobody knows what ABM is for this company right now because it's going to be unique for this company. It's going to be more unique than it is, you know, it's going to be different than it is at other companies, even though we're all doing abm.
14:35
Colin Day
And also, it's not, as you say, it's not just a marketing thing, right? Like, you know, there are other stakeholders. Key one being sales, right? After all, like, isn't. Isn't that our role as marketers is to drive demand for our products and services that our sellers can then go and turn into business for the organization and drive increased value for our shareholders, whoever our shareholders may be.
15:05
Shanie Zimerman
That's actually a really great segue. I know the two of you can just talk about this for the next five hours, but we have a time limit today.
15:11
Colin Day
Oh, do we? Oh, sorry, Shanique.
15:14
Shanie Zimerman
That is actually a really great segue into the next topic. Meaning, which is don't give up yet, because there are a ton of benefits that come out of an ABM strategy, despite the fact that it can take time and it can take some efforts. But I'd love to hear a little bit more from you, too, about why we shouldn't necessarily give up if we're not seeing the bites so soon on.
15:38
Jason Widup
Yeah, I just had. So I've been a one man show for a while now and I just had a new marketer start yesterday and so I'm incredibly happy to have some space. Yeah, we were talking about this a little bit yesterday and you know, it's. When you think about this from a relationship standpoint, you know, you think about what you're doing. Hey, right there, Colin.
16:13
Colin Day
Yeah, sorry, my lights just went off. I think I need to clap my arms. Right. Someone hasn't been paying the bills.
16:23
Jason Widup
Yeah, I mean when you, when you think about this from a relationship, I can't speak. Relate. Relationship standpoint, you start to look at things a little bit differently and you start to look at things as like, okay, what can I, you know, I wouldn't treat a relationship that I care about transactionally. So like, what can I do to help me scale but still stay on this kind of trajectory where I want to personalize things, I want to be able to respond to things in a personal way. So it's kind of this balance between scale and still doing the right things for building a relationship. And so I think, you know, sometimes we enter into some of these things not really thinking about it in that way. But if you think about it and take it outside of the context of marketing, you're like, well, if we disagree that selling through, selling through relationships is probably a much better and more effective way to sell and you understand what you would do with relationships in your personal life, you know, to nurture those relationships or like if you care about them, what you would do, you wouldn't send an auto response, you know what I mean, to like somebody that you like in your personal life. And I mean, we have to do this. But like, it's important to think about these things, I think in that way so that you don't go too far in one way where you're like, okay, I've got to get so much more scale so I'm gonna dilute this and then it's not gonna hit. And so I think, oh, what I was going to say is like you, what happens, I think is companies say, okay, we're going to move to an ABM program or we're already doing it, but we're going to focus on it more. And then the marketers, like that's leadership. And then the marketers get together and say, okay, that's great, but here's what's going to happen. Your leads are going to go down, but your quality is going to go up. And so ultimately that's going to result in a higher conversion rate and, and a better experience, a higher ASP and that will offset the volume differences, you know, in our older approach and that everyone initially agrees with that, in my experience. And then you get it out there and then you're one month in. It's like, oh, God, the leads are going down. You know what I mean? But they're like, okay, you saw, you said that it's going to, you know, it's going to turn around, it's going to turn a corner, it's going to be better. Then month two comes in and it's still starting to, you know, and it's in month two, it's usually, you can't quite tell you what I mean. It's like, there's some stuff going on, it's changing, you know, but I'm not sure yet. And then in month three, they're like, get it back to the old way. I need my leads. And in month three is exactly when it's about to turn, especially, you know, depending on how long your sales cycle is, all that good stuff. And so I've seen this happen so many times. And what, what happens in there is that the marketers didn't set the right expectations. They talked about it theoretically, but they didn't give numbers. Right. And it's hard to sometimes. But if you can really help tell that story a little bit better with like, listen, it's gonna take three months or four months. Use your sales cycle. You already know what your sales cycle is. It's gonna take at least a sales cycle, you know what I mean, to pretty much prove that out. So, yeah, so I think they get into it and then they just back out too quickly because they're worried about the fact that, oh, I'm getting less leads. And ultimately that's gonna mean if they just look at their historical conversion rates and assume that's what's gonna continue.
