by William Walsh | Jun 12, 2023 | 2023
As previously published on 6/7/23 in MarTech
By Scott Gillum
Estimated read time: 5 Minutes
5 Steps for Building a Recession Grade ABM Program
Looking to get off the treadmill of producing what seems like never ending content and feeding the ABM machine hoping you get a hit? Tired of anonymous and/or intent data that produces very little results?
In today’s challenging economic environment, you’re going to need to take your program to the next level. Casting a wide net in a sea with less fish will be less productive.
It’s time to build a program that is proactive and targeted, and it’s going to require some work. Here are five steps to get you started on your way to building a market ready ABM program.
- Target specific people and accounts – because it’s called “account based marketing”, you need to have actual accounts identified. Additionally, you’ll need to have a list of key targets within the account. Forget trying to figure out anonymous hits on your website or content, invest in getting the list built.
- Know who, and what is important – not all prospects matter, in fact, the ones you are most likely to engage are not the most important. One will be active and the other passive. Not all responses or engagements are important either. To know the difference between the two you will need to profile the personality type of your targets. Doing so will allow you to gain valuable insight into the type of people you’re dealing with, and the corporate culture.
- Use the “friendlies” to get to the real buyers – we’re in an economic environment of “if it’s not broken it will not get fixed” unless you find the pain. Forget about targeting the “C-Suite,” go for the users. Get to the people who have the need, not the decision makers. For that group, there is no decision to make yet. You have to build the case and surface the need.
- Build the business case – once you have this insight, talk less about your solution and more about relieving the pain, being specific to that account. It will also need to be as close to the core operation of the business as possible. Can you help reduce cost, improve revenue, or make employees more productive, etc? We are in a “have to have,” not a “nice to have” buying environment. This is where sales and marketing have to come together.
- Communicate it back – once you have the business case, you now need to communicate back to the key targets in the account in a language that connects with them personally. To move the buying process forward, you need to get the right people to take action. You’re looking for a way to motivate them, and this is where knowing their personality type comes into play. You can create offers and marketing assets that are highly personalized and create action.
Think of this approach in two parts – a front end and a back end. You’re going to have to “make orders” versus “take orders”, as they say (could I possibly use more cliches?!). The front piece is discovering or creating the pain, which requires tight integration between sales and marketing.
The back end is communicating and selling the pain. You’ll need to find a way to motivate the organization on 3 levels – corporate, line of business, and at the individual level, in order to get a deal through the organization. This will be true for acquisition and existing accounts.
Collecting information on the front end should give you the insight you need to build the messaging and business case on the back end. And again, this takes a coordinated approach between sales and marketing.
It’s a difficult market right now so you not only need to work smarter, but also, harder (there I go again). This isn’t about more tools or increased scale. It’s about identifying the right opportunities and leveraging them efficiently. Now if it was just that easy.
by William Walsh | May 22, 2023 | 2023
As previously published on 5/16/23 in MarTech
By Scott Gillum
Estimated read time: 5 Minutes
Less than 10 minutes after the release of Chat GPT 4 I received a spam email from a company offering AI generated blog posts, probably generated by the tool.
Maybe it wasn’t exactly 10 minutes, but it sure felt that way. Since then, I’ve recently received countless solicitations from companies offering all kinds of AI generated solutions.
Will the ability to send better emails/content written more quickly by AI change the lives of B2B marketers for the better? Not yet. In fact, the greatest performance impact will not be seen in creation, but rather, in execution.
The promise of AI’s ability to deliver mass “personalization” and unique experiences, is only realized if we focus on gaining better insight into the audience, specifically their preferences.
Here’s Why
The ability to create more content faster will only result in lower performance. In a 2019 survey, Gartner research showed that 89% of decision makers said the content they encountered through the buying process was of high quality.
In fact, they found that buyers were almost at the point of saturation in their cognitive ability to consume more information. Simply said, more content will not result in increased consumption or understanding. The supply of content is at maximum, according to buyers. And that was four years ago, imagine what they would say now.
This insight led to the discovery of the “sense making” seller. A person with the important attributes of being able to connect the right information to the right person, at the right time. They also possess the ability to filter out unnecessary information, giving the decision maker only the information they need in order to take action.
It’s one thing to have a human listening and understanding the needs of buyers during the sales process, but it’s another when trying to do this at the top of the funnel with marketing assets. This is where the opportunity for AI in B2B lies.
We’ve now built ABM stacks which typically encompass dozens of marketing technologies able to pump out endless contact and engagement data, yet the performance of those “leads” is still poor. Why? Mainly, because we don’t have a “sense making” filter to align and route the right marketing asset to the right person, for the right reason.
