ABM Strategies that You Can Steal with Mason Cosby
Overview
In this presentation, Mason shares ABM strategies that he has used and led him to success. He shares them with us and invites us to use them.
Speaker
Mason Cosby is marketing director of Mojo Media Labs, a full-service, integrated brand-to-demand marketing consultancy.
Key Points
- A walk through of an ABM strategy framework and the different components that lead to success with ABM
Transcript
Hello and welcome to ABM strategies that you can steal.
This is a real campaign, that journey of $5 million for one of our clients
in just five months.
My name is Mason Cosby. I serve as marketing director of Mojo Media Labs. I
cannot tell you how excited I am that you joined the session today. If you have
questions as we go throughout, go ahead and drop those in the chat but this
session was prerecorded. I am here with you live today. So, with that, let’s go
ahead and dive in.
There’s really two parts to this session today. For starters, we’re going to
actually walk through an ABM strategy framework and walk through just the
different components that you would need to actually find success with ABM.
Once we’ve walked through that strategy framework, we’ll actually then walk
through exactly how that functions for one of our clients today you’re going to
get a framework that you can use and run with and find great success with.
You’ll actually see a prime example of how to generate roughly 5 million in
five months. So, with that, there’s an overview, a specific timeline that walks
through how to structure that strategy for yourself. We’ll walk through the
specific results and then throw out some additional resources.
With that again, my name is Mason Cosby. I serve as a marketing director of
Mojo Media Labs. What that just means is I market our agency to bring in new
clients that need help implementing an ABM strategy. The real thing that we
find great success in is if you’re a b2b organization, that is finding some
level of success you’re getting that kind of random amounts of revenue, but
there’s not really any level of predictability. We help you build sustainable
growth. And again, one of the many ways that we do that is through an ABM
strategy. So, we’re going to walk through that framework that will help you
actually achieve long term scalable and sustainable growth.
So, as we walk through this framework, we always want to start with the
objectives. We want to start with why good ol Simon Sinek but with that, for
most of you, as you think through what you’re trying to achieve, you’re
probably trying to achieve revenue. There’s been a massive push for marketers
to finally align on revenue over leads and they’ve been programming is a great
way to do that. You’re also probably looking to build and accelerate your
existing pipeline. And again, that’s just a byproduct of aligning towards
revenue, but especially as you look at ABM, there are really three different
areas that you could start you could do a pre pipeline to just generate new
pipeline you could accelerate your existing pipeline, or you can do a customer
focused Account Based Marketing Strategy to expand your existing customer base.
So, with that, what you’re looking at is also driving account level engagement,
whether it’s pre pipeline in pipeline, or existing customers you want to have
your accounts engage more with your business, because the more they engage with
you, the more they trust you the more they will want to buy from you. So, with
that, how do you measure success in an ABM program?
I’m going to give you just an example. So, let’s say you’ve got a team of 10
STRS and you guys all agree, we are going to really prioritize 100 accounts
each. So you’ve now got a target account list of 1000 accounts. For some of
you. That might honestly be the total relevant market that you would even want
to close is 1000 accounts. So, you divide that up and you start seeing
engagement amongst 50% They’re opening emails, they are even responding
sometimes they’re picking up your phone calls, they’re checking you out on
social they are and showing up to webinars, they’re doing whatever you deem is
that level of engagement at that point, they hit they hit a certain level of
engagement score. And what you want to do is you want to then activate the
accounts. Now, a couple ways you can do that. But for example, let’s say you’ve
got an SDR that’s teamed up with an account executive. The activation stage
might be when the account executive starts to get involved, because at this
point, you’ve already prequalified them because they’re on the target account
list. So, you know that they’re a firmographic fit, they’re starting to show
significant levels of engagement involving that account executive will expedite
the sales process and actually help things move a lot more quickly for both
sales and the prospect. So, from that, let’s say you have of the 300 accounts
that have actually started to get account executive involvement 40% transition
over into the pipeline.