19:55
Colin Day
Jason, you're a SaaS business, right?
19:57
Jason Widup
Yes.
19:59
Colin Day
And you've worked for traditional license fee businesses over the times. You know, the times when you weren't productive. Yeah, I'm gonna keep bringing that back. I'm like a dog with a bone. I can't like. Right. I didn't care at all. I don't even know to me what you, what you've just, you know, what you've, what you've just talked about there. Right. Is, is to me the point in time that a licensed business moved to a SaaS based model.
20:27
Jason Widup
Right.
20:28
Colin Day
In so Much as you couldn't do that overnight, it took time. Right. You didn't want to just drop the line. Otherwise the whole revenue for the companies tanked. Right. So for a period of time, and even today in some instances, people are still running both models because that's the way that you keep the lights on and you keep the business churning. That's exactly what you've just described, Right. From a marketing perspective with what, let's call it non abm. Like an abm. Right. To me it's all marketing, but it's not one versus the other. If you do go down or when you jump into an ABM strategy, it takes time to take hold. The second point I'd like to pick up on is the reason it takes time to get a hold is that we're talking about taking the same marketing tactics that we've always used and personalizing them. I pick up on the word that you use, personalization. Personalizing them to, to the accounts and the buying committees, the Personas with inside those accounts that we know are part of this ABM strategy. Now, the key thing with that is we all know that different people consume information in different ways. So therefore the tactics that work are going to differ across the accounts and the individuals that we're targeting. So therefore attribution modeling is obviously key. Right. And to build out an attribution model and to play that through, as you say, takes several cycles.
22:31
Jason Widup
Right.
22:31
Colin Day
The third point to pick up on going back to personalization is it's a very fine line between personalization being creepy.
22:44
Jason Widup
Yeah, I'm always nice. Nice. Yeah, I'm always trying to ride that line. And I have for most of my career, because for most of my career I've been in analytics, you know, technology operations, where I see what's possible, you know, what's possible for us to do with things available. And so, yeah, so it's always like. But I'm always trying to push it a little, a little bit because I'm marketing to marketers. So I kind of. So in that realm, and this isn't everybody, but in that realm it's almost expected a little bit. Or if you're marketing to the right marketers, it's kind of like, ah, you got me. You know what I mean? And it's kind of like you found another way that I don't know about. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, and so it's kind of interesting to play with different messaging and tactics kind of in that sphere. But I know that's not the same for everybody. Not Everybody's marketing to marketers.
23:41
Colin Day
But even personalization, right? It's like personalization can be to the extreme of I land on your website now let's personalize it for Colin Day, the individual. Or let's personalize it for the organization or industry cluster that Colin Day works in. You know, let's go as creepy as throw up Oktopost logo, right? It's like, you know, there you can go to the extreme, right? It's like same with, same with your email, same with, you know, direct mail, Slack, you know, whatever. It's, you know, it really is finding the balance. And you know, what, what one individual finds creepy, another individual is going to find slacker amusing or true.
24:27
Jason Widup
Hard to know who you're gonna get when you approach them. But yeah, yeah. And so I think, you know, ways of, you know, there's a standard ways of personalizing like you mentioned, you know, and I've seen some of those, like the one where they get my logo, you know, on their website. The first time I saw that, which actually wasn't that long ago, which is kind of funny, but. Or the first time I noticed it, I guess I would say I was at home too. And they associated me with metadata, which was really interesting to me because also metadata so small. Like we have like a tiny office in San Francisco and like a building full of startups, you know what I mean? And so, and so, but I was, I remember thinking, oh, that's cool, you know, but it was like. And I, but it did obviously I remembered it, you know, because I'm talking about it now. So it was kind of like, oh, interesting. But I don't know if for me that was more of like a, oh, cool, they did that, you know, versus a, you know, like, oh, that's going to actually help me go to a sale. Like you just helped me, you know, sell basically. And so, so yeah, so I think when I'm trying to, what I'm trying to do from a personalization standpoint is find new and interesting ways to personalize. But, but not like it was just first name or like with the specifics that we know. But is there another way? What did I do? Recently I had a campaign that took people through a couple of experiences. I think it was like a conversation ad website. And then I followed up with them with an email. And in that email I said, literally I said, hey, thanks for going through this campaign with me. I wanted you to know exactly why you were targeted. And I put down there in there, literally, I think you're at a Company of this, between this size and this size. I think that you're in this industry, I think you're in the market for this. You know, I just laid it out for them like this is why I targeted you. I don't know the results that campaign yet because I didn't, it wasn't high enough volume, it was just like not that long ago. But I'm trying to, you know, I'm trying to just again just test new things, you know what I mean? That I haven't seen, I've been sold to for a long time, which I think is a benefit to me because I've seen a lot of the things. And so now I'm trying to like, okay, I know about all those. I'm trying different approaches and so, so yeah, I think that's what I'm trying.
