Account Based Marketing - Insights from Industry Leaders
Welcome to another episode where we delve deep into the world of Account Based Marketing (ABM). We're thrilled to have an esteemed panel of B2B marketing leaders to share their insights.
In this episode, you'll learn:
The critical importance of gaining organisational buy-in for ABM
Strategies for thoughtful account selection and segmentation
Crafting highly personalised, staged content to engage target accounts
Leveraging technology in a sustainable manner for ABM success
Measuring the long-term impact and ROI of your ABM initiatives
Whether you're new to ABM or looking to refine your existing strategies, this episode offers a comprehensive guide to mastering ABM. Tune in now for a deep dive into the best practices, common pitfalls, and expert advice on ABM.
Guests
Ben Bulpett, Director of EMEA at Algolia
Judit Szabo, Global Head of Marketing at Endava
Navneeth Rathod, Digital Campaign Manager at SAS
Tiago Falcao, Content Manager at IQPC
So welcome to our podcast. Today we will delve into account based marketing. We will unpack the definition of ABM, its outcomes for clients and and the strategies and why it's so effective. So let's kick off with the definition. I'm taking ITSMA's definition, which is about treating individual accounts as markets in their own right. Okay. Some characteristics of account based marketing is that it's a structured process for developing and implementing highly customized marketing programs. Another characteristic is that it is a long term approach because it's rooted in deep analysis and issues that your clients are facing and demands commitment of resources. Right. And I think it's the ethos of account based marketing is collaboration. It's about building cross-functional teams that work together towards a common goal. And marketing has a very unique function, which is. The one that unifies all the all the organization. The benefits for the client is that they feel understood. They engage in conversations that are tailored to them. They gain broader awareness about what you are offering them and and the overall experience is higher customer satisfaction. And the benefits for sales and marketing is that they transition from being just a vendor to a partner, and they experience richer conversations about about needs that uncover new opportunities, accelerate sales cycles. etcetera okay, but but the world is not so perfect, you know. Today we will talk about the prerequisites for ABM. Okay. We will talk about account selection and segmentation, the importance of content, and finally, how we leverage technology for ABM. So let's start with a quick introduction. Navneeth Forgive me if I say wrong your name.
You said it perfectly. Hello, guys. I am Navneeth Rathod. You can call me NAV and I am a digital marketing specialist at SAS and we are a cloud native AI and analytics platform serving solutions and services across multiple verticals.
Thank you, Thiago.
Hi. So I'm Tiago. I work for under the guise of defense. We are a defense conference company and I am the content manager at the at Defense IQ, also currently working at for our American branch.
Thank you.
Ben.
Hello. Ben Bulpitt. I'm the senior director globally for Algolia and I'm responsible for all account based marketing teams, field and partner marketing teams at Algolia. And for those of you who don't know, Algolia is a search and discovery company in the e-commerce platform space.
Thank you, Ben and Judith.
I am Judit Szabo. I'm the global head of demand generation at Endava, and Dava is an IT services and consultancy company serving B2B enterprise customers across technically all verticals that we can sell into. I'm responsible for ABM Field marketing partner marketing campaigns and digital marketing and marketing operations at Endava.
Thank you. Did it.
Adrian. I say I'm a VP of customer success at Adzact Growth Intelligence. But previous to this I worked for a global market research company called GfK, and one of my last role there was actually managing their top or the top 40 strategic accounts. They all had individual account directors. And one of the things that we managed through that process was how to deliver ABM to those individual accounts.
Brilliant. Well, I'm Joaquin Dominguez. I'm head of marketing at Adzact and we are hosting this podcast. So let's kick off. Um, as I told you, we will start the discussion with the prerequisites for accounts based, account based marketing. Before we dig deep into ABM, it's essential to to understand its foundational elements. So ABM is rooted in a customer centric approach. So ensuring also that marketing and sales are not just aligned but working in tandem. And so I will give an open question. So why is so important to have a customer led strategy in in ABM?