AI personality profiling tools represent an opportunity to be the “sense maker” for marketers. By understanding the distinct behavior of audiences, marketers can better align content based on individual preferences, understand what intent “signals” are real, and create messaging that appeals to specific segments of the market.
Understanding buyer behavior offers value beyond just outbound marketing. It extends to routing and aligning business development resources. It can help sales managers understand how to align their teams based on the preferences of prospects with their engagement activity.
The combination of understanding the personal motivations and engagement behavior gives insight into what “leads” hold the most potential to move forward. It can identify which targets to avoid and identify the most fertile ground to build relationships.
Here’s an example… A professional services firm was getting high attendance for its webinar series, but very few attendees converted into leads. After analyzing the audience they found that over 50 percent of their attendees had one dominant personality type.
Their webinars were rich with data and research and their content consisted of mostly research based white papers. And that was the problem; their audience was made up of mostly strategists and consultants. Their behavior was to learn the information in order to inform others. Their content preferences were for “light” content that traveled easily and could stand on its own without an explanation.
Think infographics and animated videos. In fact, that’s exactly what was created. Lead conversion post webinar increased by 35% after they shifted to “lighter” follow up content. Why, because this group had a personality profile of an “Influencer” – those who use information to inform others. They were not the “lead” but rather, they pointed to the opportunity.
The organization started tracking sharing versus downloads, and then followed the content to the intended audience. More content was not the answer, but personalized content aligned to how the audience wanted to use it was.
The “sense maker” in this case was the Influencer attendee who was routing the relevant information to the right person, at the right time. AI tools unlocked the insight into understanding their behavior and motivations. Better understanding the audience improved the performance of their outbound efforts.
And that is where the ROI will be found. If you’re truly interested in impacting performance, find the solutions that will provide you with insight into buyers. You don’t need more content, buyers already told you they do want or need it four years ago.
by William Walsh | Apr 11, 2023 | 2023
By Scott Gillum
Estimated read time: 5 Minutes
Last week we finished a new website for a client. It’s the third time in the last 2 years we’ve been the “rescue” vendor on a website build that had gone wrong.
If you are thinking about updating your website, and/or are an agency building sites, here’s what we’ve learned through those experiences that you need to know.
- Building a new or “refreshing” a website is not just a website build – it is also a rebranding, repositioning and a messaging project. Know that going in and plan for it. You may also want to scope in a competitive assessment.
- Don’t build anything until everyone that counts has a say or has reviewed a page, content, images, etc. To hell with project timelines, don’t do a thing until the right people are on the same page.
- Make it “paint by numbers.” Use pre-designed templates, provide direction on what you need from the client and be specific….”We need 250 words that describe your corporate culture.”
- Scope in a copywriter. You’ll need one to either fill the gap on content or at a minimum, edit copy.
- Give the client access to the staging server. Let them see the site as it is being built. Full transparency, do not wait to the end to share the site. At each client update meeting, walk them through the new updates and get their input. This is a collaborative effort.
And finally, if you offshore or nearshore the build, see the paint by numbers point. Give exact and specific directions to your developers. Stay on top of the development at each stage of the process. Plan reviews before showing anything to your client. Look at EVERY single detail.
by William Walsh | Apr 4, 2023 | 2023
Estimated read time: 5 Minutes
Once upon a time, Account Based Marketing (ABM) was a strategy – a very smart strategy, aimed at the biggest, most valuable accounts.
Gartner defined it as “a go-to-market strategy targeting certain accounts with a synchronized, continuous set of marketing and sales activities. ABM activities engage those accounts and individuals through all stages of the buyer journey.”
Given the complexity of decision making, number of buyers involved, and the size of the opportunities in large accounts, it was the smart thing to do. But somewhere down the line, ABM became a technology platform. As Peter Drucker once said, “all good strategy becomes software”, and that is exactly what happened.
Where did it go wrong?
You could point to one of the leaders in the space, DemandBase. They started in the enterprise segment with “One to One Account ABM” intending to create and execute highly personalized programs against the largest and most strategically important accounts.
But that quickly expanded down the account pyramid to include “One-to-Few ABM” and “One-to-Many ABM”, which “leveraged technology to tailor or personalize marketing campaigns for specific accounts.”
It didn’t stop there, to enable the “continuous set of marketing and sales activities” at “all stages of the buyer journey” as defined by Gartner, we got even more technologies.
Cisco’s martech stack has no less than 13 tools being used at the “Aware” stage of the buyer’s journey. Another 7 tools at the “Shop/Buy” phase, 3 more at “Install” and finally, an additional 4 at the “Renew”, for a total of 27 different tools used for enterprise ABM alone.
Now, for the great irony of it all… because many of the tools are being used for specific purposes and/or at defined stages, the performance analytics are optimized for that specific task and/or to measure the performance of a channel. They are siloed.