26:46
Shanie Zimerman
I had a question and actually very. This is just. You're gonna keep talking about what, you're talking about what tactics work best and if you have like in a specific order that they might work best.
27:00
Jason Widup
Yeah, I mean in terms of the tactics that work best, I mean I, there's some tried and true ones and then I'll talk a little bit about some of the new ones that I'm like testing. And so like the tried and true for me is I just, I always have to have streams of things going on, you know what I mean? And so like what are my awareness streams and who am I targeting with those and with what channels? And usually I'm like, okay, awareness stream through display, advertising, maybe some through social with the ultimate goal of getting them to the site, getting them through a little bit of an experience so they learn more about who I am. Now I have them from a retargeting perspective and I can retarget them in social with a little bit different ad. I'm also, you know, we focused in on our three primary, you know, the problems that we solve, you know, and we're using that in more of the mid funnel stuff also trying to get stuff that help people self select out. So that's, I would consider that all pretty standard stuff that most SaaS companies do. Now what I'm, now what I'm moving to is I really am using paid as a bridge to get me to a place where 70%, maybe I'll 60 to 70% of my inbound is coming through organically. And so what I'm doing there is several, several different things. So the first thing I'm doing is I'm actually doing a lot of content on LinkedIn so I'm doing social selling, I guess that way, but I'm doing it in a way where the content that I'm putting out there, I'm trying, it's trying not to make it salesy or talk about metadata. I'm just trying to talk about things that I've learned in my experience. I'm an ops person, so I'm all about efficiencies, you know, things like that. So I talk about that and I produce content around that. I connect with people. I've. So I've taken a more aggressive approach at connecting with people on LinkedIn that could be my potential buyers. Right. But for me it makes sense because they're marketers as well. And so it's a lot. It's just really easy. It's like I should be connected with you anyway because you're a marketer, you work at a B2B company, so do I.
29:01
Colin Day
They may be your next employer as well. Jason. It's like somewhere where it's like, you know, you can be, you can do even more, right?
29:07
Jason Widup
Yeah, exactly. Like, well, that's, you know, there's always
29:10
Shanie Zimerman
going to haunt you, Jason, going on.
29:12
Jason Widup
Yeah, and I've seen that, you know, and, and the goal there is, hey, put out content that's tangentially related to our product. It's informative, it helps people, it creates conversation, it shows a perspective. The hope I have is that they'll see that, like, huh, that's kind of smart, hopefully. And then they bridge that to the product. Well, okay, Jason is putting out some smart stuff. He works for metadata, he'd probably work for a smart company. Let me go check them out. And we're seeing signs of that working, which is nice. On the other side, you know, I'm working to get more people to my website organically. And so, you know, I started from ground zero, basically, where we didn't really pay any attention to SEO. We're still not there yet. We have a lot of technical stuff to do, but it's content creation, getting content exposed. First of all, I had a lot of stuff wrapped up in PDFs, a lot of stuff wrapped up, just not things that search engines could see. Getting that exposed, building more and more content, getting backlinks, you know, doing all the technical stuff because I want most, like I said, I want most of my demo requests and hand raisers to come through the website and not through campaign. So also we see great results through direct mail. So we use Sendoso quite a bit. There's other companies out there of course, like Alice and others that actually, if done right, is incredibly powerful. You know, it's the law of reciprocity, basically. And so if you do it in a way where, you know, it's, you're not too salesy, they know, you know what I mean? They know what you're trying to do, they're trying to get a relationship, but you just, you carry it on. You just carry it on and you don't. You do it correctly, you take the time and you're using it as a relationship builder and not a sales tactic. Our SDR is great at this. She actually, somebody who she did this with just wrote up a whole post about their experience with her on LinkedIn. Didn't even mention her or our company because he was just, it was just great experience and I wanted to like talk about it. You know, she sends out a pinata gram, you know, it's like this little pinata, you know, that's like this big with like a label on it to where it's going. His little head sticks out and his feet are sticking out of the package, you know, and you. And it's just, it goes along really well with her personality. Right. And so it makes sense. She sends a follow up just like, hey, hope you enjoyed that, you know, what kind of candy do you like? Blah, blah, blah. And then she kind of waits, you know what I mean? She waits to see are they going to engage with me. And if they don't, she'll wait a month, you know what I mean? And just kind of put them on ice a little bit. And so I like that as well. It's working out pretty well for us.
