Craig Rosenberg - Account Based Marketing

So my talk tomorrow is about alignment. And I think the key preface here is that we've been talking about alignment for a long time and it's never happened. Never. Maybe sometimes, you know, everyone's like, well, I'm aligned, but most of all, the market, 99% of the market's not aligned. And so I want to talk about how account based brings people together and it's proven to do that. And there's a couple things. So one is you get to, you know, choose the targets before anybody applies any resources. That's not what happens today. What happens today is marketing creates a lead, sales doesn't like it, then they argue about it. Instead of saying, well, I'm about to go spend resources, it's going to be against these companies. Are you good with that? Yes. Now we're already aligned. And then we align on how we go get them as clients. We might go do campaigns together. And then we align on a metric that's more meaningful. So like today, we do marketing does leads and sales does opportunities. How about if we both do opportunities? And so now you just can start to see the amazing alignment that happens when you do account based. But it starts at the top. You get all your arguments for about who out of the way before you go. And that's really powerful. That's what works. Even if you are for four months before you get started, it's still worth it. Because the problem today is you argue in real time. And that's just not healthy. And that's one of the reasons why alignment breaks down. Was that a good answer? Okay. So sort of with that, what are your top tips then for marketing and sales teams when developing your ADM strategy to be implemented? Yeah, so if I followed that same structure, I just gave you. So number one is the target account list. So everyone thinks of that as something really tactical. But actually, in account based, your target account list is your TAM. It's your target market. And so it's something you want to look through, like literally, if even if there's 10,000 names, you want to look through it. And you don't start until sales says, if you get me those, I got it. If they don't say that, don't start. So that's tip number one. I've seen too many times where it's been a sort of passing agreement. Yeah, yeah, just go ahead. It's not enough. Sales has to say, get me into these, and I'll take it from there. That is huge. And so that but that is sounds so small. But that those words make a difference. The second thing I would recommend is, you know, everyone's talking about orchestration. I would start small. So I would use an inside sales team like a sales development team. And I would team up with them first. So marketing, sales development, because sales, bring them in later. Once we prove everything out, they're just very challenging to work with. And so if you start small, and then build into it, I think you'd be more successful. And then the other one is to choose one metric. Because everyone's now built infrastructure to look at a lot of things. Instead, we want to choose one. And the one I recommend to look at is target account pipeline. So look at all the pipeline you create in the target account list. And you can you know, look at it based on what you did before. But that, you know, that's just a number, you have to look at whether that target account pipeline converts better in the long run than the other pipeline. If you chose your target account list, well, it should. And so if we can both align on pipeline, then that's the win. And that's I think you just start with that. Don't worry about all that other stuff. Yeah, so there's, so there's a difference in my opinion, between KPIs. So how we're doing, leading towards a how we're doing. So it's how we're doing now towards how we're doing in the big picture. So you know, those are all traditional things. I mean, you still want to look at whether ads are being clicked through, whether leads are being created, whether people are visiting the site. And so that's the big picture. But you just don't want to make that the be all end all it's just, it's just things that will tell you how things look and how they're going. What you want to do is you want to I mentioned target account pipeline. The big one for us is opportunity rate. That's the big conversion rate. So that's the number of opportunities created against the activated target account list activated is important. So if you have 10,000 target accounts, and you activate 2000, you want to know how many opportunities do I create against that 2000. That's the ultimate conversion rate. And we've started to talk to that about our clients. It's on board pre says now it's been a huge deal for them. And we're pretty excited about it because now you can look at account base and you can say, well, I took these 1000 accounts, I created this amount of opportunities. Was it successful? Yes. Well, hopefully. And then if I add 1000 more, what am I going to get? Because that's the problem with account base. Nobody knew kind of what you're going to get. And by doing that, having that conversion rate, you can do that. So those those to me, are really the big ones. And then the final one is to start to track engagement across the entire lifecycle. Okay, so instead of just leads, instead of just hits, instead of just visits, all of them include conversations like a video, right? So you guys do video. That's a perfect example. How was a marketer judged before on video? A lot of times if anybody cared about videos, they all did anybody watch it for any amount of time, and then say, Well, what happened to it after? Well, what if we just looked at and said, across an