Okay, I'll go first then, if no one's going to put their hand up. Um, I think the foundations of has to be rooted in. Does the company recognize and understand that ABM is a different approach? I think a lot of sales organizations talk about ABM and they want ABM, but they don't fully appreciate and understand the complexities and what is required from them from an investment of resource and time and energy to support that program. It is truly cross-functional. So I think one of the prerequisites, before you even get on to the conversation of accounts we get on the conversations of technology is how do you get buy in from across your organization to understand that ABM is a different approach? It may not necessarily give you the short term rewards that you need, but it is a long term gain. And what I found is that when you get into that conversation very quickly, too, for the sales teams to decide, okay, no, no, that's not what I wanted. I'm really looking for short term leads. And you go, okay, so you're not really after ABM or you get into the conversation that says, yes, this is a strategic investment. We recognize that it's probably going to be a 12 to 18 month program before we see any form of meaningful results potentially depending on your sales cycle. Once you get that that buy in from across your sales organization and your sales leaders, that then allows you to move to the next phase, which is how you define your accounts and your strategy.
I am. I'm happy to reflect on what Ben mentioned. I totally agree that account based marketing is a very different approach and that has to be recognized. And the success lies in this cross collaboration between sales and marketing and pre-sales or deliveries. And it's really that strong alignment that will make any marketing campaign successful and find those advocates across the company. And sometimes finding and starting small, I found was was was rather helpful, you know, finding those first advocates and then showing success together with sales and then broadening it up a little bit wider. I do also, you know, getting back to your question on whether that's for customers or not, obviously ABM is is a really great way to increase, you know, share of wallet with existing customers. And I also found, though, that it's quite a good approach to use for new logo acquisition. If you are really targeted in your approach and maybe a one to few cluster approach to go after a select number of accounts and, and really, you know, grow your business with with new prospects as well before they are a customer. I don't know what others think about that approach but I do like to use this account based everything approach when I approach demand generation in general. Think the different different channels and tactics we would use when it comes to new logo acquisition with an ABM approach or account growth within existing clients.
Ben, you highlighted the role of marketing in ABM, right? Can you elaborate on how this has changed the dynamics between sales and marketing at Algolia?
I think sales, you know, my background for the audience and for my fellow panelists is I was 30 years a salesman, so I ran and I was part of a very large key account team. I run some very large accounts and had a very large sales teams. So I moved into marketing a number of years ago and I suddenly, I'm sure people who are being marketers for the life, I suddenly realized when you woke up and you thought, Hey, you know, this is the complexities and the the nuances of marketing is incredibly difficult. And as a sales person, I didn't understand and I wish I'd now spent time and taken the time to put some more investment in it. But I've learnt very quickly. But one of the things that's happened I think, and covid's been a catalyst for this, but this has been happening in the last ten, 15 years is the buyer and the buyer's journey is very much shifted away from the salesperson. You know, you can read any, whether it's Gartner, McKinsey, whichever report. Forrester, But you know, over 70% of the buying journey is done without even engaging with the sales teams and or your company. And all of us have seen that shift from our content being ungated because we want to make it available. And so we're now looking at intent and we're looking at account based activities. So the shift for marketing has moved away from not just demand generation, but actually I see it's, it's demand generation, it's content contact acquisition and it's opportunity progression. And one of the activities that we've started to look at quite successfully is how marketing is staying a much longer in the sales cycle. So historically marketing has withdrawn from that process. Once the opportunity is created, sales people tend to say, you know, we don't want them getting emails, we don't want them bombarded with events, and we say that's respectful and we've moved out. We've moved away from that. Or we had actually now I think actually is the time that you turn that up. And I think the dynamics of marketing has changed and its participation in the sales cycle could actually be right up until the closing stage where, you know, but your message and what you're communicating to those organizations is very different to what you would be communicating if you're looking to do some form of acquisition or lead acquisition for an ABM program. What's really important is, is that messaging and that is nuanced to reflect the needs of that company and that organization. And you're working with the sales teams on your ads or your emails to make sure that you're not bombarding them with unnecessary material, but you're you're constantly feeding them, that the validation of their selection of your organization is right. And we understand your organization. We understand you as a company. We recognize some of the challenges and we have solutions to fit that. And actually we're starting to see that resonate with customers through that buying journey. And we've seen, for example, in our opportunity progression program that we run under the ABM team something like 80%, 80% of the accounts engage far more with our content because they're in the process. But it's not about can you have a demo, can you have, you know, here's another white paper showing how great Algolia is. It's about here's an example of an industry that you should be looking at who's, who's, who's using our goal. Here's some best practices. Here's an example of where we work with our partners that you use. So that's the sort of thing that we're starting to see. And that requirement for marketing to stay longer is quite challenging for some people because it does drive your customer acquisition cost up. But I do think it's going to be an example and I think it's going to be something that will be maintained for a lot longer.
And how long are your sales cycles to to give an example of the commitment that you need to have in.