31:37
Colin Day
So, Jason, I mean, that's an integrated campaign strategy right there. Right. So I think you've touched upon at least a dozen tactics, right?
31:46
Jason Widup
Exactly.
31:48
Colin Day
I think the one thing that I got from that. Right. Is as always, content is king.
31:53
Jason Widup
Right.
31:53
Colin Day
And what you're doing with that content is you're earning that relationship. You're not buying it. You're not buying it through paid. You're earning it through the organic material that you're putting out there on whether it be LinkedIn. Are you finding LinkedIn is the, is the best social network for you or for me?
32:18
Jason Widup
For sure. Yeah. I've concentrated my efforts there. And honestly, it's not that difficult. You know, I really didn't start to grow my network until I took this role because I never worked for a company where I was like, I'm willing to associate my personal brand with this company. I mean, I Work for companies that way. But the roles I had, it didn't really make sense. You know, it's like I was always in operations analytics and so, and so, yeah, so I focus on LinkedIn and we see these signs in deals, you know, and the way I know about it is because before I started growing my network, I pretty much knew every, you know, most of the people in there. They were pretty much all, you know, people I'd worked with before for the most part. But then I started getting people say, hey, I've got this deal, this opportunity, I'm working and you're connected with this person on LinkedIn. Do you know them? And I say no. And so then I know it's working, right? Because like, these are people that I've been connecting with that I don't really know. And they're in deals now and they say, and they often mention like, oh, I saw Jason's content and you know, it kind of came over. And so we're seeing that on just a handful right now. But I've only been doing it for three months, really. And so it does if you do it. And you know what I'm finding works is three times, three to four times a week posting. I do follow the tried and true algorithm buster things I didn't want to at first, but like if you put a link in your post, it does not work as well. I don't, whatever reason, put a link in the comments. You know, I hate that, I hate it. But let's play the game. Literally, we must conform. I know we tested this and with the same content basically. And one of the, one of the posts had 200 views, the other one had over 2000. Literally the same exact content. And so it, you know, so I play that game a little bit.
34:02
Colin Day
The interesting thing then though, Jason, right, is with. We're talking about account based marketing strategies. Right. And you were talking about Jason the man. Right, Jason the person. Right. So you've now just become part, whether you like it or not, right. Even when you certainly understand it. Right. But you've now become, as an employee of the organization, you've now become part of that account based marketing strategy.
34:31
Jason Widup
Exactly. And I kind of, like I mentioned, I was never really willing to use my personal brand in past roles to do that, but it made so much sense here. And also, you know, the way I think about it is these are all people that I actually do want to be connected with. You know what I mean? Like, even over time, if I want to continue to try and grow my influence on that channel. And so, yeah, so I. And I actually do enjoy it. You know, I've been marketing for a long time. I'm an old man now in marketing. And you just have a lot of experiences, you know, and it's. It's fun to share those because I remember, you know, when barely. But I barely remember when I was early in my career. That's how I learned, you know, I just kind of. I followed. I looked for just people that had had experience and just things that I agreed, you know, kind of agreed with and really got me excited about marketing. I'd follow them and learn from them. And so I thought. I kind of feel like, oh, okay, I have a little bit of a responsibility now to kind of pay that back in some way. And, you know, if I can do it in a way that's. I try and do it a little bit entertaining, sometimes a little bit provocative, I can't speak. And so that's funny sometimes, too.
35:44
Colin Day
Yeah.