Congratulations, you now have 120 new opportunities from that. Let’s say you
have an average deal size of I don’t know $100,000 You generated a $12 million
pipeline. And let’s say that 90 of those 120 accounts closed, you have just
generated 9 million and closed one revenue. And you think about that from the
perspective of that 10 STRS that focused on 100 accounts each has a total
target account close rate of 9%. I think that’s super reasonable back in my
opportunity to be on the sales side of things. When I was cold calling, I would
go after a list of anywhere in the 300 range as an individual. And again, it
wasn’t super personalized. It wasn’t super targeted, because I was just calling
down the list. Imagine if you get your STRS to really get to know 100 accounts
super well and could help those 100 accounts engage well with the right
content. I think that it’s reasonable to say that you’d see 90 accounts closed
over the span of six months.
So, with that, let’s talk through how you even identify who you should
include on that target account list. There’s a lot of ways you can do it. You
can just do it simply by industry. We’d also recommend doing firmographic. So
maybe it’s 200 million to 2 billion in revenue, their private equity backed,
and they’ve got at least 500 employees, you can do a tiered approach. You know,
if you’re just starting out, you would probably want to tier your approach
based on the significant levels of engagement or if you have existing target
accounts that are already in your database from previous engagement, those
would be a great place to start from a tiered approach but you would want to
tear by those are showing the most interest and that would be the best fit for
your services. So again, that’s going to be so subjective, that that’s
something that you can on your end, figure out the specifics of how to tier
that the other thing is you can go by geographic location, so you could focus
on Texas and Pennsylvania and Wyoming and there there’s a ton of reasons why
you would want to focus on geographic locations.
But as you’re looking at this, just know, there’s 100 different ways that
you can build your target account list. What you’re trying to get to is a core
of who are we going to best serve, who needs our products and services the most
and who’s the most likely to actually buy today? With that, we talked a lot
about this concept of engagement. So, let’s talk through this Engagement
scoring model for many of you that’s going to live in your marketing automation
platform like HubSpot, or Salesforce or Marketo. And that marketing automation
platform. There’s, for all of them, a way to build out an account scoring
model. So that’s one way that you can do it and you just want to sync that
information. With your CRM. There are also third-party platforms that do
Engagement scoring far more easily than building it in for some of your
marketing automation platforms. So, you can look at something like a Terminus
or 6sense or Demand Base or there’s a tool that we’re even looking into called Sapient
that pulls in all of our HubSpot data to make it really easy to do account
scoring. So, there are third party tools that you can use, but you can also
build it within your existing platform.
And again, you want to look at from an account Engagement scoring
perspective, there’s really two major kinds of high-level components that would
go into your count score- be firmographic. So do they fit? Do they have the
right business technology? Are they the right revenue size? Are they showing
that they have the right number of employees like there’s any number of things
that can fit into that? firmographic But again, think employee, count,
location, industry, even potentially technology that they’re using? And then
look at behavior. So are they showing third party intent across the web? And
are they searching for similar products to you? Are they showing first party
intent and they’re showing up on your website looking at your service pages and
your pricing pages? The best thing that’s easiest to track would be that first
party data, because if it’s your data, then you can actually start to put some
level of tracking around it and assign different scores as a way to then measure
the engagement score and then what you would want to do is combine those two
scores. So, look at firmographic and behavioral.
So just to walk through a quick example. Let’s say we are going after 200
million to 2 billion. If they are 1.5 to 2 billion in revenue, they’ll get a
score of 20 if they are, 1 billion to 1.5 or 1.49 and a nine, get a score of 15
so on and so forth. So that’s the demographic and it all would add up to your
best fit that has the right number of employees, the right location, the right
industry, the right revenue would end up being 100 and then you have different
marketing activities that you measure. That also would add up to maybe not even
100 Because there’s a countless number of marketing activities, but you would
assign based on the value that you deem these activities. So, webinar
attendance would be higher than webinar just registration or opening an email.
That’s a marketing email. So again, you assign all these different point
values, and then you put those two scores next to one another. And you can see
they’re the right fit. They’re highly engaged and then you can prioritize,
because you would want to probably prioritize a better fit. That’s got moderate
engagement over a bad fit, has high engagement.
