AMA: Qualia Director, Demand Generation, Laura Lewis on Account Based Marketing

There are so many ways to answer this question, depending on your GTM strategy and organization! The key, no matter the differences, it to be selective and targeted. There are likely many people you WANT to sell to, but who is most likely to actually become a Closed Won deal? That is where you need to focus. Focus is the key to success in ABM. The best place to start is to have a clear understanding of your target market and its size. Are you a horizontal SaaS company that can sell to any IT Director at any company over $100M in revenue? Are you a vertical company with a finite market of only 20,000 accounts? Are you selling to developers at any size company for a very small dollar value? First, you have to understand your target market and use this as your total addressable market. Once you have a TAM, you need to tier the accounts somehow. Are certain accounts, based on size, location, or other factors, more likely to have success with your product? Do you have data you can look at from past sales efforts that shows companies in a particular segment are closing at a higher rate than others? Focus here. Then, build your scoring model. This is easiest to do with an ABM tool. Identify which accounts are showing intent, which have been on your website, which have engaged with marketing. Work with sales to build a model that makes sense to both of you, and tiers down. The biggest bucket should be at the top, and the smallest bucket of accounts should be at the bottom. Again, working with sales, identify at what point the accounts move from marketing to sales and should be targeted by different types of outreach and messaging.

When I joined my current organization, the sales & marketing teams were using Demandbase. Demandbase is a great tool for ABM, but our current implementation was not meeting our needs - the scoring model was so complex it took 10+ minutes to load, we had asked sales to log into the platform instead of pushing the relevant data into Salesforce for them, and we were sending "MQAs" to our SDRs that were essentially indicators of contact engagement with email marketing, rather than account activity based on intent. All of this had led to a sentiment across the organization that our MQAs were terrible, and it was Demandbase's fault. For us, it made more sense to tackle the implementation and sentiment issues by completely replacing the solution rather than trying to fix it. We evaluated and brought 6Sense on board instead.

Funnel stage, persona, and topic. 1. Funnel stage - is this content for someone who has never heard of your company and what you do before, or is it for someone who has been all over your website? The former will need to be introduced to what you do in a way that is interesting and engaging (think "thought leadership") where the latter will be more interested in your company (think case studies). 2. Persona - who is this content more relevant for? If you're selling to Analytics/Operations folks, is this content for a Sales Operations person, a Marketing Operations person, or a Systems person? Is it for an individual contributor working on a specific project all day, or for a VP who is thinking strategically about what they should be doing next year and how to get there? 3. Topic - this one is easy. What is the key topic of your content? And topic should be synonymous with value proposition or theme - NOT with product features. Topics are things like AI, Security, or Workflow Efficiency, not things like the new report or the new checkbox feature in the product. Those latter things are good for customers, but prospects need to know about how your solution solves their problems and makes their life better, not about the latest widget.

Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, and Operations. Marketing - you're leading the charge here. You own the GTM strategy and persona and messaging research (Product Marketing), the content and asset creation (Content/Design), and the targeting and campaign launches to move the accounts down the funnel (Demand Generation). Operations - you're ensuring the account scoring is working, handling all technical implementation of tools, and making sure everything syncs to the CRM and is visible to sales. You're also building the reporting necessary to track success of the initiative, account funnel progression, and revenue attainment. Sales/Customer Success - you're highly involved in the strategizing process before anything gets put into place. You're using the tools, providing feedback on successes, and winning some deals!

We do! We use 6Sense, which includes an integration to Bombora, and have identified key keywords and topics that are relevant for our business. We track intent data through these topics and keywords and include them in our account segments. Someone showing no intent data and no marketing activity is in our top stage, whereas someone showing a small amount of intent or marketing activity would move down one stage farther,

Every organization is different, and I always start with looking at both historical data and benchmarks. Generally, the lower the average deal size, the higher the percentage of inbound leads should be. For example, if your ADS is low (let's say $5000 or under), it's not very efficient to have both SDRs and AEs spending time researching contacts and cold prospecting, especially since cold prospecting converts at low rates. In terms of time spent to get a deal, a large % of the deal size will be taken up by paying salaries. Similarly, it doesn't make financial sense to run 1:1 or 1:few ABM campaigns on these deal sizes because of the effort involved. As deal sizes get larger, the percentage of outbound should increase. Once you get into the millions per deal, it makes a lot more sense to spend dedicated sales effort to research and prospect into accounts. At this point, it also makes financial sense to dedicate marketing resources to build custom campaigns and messaging for a 1:1 ABM approach.