35:44
Jason Widup
And I'm just. And it's working so far as.
35:47
Shanie Zimerman
I love your content on LinkedIn. I love what you put out there. It catches my eye enough that I click the link in the comments. So
35:58
Colin Day
she's waiting for a pinata, though. So that hasn't turned up quite yet. Right. But Jason, that really talks to. I mean, everything you've said there really talks to point three and four, right on the side deck that Shani's got up there. Right. Like, I mean, so much as what you're doing through that outreach on social is really like building that network, nurturing that network and doing it with authenticity.
36:30
Jason Widup
Yeah. Yeah. That's an important part.
36:32
Colin Day
If I can speak, it's about being. It's about being authentic. Right. And then the company rides on your coattails in that regards, then.
36:44
Jason Widup
Yeah. And that's what's important to me. You know, if I'm going to associate my personal brand with a company, it has to be where I can be authentic. You know, I even put a post out a couple weeks ago, a WhatsApp exchange I had with Gil, our CEO. I asked. Yeah. I was like, hey, Gil, can I. You mind if I put this out there? He's like, oh, no, thanks for asking. I didn't put what he said afterwards. But. No, I'm just kidding. Totally kidding. And I was like, hey, I'm just. I need a. I need a break. I'm gonna go on a hike. You know, I got my stuff done. Which was kind of funny. Cause I'm like a vp. I'm like, I Got my work, daddy. But, like, I just felt it was a little bit of me that felt like I was feeling a little bit like, oh, God, should I leave and go get this hike in? That was like, I needed to really clear my mind. And so even, like, stuff like that, you know, it was really authentic. I was struggling, personable.
37:41
Shanie Zimerman
It's relatable.
37:42
Jason Widup
Yeah, yeah. And that one got a lot of.
37:45
Shanie Zimerman
A lot of people love people. Yeah, People don't love brands all the time. They love the people connected to the brand. I do want to be conscious of time, Colin. I'm sorry, you want to get that one last thing in?
37:56
Colin Day
One last thing. One last thing, yeah. So, Jason, and people, you know, people like people more than the brand, right? Sometimes. Yeah. What I always say is, do you know what a connected workforce is? Sometimes more, you know, more powerful than the brand itself. Right? And that's. That's what you're demonstrating for everything you've just said there, mate. Sorry, Shanique.
38:17
Shanie Zimerman
I want to learn. How do you offend? I want to learn from mistakes in ABM strategy. I'm sure that, Jason, you've probably come across a couple of these along the way and Colin as well. So I want to hear kind of what we can take away from past mistakes or past faults that have been incorporated in ABM or in an ABM approach. And we touched a little bit on this in our conversations up until now,
38:46
Jason Widup
but, yeah, some of them have come through for sure.
38:49
Colin Day
I mean, some of it. Is that over personalization, right, Jason? It's like that line between personalization and creepiness.
38:57
Jason Widup
Yeah.
38:58
Colin Day
Yep.
38:59
Jason Widup
Yeah, I've had. Yeah, I've had my fair share of people come back to me and say, like, wait, hold on a second. But, yeah, a small handful. I mean, I think for me, some of the mistakes I've made. And you're right, I've talked about these a little bit, but maybe I'll talk about a little more. I mean, one is going back to the alignment piece. And so, you know, we talked about that. Sales and marketing alignment. I won't rat hole on that again. But, you know, the mistake that I made was assumptions. You know what I mean? And I think that can. You can scale that across a lot of things. Assumptions are a problem. Right. And so if you find yourself, you
39:42
Shanie Zimerman
know what they say?