So Algolia sales cycles average around about 90 days depending on the size of the opportunity. I've worked with organizations who sales cycles are as much as 300 days and I think the sales cycle isn't isn't necessarily what's relevant. I think it's the content and the material and the ability to adapt. You know, we talked about it, you know, marketing is going to be across the ABM. And I think, you know, Judith mentioned it, it is it transcends the whole of the sales and organizational function. So sales, sales, marketing, customer success, it actually transcends it. And you need people in that who are multi-disciplined and able to network across those very different disciplines and departments.
Hundred percent agree. Let's move into into the second topic, which is account selection and segmentation, because at the heart of ABM lies the art of selecting and segmenting accounts. It's not just targeting an account, but prioritizing those with the highest potential and tailoring strategies to to resonate with them. So let's delve into the nuances of qualitative account selection. The importance of segmentation, Perhaps. Judit, you stressed the significance of learning the unique characteristics of each company in account based marketing.
Yeah.
And what I noticed whilst running ABM campaigns, either at my current company or in a previous life, is that sales typically have a very clear idea of what accounts they would like to go after and what solutions, technologies, products they would like to sell to those accounts. And that's certainly something that we need to be respectful of. But I also like to look into market intelligence and, you know. And then actually evaluating which accounts are looking for the technologies and solutions that the company is selling. And and then notwithstanding that, you know, looking at the win loss analysis of, you know, maybe sales have an idea of what they would like to sell. But have the company been actually successful in in winning those deals? Or we just have a romantic idea of what the customers might want to to buy from us. And so it also relates in, in my opinion, into this idea that marketing is not linear. You know, we need to be agile and dynamic in our approaches. So I like to obviously appreciate sales target accounts they want to go after. But since we now have access to so many intelligent tools either in-house or third party tools on account intent, I think that's the area where ABM becomes really interesting and maybe spreading a wider net in our targeting. But then really looking at the signals that the accounts are showing and then feeding that intelligence back to sales to reevaluate the accounts we should be targeting. And I think that's an area where it suddenly opens up the eyes of many department departments within an organization when you realize that actually the accounts might tell a different story of what they they are looking at buying from us. And we need to then be responsive to that. And that might actually shift the attention from a use case or a solution we wanted to position in the first place.
Starting to Judith's point. Right. So I mean, so you can like run it at different levels, but to run it at the highest level where you have like, you know, what we call the one is to one ABM, you need to have a really, really close alignment with sales because ultimately how you decide like which accounts you want to target with this will be based on numbers like what is the current recurring revenue? You know, what is the new revenue streams we can generate from the account or how is the strategic fit and what exactly is the growth potential. So I think that all comes into play when you want to run ABM programs at a very high level. So we have a very specific set of accounts, at least at our company who we run these one is to one ABM. So I think it all comes down to, you know, what exactly is the growth growth potential with that with that specific account. And you know what what exactly is the revenue streams we can generate in the future? So yeah, you need to have a really close alignment with sales when you're when you're planning to run this program at a really high level.
I love Judith's romantic idea of sales because I think having been in sales, you know, you do have this romantic view of, you know, these are my ten accounts and the amount of data that marketing now has available to it. We are obliged and we should be giving as much of that information to those sales teams to make not romantic ideas, but actually realistic ideas. The other thing that when you discuss ABM and and having run one account for like five years, I really understood that account along with my account team. We were but we lived and breathed just one account. Most organizations, when you talk about ABM, you have an enterprise team, but they might be looking after ten, 15, 20, maybe even 100 accounts. So one of the things that we found very quickly is, is that when you start to interrogate the sales team about what they really know, who they really know and their interaction with the accounts, you realize it becomes a real just a bit of a veneer so one of the things that we've started to do is once we've agreed with sales and we've got off this, I love that comment, Judit, that romantic conversation with sales, and we said, Right, this is the reality of the accounts. We've engaged the services of third party companies like Pipeline IQ, where we've paid for them to then produce for us a very detailed overview of the account, not based upon algolia's. It's based upon what that company is challenged, what they're currently doing, what's their technology infrastructure, what are some of the key decision makers, where they are in current company performance? And they give us and they give the sales guys some intelligence and insight very quickly for us to then build a very highly customized message. And actually the response from our sales teams, from both Algolia and my previous organization has been phenomenal because suddenly they've got really deep intelligence on an account. And when they have that conversation, they're having the conversation in that the customer wants to have based upon the customer's priorities, rather than us trying to make some assumptions or make some do our own research. What we found is these reports have helped accelerate the conversation with the customers and B, it helps tailor our message. And I was always taught something about ABM with there's really fundamentally two rules about account based marketing. The first rule is it's not about you. And the second, the rule is it's all about you. And I think that's actually really true. You know, your ABM strategy is about the customer. Everything should be customer centric, relevant and referenced in their frame and their terms and their challenges. It's all about you and how you show up. And if you are just chasing a deal, just chasing an opportunity, you'll get smelt out. You'll get caught out very quickly and they'll smell that. It's about, you know, how you as a company and a you as a as a ABM team turn up and engage with that account. And I think that's really, really important. You know, that rule, it's not about you and it's all about you. I've always sort of lived and breathed that, which is it's critical that you understand them and it's how you show up and behave.