So just put those two numbers together. And then you can identify who to
even prioritize going after. Let’s go ahead and talk through the tech stack. So,
most of you if doing modern marketing today, have a CRM, you’ve got marketing
automation, you’ve got a content management system. AKA a website, what you may
or may not have is a data enrichment platform like a zoom info or a sales
Intel. You may not have an ABM platform like demand base, six cents or
Terminus. You may not have a conversational marketing tool like Drift and you may
not have gifting like Sendoso or Alice, what we recommend is starting with your
existing tech stack, you can run an ABM campaign for next to nothing. It’s just
really, really personalized marketing. But bring in these other platforms like
a data enrichment platform to make it really easy to build out that target
account list so you can start to do ABM at scale. That ABM platform is going to
help you ABM at scale. Gifting is going to make it way easier to send gifts to
potential customers and existing customers.
All these other tools will help you scale your ABM efforts but with a CRM,
marketing automation and a CMS like you probably already have, you can easily
start to build out some amazing ABM programs to get it launched and off the
ground. The other thing that we recommend across all ABM campaigns is an
ungated content hub. The goal is to make your company a go to resource on
education for your target accounts. And then from that content hub, you want
them to move into a sales conversation. Again, most of the people today that we
interact with are in the tech space. So, we recommend that they schedule a demo
then what you can do also provide tons of blog content podcasts, webinars,
industry reports, and insights. All of that can then point back to this ungated
content resource hub and kind of hit two birds with one stone. If you’re going
to write some blog content, go ahead and just do some very basic keyword
research that could also rank well in search.
Again, especially as I operate as a solo marketing department. The more that
you can do that will again expand your reach and distribution of the existing
content, the better. So that’s what we’re recommending for people. With that,
let’s go ahead and talk through some of the main content assets that we are recommending
for people as they are building out this engagement pilot campaign. So for
starters, it would be a schedule for a demo conversion path. You want to be
very, very clear on how you’re going to get people from point A to that demo.
And again, there’s a lot of paths that they could go through the podcast,
through a blog. They can go through an industry report. They could come through
social media. There’s a number of ways they could go, but you want to really be
pushing people towards that content hub that then engages them and gives them
bingeable content. They build trust. With you and they move into a buying
process with you. You’re going to also have some promos, promo emails they’re
going out that raise awareness again of this content hub of your existing
content that is going to directly engage people super well. Is it going to
probably want to have any level of an ad and platform? LinkedIn is probably one
of the best ways to natively target with an account-based strategy. Because
again, you can actually name specific individuals within accounts if you want
to go after specific decision makers.
The other thing that I have found that works really, really well is the main
problem that a lot of companies are running up against is email match. So, what
you can do instead is upload the list of domains, like website domains for the
target accounts, who you’re going after, and then you do a match up against the
specific Department that you would want to close and then you also do a match
up against the seniority levels or even specific job titles within those
departments. And then you have done an account-based approach, but you don’t
have to have an individual email match.
So, I’ve seen that work really, really well for us and for our clients and
it’s a workaround for a lot of people that they didn’t even know existed.
Finally, again, we talked about this team of SDRs. build out sales sequences
for them, that is email social connection phone calls, that they can then
directly reach out and engage those target accounts with great content. So,
when you do really these four things, you map this out you’ve created this
interconnected web in a great distribution approach that will get content in
front of your target accounts and they will start to engage in binge, when talk
through how all of this then maps back to your actual deal stages and how
you’re actually going to help accounts progress through the buying process. So
again, that stage one is identified. So that’s building up that target account
list. Stages are engaging. So, you’re again sending LinkedIn ads, you’re
sending abound emails and having STRS trying to again, just plug content to get
people involved and engaged once they’ve engaged with a specific level that you
deem.
Alright, we will get an account executive involved will really accelerate
this buying process. That’s the activation stage. Account executives reach out.
They are then deemed a sales qualified lead and once they have accepted that
intro meeting, you have now entered into the opportunity stages. So that could
be a connection meeting just to again, get to know each other, understand, from
the executive perspective exactly what has been the most helpful and valuable,
then you do a deep dive of discovery. That discovery could also be that demo.
Or you could even do the demo in stage one again. These are just some examples
of where we’re seeing a lot of our clients are doing their buying process,
selling process, but this is going to map to you especially in the opportunity
stage. So again, we’re going to connect discovery recommendations.
So now we’ve done a deep dive into this discovery what products we’re
recommending that will help you scale your business you get to the agreement
stage, you work with legal to get all the details parsed out and then you are
closed one, and if at any point, the customer, ghosts or decides to back out or
recognizes this isn’t going to be the best thing for their business. You’ve
closed that deal as a closed arc or closed lost depending on how that pans out.