39:44
Jason Widup
Yeah, exactly. If you find yourself make it creating an answer for somebody, then you probably have some assumptions in there. And so get, you know, get started by like maniacally defining what it is, even defining some of the small things. That you think maybe everyone would already agree with, but, like, there might not be. And so don't take anything for granted that you, you know, that you think you have it nailed. Like, really start from the ground floor. When you don't do that, you get the misalignment. And I, the last corporate job I had, it was just rampant, you know, sales. It was like we had all these campaigns going, feeding to an sdr. The SDR didn't know anything that the, that the prospect had engaged with. So it was almost like they were just kind of getting an email, almost like a cold outbound, you know, they weren't using any of the, like, all the stuff that had happened coming into the fold. And when, before they were handed off, they were just, okay, there's a new email address. I got to go after them. I don't know what they've engaged with. I don't know. Even though the data was there, they didn't know. You know, it was just like. And so if you don't have that alignment and if you don't talk about these things beforehand, it's just gonna, it's not gonna work out. And then you gotta stay connected. The other mistake I've made is, and I've seen this a lot too, is, and this is more campaign focused, but it's really across everything is you work first two, three months on something on a campaign, you launch it, and then you move your entire team over to the next campaign because you've stacked them up in your campaign calendar in exactly that way. So what you need to do is you need to reserve time and resources after a campaign launches to optimize that campaign. Nobody is going to get the perfect performance out of a campaign with the first instance of it. Nobody. And if you're just, if you're hitting your goals and then you're still leaving it alone, you're still leaving money on the table. So reserve time and effort resources to follow up on a campaign after it's launched.
41:40
Colin Day
Shani. And I think that third point on this slide, right. Talks to marketing in general, right. Not just ABM in so much as over saturation of target lists dilutes the relevance of the message that you're putting out there. Because you just become noise. And that's as bad as being creepy.
42:07
Shanie Zimerman
It's a case of impersonal.
42:12
Colin Day
Well, it might be personal noise, right? But you know, it's, it's, you know, personalized noise, right? It's like, but, but you know, it's like people, people zone out, right? And tune out and it's okay. That's, that's the one thing as marketers, you know, we can, we can ill afford because we put so much time and effort. Yeah. Into creating great content in, you know, in ensuring that we're using the right channel, you know, having a multi channel approach like being able to pick up on who's engaging like, you know, with our content. But guess what, if no one's engaging with it like because we've, we've oversaturated them, then we've just shot ourselves in the foot.
42:57
Shanie Zimerman
Yeah.
42:57
Colin Day
And it don't matter whether you've got a net. Yeah. Or a fishing rod or whatever in that regards. Right. You're never going to catch that fish
43:06
Shanie Zimerman
for sure. I want to move on to our last section again, just being conscious of time here. What makes a lead a lead? I am sorry, wow.
43:15
Colin Day
That's a question.
43:16
Shanie Zimerman
There you go. Let's start.
43:20
Jason Widup
Oh boy.
43:21
Shanie Zimerman
Yeah, I'll just cut you off mid sentence.
43:27
Jason Widup
So we'll start by saying, well, number two, a lead is not an email address. And so if you have an email address, please don't call that a lead. Especially if you're doing things like dating content on your website and then gathering that information and then passing it off to sales. And I've been at places that are bad at that and a lot of times what the reason for that, I've seen this a hundred times is you've built too large of an SDR organization based on historical performance rates who need to be fed a higher and higher volume of leads who start to not care about the quality because they just need those leads and their conversion rates like 0.1%. And so the more that they get, you know, and so that's, that's what gets companies into these problems of growing these sales teams entirely too large. Letting the sales team do most of the mid funnel work that marketing should be doing. And so.
44:32
Colin Day
Oh, I think we just lost you, Jason.
44:34
Shanie Zimerman
We lost you, Jason. We see you very well. But we lost your sound. I thought it was my headphones that popped.
44:41
Colin Day
I did hear a pop. Hey, let me, let me pick up while Jason's sorting his sound out. Right.
44:47
Jason Widup
I'm back now.
44:48
Colin Day
Oh, we're back.
44:50
Jason Widup
This is the headphone problem. I was telling you guys about it earlier. I don't have my conference phone. I don't have my AirPods. I'm on the stage.
44:56
Colin Day
Sony technology. Technology.
45:00
Jason Widup
Jason, what'd you guys hear me say? What's like the last thing you heard me say?
45:05
Shanie Zimerman
Oh, and it just ended. It ended like really abruptly. There was a literal like. And then you just went away.
45:13
Jason Widup
Well, I'll just say like here's all, here's how I ended it. Which was a lead should not be a lead unless there's some kind of an intent understanding in there, right? So either obviously a hand raiser. So hey, give me a demo. That's intent right there. Maybe you have intent data, but you know, maybe not intent data is okay, but like you want them to, you know, you want them to, you want them to have some kind of motion I think is what, how I would call it a lead. Not just somebody that is not even consumed, received your content. That's not a lead. So.