And I totally agree. And maybe just one point to reflect on how we can divert the attention into into new areas of the business. I think it's particularly true when we are selling to enterprise size customers, you know, massive buying centres and maybe the company has a good established relationship with one buying centre. But then obviously those relationships, you know, you know, kind of dry out after a while and then with this need to increase revenue with with an existing client and then the onus is on marketing to open up those new doors in different buying centres. But then oftentimes actually there's again, too much to sell to too many different buying centres. So that's when marketing can help sales and share those intelligence about the signals that the account are showing and then help the teams be the sales focus, their attention on, you know, a particular use case or particular solution when there's maybe 5 or 6 areas of the business we could be selling to. And obviously that would be just too much for any department to focus on.
Just wanted to add something, whether I'd be interested to get the guys view on this one. And again, quite strongly opinionated on this one is I'm very I challenge our organization whether they're actually capable of engaging with a strategic enterprise account, because most of our readers, they're young, they're aspirational, they've got to get into sales. But when you're selling to large enterprises, you're typically dealing with very experienced, very typically longevity within their roles and their understanding of their businesses. So one of the conversations that we started we've been having in Algolia around our ABM is that our eyes and those are the guys that have to be prepared to get engaged a lot earlier than they have typically been expected or used to, because if you're dealing with if you do manage and you engage with the CTO or the CIO or the CTO of an organization, if you don't have the competency, his the capabilities and the topics of conversation and are able to respond to them within a business sense. And you just come across as someone who's just trying to follow a script. Again, your credibility goes back to my my rule, it's all about you. We'll just fundamentally you as a company, your credibility goes. So one of the topics for ABM, when I said at the start is, do you realize, Mr. Sales team, that you're going to be having to pick up the phone and you're going to have to be dealing with some of these leads at a very early stage? And that's been a very interesting cultural shift for some of our guys who've gone, Oh, I thought the SDR could do that. And my argument is, okay, you want me to give this lead that's worth $1 million to a 22 year old college graduate? Interesting. How far do you think they're going to get with this conversation? So that's the other thing that we've been looking at. And we've looked at third party agencies who use a lot more experienced salespeople to help us with that as well. It's been a really interesting exercise because when you challenge the XDR community and get them into a conversation around could you really have a conversation with the CSO? They're pretty much like, No, I couldn't. And you go, okay, but that's the target audience that we're going after.
How are these third party agencies help you with that? Because they are really experts in the matter?
Yeah.
The organization we're currently training with is a German organization for a number of reasons. One is we need to go after the German marketplace, and that German marketplace is very much local language. If you don't go into Germany with a German speaking proposition, then typically you don't get engaged. But the average age of their caller is around 45. So you're dealing with someone who's far more experienced and they come across that in when you talk to them. So they can the topic of conversation can shift. It doesn't have to be following this script. That's the other thing. You know, you tend to give the Bdrs a script. Well, actually, we all know as we've as we're finding in this conversation, a dialogue shifts and ebbs and flows. You want someone who can have that conversation when when someone says, Well, actually, Ben, you know, I don't want to talk about e-commerce. I'm currently looking at my my data, my data governance platform, or I'm looking at my my finance or purchasing platform. Okay. So you're looking at a Shopify. What are you doing to be able to have that conversation? It allows you to build up some credibility.
Yeah, totally.
Agree. Navneeth. I wanted to ask you and I think it's very related with this topic because you've seen the ABM budget increase or double in your organization and one of the things that you have done is that is the Knowledge Hub. Yeah.