So hopefully we’re all hitting for Stage Five, both customer and closed one.
But again, what we’ve mostly talked about right now are stage one, two and
three, and activating the target account to enter into that buying process.
So, as you think through the engagement in the activation, there’s content
hub over all of it. All roads lead to that content hub, because that’s how
you’re going to build trust, build authority, and then invite someone into a
buying process. The engagement piece would be this conversion path towards
scheduling a demo. You then incorporate LinkedIn ads and emails and again,
these are marketing emails once they started to opt into some things, sales
sequences and continued educational material around podcasts and blogs. And
then once they have that certain level of engagement, it’s nurturing them from
an account executive perspective or an SDR perspective to get them to connect
with that account executive. It’s highly tactical, it is highly relevant
webinars that engage into even more of a buying process. And then the best
thing that you can really do is once you’ve hit this activation stage is have
some level of daily reporting with your sales and marketing leaders to identify
what are the top accounts that are actively engaged that we need to bring into
the sales process and then identify how do we do this another way to think
through this is this engagement stage.
This is a one-to-many approach for your Account Based Marketing Strategy.
But the closer they get towards activation, you go one to few and even
potentially one to one to bring those prospects, those target accounts into the
pipeline. So those daily reports can help you identify what they are engaging
in with us? What are we spending up and inviting these target accounts to? What
landing page should we build that is so hyper personalized to this exact
account that we can then invite them into a sales process by demonstrating
exactly that brings us again, those daily reports are the way that you really
make this a personalized approach and have marketing and sales and words of my
friend Richard, who’s the Global Head of ABM at HP, marketing and sales singing
from the same hymnal and those daily reports are a great way to do just that.
Let’s talk through the major roadblocks that a lot of organizations are
experiencing when they try to implement an ABM approach.
The main one that a lot of people get stuck on is this tech stack. Marketing
automation isn’t what you need at this current stage. They don’t have the
appropriate level. So, if you’re running a HubSpot free automation platform, it
is surprising the number of enterprise clients that we’ve worked with that are
still on HubSpot free, then you’re going to need something that’s even more
robust. It could also be that account and contact intelligence if I’m talking
through building a target account list of 1000 accounts. You don’t have any
kind of a data enrichment platform; it will be difficult to build that account
list. It could even be that ABM platform. The example that we walked through
today didn’t actually even require an ABM platform. But if you want to do
really, really integrated campaigns that have highly targeted advertising
across every digital channel, more so than just LinkedIn. And if you even use a
third party tool to get LinkedIn targeting on Facebook, if you want to do more
than just LinkedIn and Facebook, are highly targeted ads on Google then you’re
probably going to want an ABM platform.
And then finally, we talk about sales cadences it’s really that alignment
with sales. It’s identifying how we get sales actively involved and engaged
with marketing. And it’s so important that we actually kind of put it on here
twice. So that sales cadence of how we line up what sales is doing from an
outreach perspective to align with the level of engagement that we’re seeing on
our target accounts. Another thing that people really struggle with is that
account engagement scoring model. It is pretty complex for a lot of clients to
understand how to value their different activities, and that’s where we see
marketers sometimes to hit their MQL goals will adjust the criteria of the MQL.
And it’s sometimes the same with the account engagement model. They will change
the filtering on what qualifies an account as engaged or activated to make their
numbers look good. And then it just becomes a blame game. Which is why we
started with the goal of this is revenue. These are leading indicators, but at
the end of the day, if you’re not aligned on revenue, this is not going to
work.
Marketing and sales are not opposed, but they are aligned. So those are some
of the major roadblocks that we’re seeing. With that I’m going to go ahead and
walk through an example pilot campaign. So this client of ours was a content
engagement technology for the life sciences industry, super niched. They saw an
ABM strategy would help them engage their super niched clients, because again,
could build it the inbound lead gen model and generate 3000 leads a month but
probably didn’t need that. They really need to close 30 deals every six months.
So instead of focusing on the 3000, they started to focus on how we get this
30. And again, the best way that they sought to do that was through ABM. And
this was their pilot campaign.