45:46
Colin Day
Yeah, but the key thing there, right, is to start off with the addressable market, right. It's like Jason, in so much as, you know, is a lead a person or is it a company, right? Like, or is it, is it, you know, a number of people with inside a company, right? Because you know, if you're trying to sell to Citibank for example, right. Like a huge organizations like you know, many people within that organization, not everyone is going to be a key target for you, right? Because not everyone's got the authority or the ability to influence a deal in any way, shape or form. It is truly about understanding the firmographic and the Personas. To me it's a case of everything that you've discussed. There's an implicit and explicit elements to it. There's some stuff that doesn't change. That is the type of organization, the geo company size, so on and so forth, the Persona types within those organizations. And then there's the intent, right? How do I understand that they may be in a buying cycle or be interested in what I've got to offer. And that's the way that they engage with the tactics and the assets that you put out there, right. So to me it always starts with, with understanding the data, the target addressable market. Yeah. And then as you say, right. Just because you've got someone's email address don't mean that they're a lead.
47:29
Jason Widup
Yeah, yeah. On that top one, the addressable market. You know, there's a lot of tools out there that can help you understand who you sell best to by just you know, connecting to Salesforce, reading your deal data and giving you like weights basically on different variables, you know, on accounts and even on buyers. Start there. But like that shouldn't be your end map. And so what I like to, especially if you're early days, right. Your early days, you don't have a lot of great deal data. Also, if you're early days and you're growing, you're moving markets way faster than your historical data is going to be able to help you predict, you know what I mean, future performance. And so I always like to say talk to sales, talk to, like talk to them about who they're selling most easiest to, who they want to sell to. The good salespeople that I've worked with have great pattern recognition brain. So after like 20 opportunities that they've worked, 20, 25 opportunities, they work, they understand who is going to be easier, who's going to be more difficult. So for us, we literally just made a change. We've been selling to companies between 50 to 10,000 people, right? And it's like a huge long range. And what we're realizing, we have a small sales team, like five, six people. So we get an enterprise person on the hook and they're really interested. We could easily, they could get all kinds of benefit from using our platform. You know, we have everything they need. Not everything, sorry, but like enterprise wise, you know, security, etc. And, but the sales guy has to do 17 demos, right? Because he's got to do one with the person that came on first and he's got to bring in his people and then they've got to go up market to talk to their people. Then you've got to meet with the security people. And what we're realizing is like, but if I bring an account in that has 350, like between 100 and 500 people, it's two calls and we close the deal in 40 days, you know what I mean? And so it's like, ah. And it's hard because it's like, well, we want the enterprise, we want those big names, but that's, we're more focused on our growth goals, you know what I mean? And meeting those and being able to serve these customers as best as we possibly can as well. And so yeah, we've really changed our focus. But if we just looked at all of our historical data only it wouldn't really tell us that. It would tell us to kind of continue to go all over the place because the win rates are still great across the board. It just takes a lot more time and time is money.
49:49
Shanie Zimerman
Yeah.
49:50
Colin Day
So you just spoke about the free Vs of sales, right? Like value, volume and velocity, right? It's like they're in one sentence, right?
50:01
Shanie Zimerman
Great.
50:02
Colin Day
Janine, does that answer your question of what is a lead?
50:05
Shanie Zimerman
Everything that you guys have spoken about today has answered every single question that I had about abm what a lead is. No, this was really helpful and very timely. Colin, do you have any last bits that you wanted to add onto the what makes the lead a lead?
50:24
Colin Day
No, as say. I think I've put mine out there. Right. Shani. In so much as. To me it's all about the address of understanding the addressable market, understanding who it is as a company and an individual that an organization needs to sell to. And in most instances, from a B2B perspective, it's not one individual. Right. It's a number. And you bring that together as the entity, as the buying entity and that's what really constitutes the lead.
50:58
Shanie Zimerman
Yeah, that's great. We got a couple of questions in. So with the last couple of minutes that we have, I'll go ahead and put them out there. Jason, I think that this one's for you. When I. Well, when we were speaking previously about the personalization, remember the fine line between personalization and creepy. How can we forget this came in a little bit afterwards. But when we're speaking personalization in the ABM space, is it personalization on the account level or the Persona level?