So, yeah, so so on the back of what I said about, you know, how we run these 1 to 1 ABM campaigns, so we have these 23 corporate focus accounts which spans across different industries like banking, life sciences, government insurance. So so for these 23 accounts, what we have done is we have created a web page which is fully personalized for them. So so what these account specific pages entails is dedicated content for the account, like ebooks, Whitepapers, everything is tailored for them and they also have links to customer enabled enablement portals and they have an array of different training resources in that. So this is kind of like our the, this is what we call the knowledge hub. So this is kind of like our primary asset in play for these accounts. And yeah, these, these pages also have have a section where they have a chance to meet their dedicated account teams and where there are events which are like, you know, networking sessions which are like tailored for them. So this is what in a nutshell the knowledge Hub encompasses of everything. And these web pages are not so these are not they can't be navigated from our main website. So and these are not indexed on the search engine. So we run like targeted marketing campaigns to to get the users to, you know, get to these pages. So these are very account specific. And all the marketing campaigns we run are very account specific. So this is in a nutshell like what we do, and the Knowledge Hub is like our primary asset and play for these accounts.
And the rest of the panel. Have you have you experienced something like we discussed at the beginning the importance of content, right. To connect businesses? You Ben, you were saying the importance of having the right expertise because it's also the is the access to knowledge, right. That you can discuss with someone of of the same seniority is because you want to be putting in front of them the right content. So the rest of the panel, have you have you experienced something like this like the knowledge hub that Navneet was mentioned?
So I'll just comment on that because the most when it's done really well, the ultimate end point is it ends up inside the client. So we were building knowledge hubs in effect which were again targeted to a single global account. Know GFK offers like 20 plus different solutions and products and services. So there's a huge amount of detail there. And the whole point was, just as I've been described, you build it from the customer's perspective. So what are the things that the challenges they may face and a real understanding of working with the account team to to to put the right knowledge hub together and then the customer gets the ability to self select. And we got to a point with one customer where they said actually that is genuinely useful to our business. So they actually put it inside. It was on their system so that anybody who had a research requirement could go to the hub, understand what services and products were available. The organization knew it was a trusted vendor and therefore they also had access. And coming back to to a point that Ben made, you know, having access to the account manager is great, but the strategic account manager isn't necessarily a product expert in all areas, right? They're their most important job is managing the relationships within the account and coordinating the resources on the account. So when you can have a knowledge hub which helps you identify where the customer is engaging, what they're interested in, you can also find the right product people to support that conversation. So you get that expert input really early on. So that's the best example where I've seen where the customer, the customer went, that is so useful. Please put it inside our organization.
Content is an interesting topic, and I know it's something you're going to cover off, but I think we all have depending on an ABM, you're going to have different assets and content based upon where the customer is in that buying journey. You know, whether you're and again, due to at the start, whether you're also going after ABM from a customer expansion and a customer retention perspective or whether your ABM strategy is around new business. But as customers engage in your in their buying journey, you know, Techtarget, who I've done a lot of work with, you know, they averaged that it's between 12 and 14 different pieces of assets and are consumed by a customer on the early start of their buying journey. That's white papers, e-books. But as they get into the buying journey, what we started to look at is how do we segment our content to be where people are in that process? So one of the interesting assets that we've seen is when you start to look at material that helps people get value or best practices or guides to deploy, and you make that available at a later stage in the buying journey. We've seen some really good responses from our large accounts because actually that's relevant and that material is appropriate for them at that stage in their buying journey. There's an interesting book if the audience want to read called The Jolt Effect. And actually the jolt effect was written by the guys who did the Challenger sale, and they argue that most deals actually sometimes fall out, Even though the customers made a decision to buy your product, you still lose it. And at that point, the human nature is, is have I made the right decision? Have I Oh, I've just you know, I've made a decision to buy in Davao. Is that the right thing or actually, what then sales people do is get into the whole, well, here's a flood and, you know, discounting actually what that customer wants at that time according to the jolt effect and we're trialing this is here's a white paper on how you deploy it. Here's our customer success guide. That's what you can deploy. And actually you're validating their their purchase and you're demonstrating that you want to be part of that overall customer success. And I think that's a really interesting as you look at your content, serving different content at different times in that buying journey is becoming more and more appropriate and relevant. How you customize that, whether you do as NAV says, you customize it right down to that individual or whether you make it and say, Look, this is a really good example of a deployment guide for an organization of your size who's been using Salesforce as their Ecom platform. And the customer was like, Great, thanks very much. I'll use that. That that gives me some more validity that Algolia is the right partner of choice.