entire lifecycle of a potential customer? They looked at white papers, they read our advertisements, they watched video, they passed the video on, they talked to a sales development rep, they met us at an event, all of those things should come together to create an overall score that we look at, instead of looking at units of one on everything, because it's really the recipe. And so for us, we tell everyone, don't track leads, you can look at them. Instead, they score your engagement and you know, marketo is going to announce if you if they haven't about how they're going to allow people to track engagement score. And we believe in that, right? So that would be my other one. So I think I said this last year, videos like a why not, you know what I mean? Like, why wouldn't you? I don't even understand. I don't understand why people even ask that it's like, well, you, you need every potential way to, you know, like, if you're sending emails, and you're getting a 3% conversion rate, why wouldn't you try a different way? So first of all, it's a why not thing. But in my opinion, there's a lot of ways. So, so for one is, I like really relevant personal video, especially for executives, I think we all know executives are not going to read an 80 page white paper, but they will view a 1520 second even I think up to 30, you guys probably have better data than me on that video that's relevant to them. It sounds short, it's easier for them to consume. So if you think about, you know, how do I mix video into the people that prefer it? Right? So that's one thing, how do I personalize the video video in and of itself to me is very personal. I think it's because you have a face and you have, you know, mannerisms. But, you know, as part of everyone trying to personalize, you can also do personalized video, you can make the video relevant and send it primarily to execs, you can offer it as another way to communicate with the, you know, the rest of the managers directors team. It's just another sort of, it's another touch. It's another way for people to engage. And you know, it's funny, everyone's like, well, what do people prefer? I don't know. And you don't know. Right? But we do know that some people prefer video and some people don't. So to me, it's just a critical part of the mix. And it's becoming more I mean, I'm sure you guys see it's becoming more part of the mix. This is especially the Millennials love video and all this stuff. So if we want to reach young audiences, we got to be thinking in terms of video as well. So I think the possibilities frankly, are endless is just another great content piece. It's inherently personal, as I mentioned, because it's got to be a video. It's got people and feeling. And so it's, you know, for a lot of my clients, it's been a nice addition to the mix. One example of that is inside sales. So inside sales traditionally doesn't outreach all the contents in their email. And they don't really trying to personalize it. They're trying to write personalization, maybe 10% of the emails are good things, things happen. But like now we're seeing a outbound sales development rapper and said sales rep, email number three is a video, right? Now we're mixing it up. Now we're adding a new personal touch. And it's you know, it works so much better. Even if someone doesn't write back as they had loved the video, the next time you reach out, they'll remember the video. They also put a name to the face of voice to the face of a voice a face of the company. So there's another good example of how you know how it can be worked to your advantage. So I'm not I wonder what I answered last year, I'm a little nervous. But I do think I think video is moving fast. I'm actually surprised that it's not moving as fast. I think it just has to do with the resources of the marketers. I don't think it's any indicator of how the market is moving. So I think it's a good example of how the market is moving. I think that's a good example of how big video will be. I think I don't think anything will take over the written word. But I feel like if you look five years down the line and the who's going to be consuming the information, I think video will be one of the ways that we communicate across the board even not just from marketing. So like sales, like I was mentioning, you know, they are writing emails trying to communicate. Can't they use video marketing is more and more infusing this into the mix. But just like how you communicate internally, you know, can you use video to communicate internally, people prefer it, it's just more human. So I feel like if we took what three years, five years, I think, you know, I don't know, most communications is going to be video. I mean, I, I don't see, I don't, I mean, the Snapchat generation comes up. Right. I mean, it's just it's videos integral part. I know I wasn't. I wasn't but I prefer, you know, I don't, I don't know 100% pervert video, it depends on what it is. But like, I'll tell you this, like if I go to ESPN, so as a consumer, I watched the videos, I don't want to read the articles, I want to hear the human part of it. I think the issue for me on B2B is it's incredibly impersonal. Like they have the opportunity to be really personal, but they make it really slick and, and they don't like make it really human. The ones that are human are really good. And you'll see those you'll see them on LinkedIn, those really human ones. Those are great. And so that's what I think B2B marketers have to sort of catch on and the type of content they create when they do will be our LinkedIn feeds will be all video, or Twitter feeds will be all video. And I think that's just the way it's going.