So, they really wanted to focus on building out the framework so they could
build it for one product, and then kind of repurpose that framework across
different products. And this was really kind of the always on ABM approach that
then got more and more personalized, more engaged and activated accounts became.
So again, we needed an internal alignment. So, the way that we achieved this
internal alignment was through that account scoring so it was demographic
firmographic and behavioral. We did the orchestration or another way of saying
that is the alignment, so we got the data synced between HubSpot, which is
where marketing lives and Salesforce which is where the sales team live, we
remap their account stages to map to the marketing activities so that the
accounts and sales when you’re doing that, so that sales knew where every
account was in their overall marketing and sales process.
And the final thing that we did is we helped them expedite the sales process
based on activated target accounts. They brought in the account executive way
sooner, as opposed to sending them through the SDR qualification process. These
are target accounts. We know that they’re the right fit. The reason they
wouldn’t work out is more based on culture which is really difficult to
actually feel out based on firmographic and behavioral data. You kind of need
to sometimes have a conversation to actually understand it for a culture fit.
Finally, they actually went through and did a handpicked account approach with
marketing and sales to identify like 200 odd accounts. So, this was a very
targeted campaign, and they conducted a research study on the entire industry
to actually identify who those accounts would be. And then what we did is we
divided the responsibilities between the client and ourselves.
So again, the client focused on really more of getting marketing and sales
aligned because they needed to have some internal conversations. We focused on
helping them develop the content. And the final thing is to engage target
accounts. The main objective was actually to get this ungated high value offer
in front of them using a multi-channel approach. So again, think LinkedIn,
emails, podcasts, blog content, a certain number of ways to try to get that in
front of them. So again, we aligned the distribution to the accounts stage. So
if they were still in that target, or identify stage, we were using Terminus
animated ads to get them in front of the target accounts to help them engage
with that eBook. From there we also ran animated ads using Terminus to show
case studies to demonstrate the value that a content engagement platform could
offer these life science companies. Once they were aware, they were starting to
engage.
There was actually a content engagement webinar that walks through the
practical ways and steps. That content engagement showed better results at
these events that were really promoted through LinkedIn ads. Once they had been
activated, as well, they were getting this delta variant checklists to
understand now that again, this was running October to January of 2021 to 2022.
So, Delta was a big deal. How do you then still host a great event with the
Delta variant, and they walk you through this checklist of things to check off
to ensure that you have great success despite the Delta variant? And finally,
there was this massive content pillar page that was all about what is content
engagement and that was then distributed through Terminus display ads. On top
of that, though, by the nature of the content pillar page has also ranked
really, really well on driving traffic through SEO.
So, if you think through again, the numerous ways that you could engage an
account or a variety of methods through which this content was presented to the
accounts, and here’s the overall timeline. So, from September when we started
to develop the content to October when we launched it, what we did in that
timeframe was develop all of the content engagement content and ads, and then
we started to develop that webinar series. From there we launched the ad
campaign, did a follow up webinar on that initial webinar series and then
released the content pillar page. And another webinar series we did a
retargeting campaign. We did planning for the retargeting campaign. And then we
launched a strategy approach for a new segment, we launched website retargeting,
and then we started to develop the new segment assets. And then finally we
launched the new segment in January 2022. With that the results, they targeted
248 total accounts they had 35 and into the pipeline, and from October to
January, so that’s in the span of four months. pipeline that was generated with
$6,672,731 but we did end up closing 34 total accounts, which resulted in a
$5,700,579 in closed one revenue from target accounts that had not shown
engagement to closed one in the span of five months. Five months included the
creation of content.
So, if you are wondering, man, that sounds amazing. How do I get more
content? It helps you launch an amazing ABM campaign. I’m glad you asked, go to
Mojo media labs.com/abm And you’ll actually get this beautiful resource hub
that has over 15 hours of ABM specific content from a recent conference that we
hosted called ABM Athan, so if you are looking to understand the various ways
that you can launch and find success with ABM, check out mojomedia labs.com/abm
Get 15 hours of completely ungated helpful content. Thank you so much for
joining.
If you’ve got further questions, feel free to email me at Mason.Cosby@Mojo
media labs.com or to connect with me on LinkedIn. Again, my name is Mason Cosby
and no I am not the Green Bay Packers kicker unfortunately.
And with that, thank you so much for joining me today and we hope you
enjoyed.