Yeah, just wanted to highlight like what Ben mentioned, that you know, about the customer being, you know, where exactly is the customer in the buying cycle. So that's where we have the input from our go to marketeers and you know, the account teams to understand what exactly are the customer priorities right now. And that's how we review it on a quarterly basis. You know, how do we exactly update it so that, you know, it's like we're talking to them the right things at the right point of time. So that's where I think the input from the go to marketeers and the account teams becomes very critical. And yeah, that's how we like take things forward.
Talking.
Talking about customization of content. I work in the in the defence industry, which is incredibly, incredibly niche. I would I would assume that it's one of the more niche niche areas there is. I might be I might be wrong, but it sure feels like it sometimes. But when it comes with content, one challenge I find is that when when I produce content, content can sometimes be very specific to to a client and then but then not really relevant to to others. However, if and on the other side of the spectrum, I have crowd pleasers, essentially content that does get the downloads, that does get the that does get the interaction. But but the client basically says we're just interested in the content. We're not actually interested to come to your conferences, which is the main product we're trying to sell. So I find it very interesting what Ben said, and I think there has to be a sort of balance between customization of the content to your customer and at the same but at the same time enough bandwidth or leeway that especially when you're creating content with with very few resources that it that it nets the biggest amount of readers possible. Uh, hope that makes sense.
Totally makes sense. And I know you have a view on this. We discussed about the nonlinear marketing funnel. We have been discussing all the idea of putting content depending on on which stage of the funnel they are, but you have this view of the nonlinear marketing funnel. So could you explore that idea?
Yeah. And that's.
That's around, you know, how do we find the right balance of being always at the top of mind of the customer throughout the buyer's journey and being respectful of the time they need for research, but then really executing on those signals that they show for us when they are ready for an engaging conversation. And then how can content help? And then I'm sure that we all experience this challenge of, you know, budgetary constraints and resource constraints when it comes to fueling our account based marketing funnel. And yes, we all understand that the the ultimate, you know, nirvana in content strategy is to have hyper personalized content for our one on one accounts. But is that actually feasible with the resources we have? And is it actually smart to invest proactively in that hyper personalized content and messaging before even understanding what the account is looking at buying? Getting back to that previous conversation of whether we want to sell something or we want to understand what the customer would like to buy. So when building out a content strategy for account based marketing, the way I like to to build it out is to, to to be respectful of this resource intensity of the hyper personalized content for those chosen accounts. And then really only do that 1 to 1 approach for accounts where we have a good repository of content for that, that kind of, you know, one to many and one to few layer, and then sending those assets out using a variety of channels and tactics and integrated mix of, of, you know, marketing tactics. And then once the account starts to engage, then being reactive on, on, on those signals and then maybe activating, you know, less resource intense content in that in that funnel and probably using the resources of, of Bdrs or SDRs there and then making sure that the follow up or the outreach is very personalized and or maybe, you know, using shorter assets or a personalized video in that outreach as opposed to putting a lot of resources and budget behind creating those hyper personalized assets upfront that that might be long tail assets as opposed to that kind of putting the signals out, you know, being really real time and reactive as much as we can on apprehending that, that those signals that we get from the accounts and then being as quick as possible on reacting and then being personalized on that follow up and maybe, you know, creating, you know, smaller snippets of, of content. But, but yeah, so, so that's how I look at content creation and then there as well to, to, to keep this dynamism in, in in mind as opposed to being very descriptive and, and, and linear in, in our, our planning of the content repository.
If I may just ask a question to the panel. Do you? When it comes to content, do you find that because how it works with with is that obviously the content is there to create that pre-conference engagement and to get people to come to our conferences and being being blunt, getting getting a good resource for value, getting a good value for, for their buck at our at our conferences. But I have had I've had some some feedback from what I guess would be considered the delegate sales team that that there that a lot of people would be are very interested in the content but they don't want to engage in the actual conference product. I don't know I don't know if you I don't know if the same challenges are also are also felt otherwise.
Absolutely.