It is very difficult to integrate them to view the entire progression of a buyer from one phase to the next, even if you are using Salesforce across stages. More challenging, it is impossible to see the movement of a purchase decision across a buying group.
The focus on measuring activity or engagement against an individual at a certain stage, has caused us to lose sight of the objective, which is to sell something, and in B2B, it usually requires a group decision. The fundamental issue is marketing targets individuals, selling involves a buying group.
Finally, because the machine requires fuel to run “continuously”, we produce an overabundance of content that typically lacks relevance and/or actionable insight. Caught in the cycle of what can we produce versus what do buyers need. We work for the machines rather than have them work for us and it will get worse with generative AI.
And the momentum is such that it is nearly impossible to course correct. What was once a strategic approach has now been sacrificed to the lords of scale.
ABM’s inability to provide real insight into the progress of account level buyers within the journey, has left us with what we believe to be “signals” of intent. An assumption that a potential buyer has reached a certain stage in the journey because of an action.
Instead of marketing filtering those responses to find real intent they are routed to sales to sort through. I once thought sales was responsible for the proliferation of the sales development role only to realize now that it’s actually marketing’s fault.
Case in point, we worked with a client on a new product launch. The big launch event was a webinar. It was the highest subscribed and attended event of the year.
A couple hundred people attended the live event and another hundred viewed it on demand. We sorted through the list to find qualified leads to route to sales. Our analysis determined that there were 2 viable prospects. Marketing entered over 70 “leads” into Salesforce for sales to follow up on.
The strategic value of ABM has been marginalized, if not lost completely. It is now better defined as Activity Based Marketing and/or Acquisition Based Marketing. And unfortunately, there isn’t a tool that can fix it.
by William Walsh | Feb 21, 2023 | 2023
By Scott Gillum
Estimated read time: 5 Minutes
Imagine adding one of the world’s greatest artists to your creative team. Or, how about saving time and money on creative brainstorming by starting with a first draft to inspire the team. How about creating dozens of creative concepts in the same time it currently takes to develop a handful.
Intrigued? This is the promise of AI creative engines for B2B marketing. And with that possibility, could it also help make B2B marketing as sexy and exciting as B2C advertising?
The big story of this year will be the widespread adoption of AI creative tools. Chat GPT is just the beginning. Expect to see agencies widely embrace AI for all types of creative – not just content. Open AI’s CEO, Sam Atlman, sees the “greatest application of AI for creative use,” not in replacing blue collar jobs as many had predicted.
After experimenting with AI tools for the last couple of months, you may be interested to know that I totally agree with Sam’s statement. In fact, the image used for this blog was created using Jasper’s AI image generator.
I selected Salvador Dali as my inspiration, acrylic paint as the style, the context of creating an exciting and bold prediction for the future, out pops the image you see. There were almost endless options of possible combinations that could be used from style to mood, and everything in between.
Rather than these tools being utilized to replace people, they have the potential to be incredibly useful tool sets that in a sense, may serve as an “inspiration engine” for creatives. The potential for increase in productivity is huge!
In fact, think of the possibility of having a famous artist inspire the creative team. Instead of replacing people, you’re gaining access to an incredible talent pool that would otherwise be impossible. Talk about shaking up the world of B2B that has a tendency to lean on technical language and images of products.
The creative process is nothing if not iterative. Imagine how fast the team can play around with concepts by using AI content generators to create first, second, and third drafts that are then edited and approved by a human as final copy.
Consider the time saved by having a designer build the exact image they want, rather than scanning Getty Images for hours on end. Oftentimes, just getting started creates a delay. Working off an AI generated first draft could accelerate the process – at least, that’s the hope.
Now the warning. It is very easy to write long form and short form copy using AI tools, especially for digital ads, blog posts and emails. For B2B marketers, this could mean that there is an easily accessible cornucopia of content to blast out to prospects. Please use these tools judiciously.
The assumption that more content equals more engagement is incorrect. Relevant content is closer, but it still requires insight and strategic thinking, which you will not find in AI tools. The new generation of AI generators is very powerful, in particular, with the coming release of GPT-4 and the advancements made in language modeling.
The tools still require time to learn and understand how to best utilize their power and get the output you desire. There is, however, a learning curve – it is not as simple as input and output. There are numerous variables that need to be refined or manipulated by humans in order to achieve a quality output. The expression of “crap in, crap out” still holds true.
Agencies and companies who carefully consider experimenting with these new tools will now be better off in the long run as technology continues to advance. And here’s another warning based on our learning in young marketing using technologies, they are not the goal.
It’s not enough to only know how to use the tool, you still need to think creatively. AI generators can be great tools to aid the creative process, don’t let them become the process.
They don’t become a threat for replacing humans if you understand how to use them properly. And no, I didn’t use an AI content engine to write this blog…or did I?