51:29
Jason Widup
I think it's both, if you can. I think it depends on the data that you have. You know, the, the easiest and the highest level is personalizing based on company because that's really easy to understand. If somebody comes to your website, you use a technology like Clearbit or Kickfire and IP lookup, they tell you what company they're from in real time. And so that's how a lot of companies are doing the, like showing the logo. So then you can get a logo lookup, blah blah, blah, you know, in near real time, get it on the site and get it in front of somebody. That's the easiest one. Right? Because it's. The data is the most accurate and the most complete, I'd say, in that kind of data set. Then when you go down to a person though, that's. I don't trust any of the data that people have that people that companies have about people. So for example, There are these DMPs data management platforms you guys have maybe heard of like Crux is one of them Blue Kai, that Oracle bot is another one. If you. And these are platforms that are trying to understand things about you and insights about you based on your web traffic behavior. And you can go to a website to see like Crux has one. Blue Kai used to have one where you could see everything it thought it knew about you and the insights it had about you. And when I went there it was like, I'm a man and I'm a woman. I'm somewhere between the ages of 18 and 75. I'm in the market for cars all the time somehow. I'm also in the market for lingerie for some reason. You know, I mean I was like, there's all these things that were not true about me. And so if that is the data that these companies have about you and you try and personalize on that, you're going to fail. And so what I, I only personalize on a person level based on first party data that I have. So what I know you've done, what I know you've engaged with already, those kinds of things.
53:11
Shanie Zimerman
Yeah. The second question, and I think you might have answered this, but paid social or organic? Social. I think you said everything that you're doing is organic. Is that right?
53:25
Jason Widup
Oh, I do both. So both. So you know, really right now I am making all kinds of hay with conversation ads on LinkedIn. So I pay for those. It's basically like a drift playbook inside of a LinkedIn InMail you could target the same way you can target on LinkedIn normal ads, you know, by industry, job title, all those things, things. And it's relatively inexpensive and so I can carry on, I can carry somebody through awareness consideration and also qualification get them to hand raise for a demo request for about $65 a person. And they're all right in my target, they're all high quality. And so yeah, so I do a lot of paid social, but primarily around conversation ads. Right now we also do some display or you know, just kind of static and video ads, et cetera in those channels. But most of my dollars go to conversation as they work really well for me.
54:23
Colin Day
And then apart from you as the individual rights, like when you're posting your stuff out through LinkedIn, that's obviously organic as well, right?
54:32
Jason Widup
Yeah, yeah. And you know the conversation that comes from me as well. So it's a marketer to a marketer, I feel their pain, I'm doing the same thing that they're trying to do. And so I kind of, I try and speak to them on that level like hey, come check out what I do to help myself generate pipeline using my own platform. You know, come check it out. And so, and then hopefully if they see that ad and they end up going over to my normal page, they'll see like, oh, this guy's real, you know, he's had jobs at Microsoft tableau I know those companies. He's been around for a while. You know, a lot of times you get these people and you go to their profile page and they're like one company, but they're like 35 years old. You know what I mean? You're like, oh, you created this profile just to market to people and stuff like that. And people snipped that out.
55:14
Colin Day
But they were all for the companies that you didn't work.
55:18
Shanie Zimerman
One last time. All right, guys, this brought us perfectly to the end of this webinar. I want to say thank you again, Colin. Thank you so much, Jason, for joining us today. Thanks, Jason. Like I said, if it was helpful for me, it's bound to be helpful for everyone listening to this. So really appreciate it. As mentioned, for the past six episodes of the series, we're going to continue our from the Expert series. So stay tuned for our next episode. It will be in the middle of September. You will be alerted of it. So we look forward to seeing you there. In the meantime, stay healthy, stay positive, stay happy, and thank you guys again. This was really helpful. If anybody wants to connect, feel free to reach out to us. Our emails are here and we'll be sending out the recording in the deck very soon. Thank you all. Thank you both very, very much.
56:08
Colin Day
Thank you.
56:09
Shanie Zimerman
Have a great day and we'll speak soon. Bye.
56:14
Colin Day
Thanks. Bye.