We we have a classic one at the moment, which is Tiago. We've we run a load of podcasts and the first thing our sales team said, well, where's the leads? And I said, What do you mean, where's the leads? I said, this was about generating content and material to raise awareness as part of that buying journey. This was never about lead generation. Oh, well then we can't show the value. I said, Well, maybe we can't. You can probably show it through clicks and but even click through from the site are very small. I think sometimes you've got to be prepared to give up content and material as a way of elevating, as a way of informing and a way of distributing your brand across a broader audience. I think one of the best examples of that, I'm pretty sure it's HubSpot. I'm pretty sure I'm 99% sure it's HubSpot. I subscribe to a lot of their stuff. I have no desire to buy HubSpot. I will never buy and never deploy HubSpot. We have our own different CRM, but they produce some really good content that I think, Oh, that's actually really useful to, to read and to consume. But I know who their brand is now. I was to ever change jobs or if I was ever to be put on to a panel that says, Ben, we're going to be looking at our CRM, Probably HubSpot would be in there. But I think we've got to be prepared as marketers and in the ABM world, be prepared to give up. The gated content and give up the trade off that I'm going to give you the content for you to sign up to my event to. Here's some content, consume it, see how you get on with it if you like it. We have an event that you may be interested in. If not, here's more content. And that's all about just maintaining that brand. And I go back to what I said at the very start It's not about you, but it's all about you. Because if you are seen to give stuff and you're seen to providing value at some point in their buying process, they will want to engage in an event. And at that point you've got to hope that the work that you've done and the brand is the one that they go, Well, actually that was the event and they were being really useful. I'm going to go and have a conversation with them. And I think more and more of that is something that we look at our brand and our PR is about raising that level of awareness of you as an organization and in an ABM world, when you consider that the buying team may consist of anywhere between 715 people, depending on what the value of your deal is, you need to be making sure that your content is being consumed by as many of those. And some of them may have just say, Oh yeah, I've read a load of Algolia stuff. Never met with them, never seen a demo, but actually some of their stuff's really quite good and I listen to their CTO podcast. For me, that's something that that's a big achievement for us in our ABM process because the sales guys then going, Oh great, you've read, you've seen that, you've read that, you've heard that, you've watched that, great, that's fine. So I can overcome the algolia who we are.
Yeah, I think one thing is raise awareness and the other is build trust with with. Everything that you described. I think what you're trying to do is building trust as well and and building trust. I think it sometimes requires giving giving something, for example, talking about your competitors and and accept that they are good at at what they are. You know, if you show yourself that that and accept that your competitors are good in some areas, maybe that you are not so good at, you are building trust with your audience. And and I think people perceive that and at the end it will pay off.
I would be happy to reflect on that challenge, Thiago, that you share. And I think that relates to this common sense idea that ABM is a long distance run. And and I think it also relates to how we should be looking at measuring the success of account based marketing. Because when you're talking about this challenge that, you know, the audience might be consuming your content but actually not signing up for your event, I would raise the question of, you know, how long are you looking at the the measurement of your ROI? Because maybe that that same person who's today, you know, looking at your content, you know, on a long distance might become a customer, but you need to look at the measurement of your success of that approach with with the longer distance span as opposed to converting them, you know, here and now immediately to sign up for an event.
I agree. And well, let's enter into the final topic of today's conversation, which is the technology infrastructure. And I think definitely we need technology to measure what you're what you're saying. Judith And you mentioned in our previous conversation about the challenges in redesigning and Endava's CRM, right? How crucial is having the right technological infrastructure for for an ABM strategy? And that also you have tools like six sense demand based available. And so how do you determine how to integrate them into your ABM approach?
And so actually.
That sets a little bit of a personal journey here. But but I joined Endava about seven months ago, and before that I spent seven years at a at a software vendor where the marketing team, as well as the marketing technology stack was much more elaborate and, you know, bigger, more tools, more resources available. And what I found here at Endava is that, again, ABM is a journey, right? And you need to be really comprehensive of that. And I prefer building a sustainable marketing technology stack. I think it's not always about the amount of tools and technology that you have available, but really looking at the available tools that you have and ensuring that all the tools are integrated with the CRM, you know, the kind of laying that foundation, right? And then gradually building on top of that. So essentially I was exposed to many more ABM tools in my past at, at the previous company I worked for and which I don't necessarily have at my exposure today here at Endava. But we have that long term vision that we will gradually integrate them. But it wouldn't be, I think, a smart decision to immediately invest a lot in all of these tools and integrate them because one, we have to be comprehensive of our internal resources skills. We need to upskill the teams to be able to run ABM campaigns successfully. And we need to ensure that the existing technologies, the automation tool, the CRM, the the sales automation tools are all, you know, integrated and they talk to each other. And then once that foundational layer is created, then we can gradually implement other more advanced tools like sixth sense or demand based, you know, and then they will also require bigger investments from the marketing budget, which obviously, again, for the for the wider organization within the commercial organization, you need to be able to prove the value of your investments, right? So all of a sudden, you can't just advise that I want to spend 20% of my budget on all of these tools. And as opposed to that, you know, starting small with smaller steps, but then gradually being able to show the value and then, you know, walking through that journey. And I think that's that's what's important when we look at tools and technologies and what we invest in is to to be sustainable and have that long term vision as opposed to short term investing a lot. And then actually the teams who are using those tools also need to be upskilled on being able to to benefit from the value.
And setting the right foundations, right with the right CRM starting from there and navneeth.
With that, we are.
Discussing about technology. How do you use the tools like the Knowledge Hub, for example, that you were describing before? Integrate with technology, maybe with demand?
Yeah. So I mean, so we I think we are fortunate enough to use our own marketing automation platform, which is called the Customer Intelligence 360. So it's one of our solutions. And to give you a specific example of like how we integrate it with the Knowledge hub, right? So we use this for our nurture flows so the customer journey doesn't end at the knowledge hub. So at the knowledge hub, they, they sign up to a curated set of alerts which is like tailored for them. So we set up a two nurture streams using our 360 platform. So the one nurture the nurture stream, let's call it nurture flow one is kind of like an organic promotion of the knowledge hub and these this is kind of triggered to all the customers, all the all the customers which belong to these strategic accounts but have not signed up to the alerts. So it's kind of like an organic promotion of the alerts. And the second set of nurture flow is someone who is already in our CRM systems. So we basically come up with like account specific assets or like industry specific assets which is which is tailored to them. So this is just like giving you a small example of like how we use the 360 marketing automation platform in this, like using that again, talking about the technology infrastructure. But I think as B2B marketers, I think we are a bit limited on like, you know, the kind of options we have to run these like one on one targeting and the paid social is obviously like I think the, the major channel that we use. But since we are like, so this is this is a little bit of a pilot phase for us. So we have started this at a full scale just last year at the start of last year. So it's still in a pilot phase. So we are in a phase where we are testing a lot of things. So our our so we are testing something called the one on one content syndication with the accounts. So this is kind of like leveraging a different set of vendor and different set of channels to reach out the accounts. So, so Knowledge Hub was kind of like our, like, as I said, like as our primary asset in clay. But we are kind of creating like multiple touch points for the accounts to interact with. So, you know, just completing the customer journey. So they have like more options to interact with our brand. And yeah, that's kind of like a small example of like how we use this like big technology infrastructure that we have to leverage.
Brilliant.
Well, we are. We are coming to an end. I wanted to give well, first of all, many thanks to to all of you for coming today. And also give the opportunity, if you want to give any final thoughts about today's topic, please feel free to.
It's interesting, you mentioned the at the start and we used to be members of them. And actually I met with Bev Burgess, who was probably one of the leading practitioners in account based marketing and has written a number of books on it. I would say to anyone in any B2B marketeer, it's a discipline that we need to embrace, but be prepared. It's a longer game. You've got to play here and your metrics and your measurements. Don't be. Outmaneuver by the sales guys who will try to throw everything in it with their romantic view. Be very focused, be very disciplined, and embark upon this as a long game. And it's will take time and you will need to to understand how you measure and how you look at some of the data and how you are going to have to say no to a few people. But also you're going to have, you know, there's a very good book called The 12 Powers of Marketing. And I think ABM is a very good example of how you need to network across your organization. You know, most of us who sit in field marketing, we focus on events and that's it. We interact with the mark ups. ABM is one of those disciplines that sits right across everything sales, marketing, finance, customer success, ex partners, etcetera. So, you know, you need to be cognizant that not only is it about reaching the customer, but you've got to be able to network and orchestrate quite a very complex internal organization to get them aligned. But it's well worth it. And it's incredibly the the lady who runs my ABM team, it's quite interesting. She's been doing it now for about a year. And her you know, when you see when she sees the success that she gets, i.e., the engagement from accounts or the sales guys who say, I've just reached out to this customer, they were so impressed with some of the stuff it she just lights up and her team just sort of really sort of, you know, glow. And I think the success on that is we're starting to see the sales guys going, okay, this is starting to work and we can get some value on it. So invest in it, but be prepared that you're going to have to justify it and it's not going to give you a return in 90 days.
Well, what a.
Great way to close today's conversation. Thank you so much, Ben, and thank you so much, everyone. Um, we had an amazing conversation. Thank you.
Okay, thanks. Thanks, everybody. Bye bye. Bye bye.
Bye bye.
