AMA: Salesforce Sr. Director, Demand Generation, Keara Cho on Account Based Marketing

The way I think about ABM metrics are 3 folds: 1. What’s the revenue impact we are driving - early indicators include what’s our contribution to pipe generation. 2. How are we helping our seller build relationships? These can be measured in the form of marketing responses or event attendance or executive engagement from decision makers in our ABM accounts (ie. VP+). 3. How are we strengthen our account data with contact acquisition & contact enrichment/cleaning? Not only are we driving new contacts for the sellers to build new relationships with but is marketing doing to 1) ensure data is the most up-to-date (trash data in = trash data out!) and 2) identifying the “change agents” or decisions that are advocates of your brand who can then become a champion for you during a deal. To answer your question directly there are many early indications that you can address as a marketer before you assess how you are impacting the bottomline (revenue). The first thing you need to do is ensure you are aligned with your sales team - are there specific plays they are running this quarter? Are there specific products that have the highest probability to cross when you cross-sell to a certain LOB? Is your company launching new SKUs? You have to understand the business and products and align your ABM initiatives to your sale’s priorities. In parallel, I would typically look at YoY and QoQ compares for marketing responses and event attendance; this will allow you to get a sense of how engaged your customers are. I will also look at the compares for contact acquisition to ensure we are always keeping the key players in each account up to date. When flat or negative compares show up, that's when you dig deeper and create an action plan.

I will keep this answer short and sweet. If a strategy drives quality pipe generation I would immediate duplicate and continue to refine.

Go to market as ONE team with your sales counterpart. Ensure the accounts you are targeting is 100% aligned with sales strategy. Your sales team is going to change courses during the quarter/mid-year; pivot with them and ensure you are always aligning to their top priority accounts. Educate your organization by highlighting the impact that ABM will have to the business. 1. What’s the revenue impact we are driving - early indicators include what’s our contribution to pipe generation. 2. How are we helping our seller build relationships? These can be measured in the form of marketing responses or event attendance or executive engagement from decision makers in our ABM accounts (ie. VP+). 3. How are we strengthen our account data with contact acquisition & contact enrichment/cleaning? Not only are we driving new contacts for the sellers to build new relationships with but is marketing doing to 1) ensure data is the most up-to-date (trash data in = trash data out!) and 2) identifying the “change agents” or decisions that are advocates of your brand who can then become a champion for you during a deal. Then, come up with a framework on how ABM is going to drive engagement, pipe generation and revenue together with your sales leadership. Here’s a sample framework to help you think through your ABM strategy: 1. 1 to 1 account journeys: Account planning should be done for each account. This includes leveraging third party data (think Bombora, Leadspace, Crunchbase, LinkedIn, etc) and/or research around each buyer within the account, key opportunities and objectives for your account within the fiscal year (i.e. is your account looking into adopting generative AI into their business processes this year, are they looking to modernize their customer service/call center technology, etc). Equip your sellers and account teams with the right homework so you can help them strengthen their account planning. 2. Be a trusted partner with your accounts team: Partner with your accounts team and ensure you understand their goals and objectives for the quarter/year. Your job is to complement your programs to their strategy. This goes without saying, but ensure every program you launch ties back to business outcomes: (in reference to my measurement framework above) 1) what is your pipe generation and revenue impact? 2) How many marketing responses have you generated with key decisions makers (i.e VP+) in the account and lastly, 3) how has your new contact strategy translate to more sales activities and ultimately, pipe generation and revenue. 3. Quarterbacking with the rest of the marketing team: you can’t create all the marketing CTAs on your own and you need to rely on your marketing counterparts to drive focus for your ABM accounts as well. Partner with your field marketers to ensure your ABM accounts are getting priority at executive events. Work with product marketers and ensure you have the right sales enablement and product demos that you can include in your journeys. Collaborate with the campaigns team and leverage content and assets so you can easily customize and make it work for your ABM journeys. Marketing is a team sport and you cannot scale and win alone.

What a great question. I never thought about data in this way. Thanks for forcing me to think through the differences as it relate to KPIs vs. data to help inform vs. pure noise. Metrics: These are the key performance indications that, you as a marketer, should evaluate your programs and your teams against. At the end of the day our job as marketers is to drive revenue alongside our go-to-market partners. Key metrics I've outlined in another AMA question that is worth mentioning here: * What’s the revenue impact we are driving - early indicators include what’s our contribution to pipe generation * How are we helping our seller build relationships? These can be measured in the form of marketing responses or event attendance and executive engagement from decision makers in our ABM accounts (ie. VP+) * How are we aiding in contact acquisition by account? Not only are we driving new contacts for the sellers to build new relationships with but is marketing identifying the “change agents” or decisions that are advocates of your brand who can then become a champion for you during a deal. I'm going to group Analytics and Insights together because analytics to me is the data that backs up (or inform) the insights. Analytics: What problem are you trying to solve for? You have to have succinct questions before you (or submit a request to your analytics team) dig into the data to pull analytics. Analysis paralysis is the cause of unnecessary cycles and it will lead to dead ends. Insights: These are an individual or a group's point of views or someone's analysis based on the analytics being pulled. It is a hypothesis backed by data to gain understand of your business. Here's my thinking process when solving for a specific hotspot for the business and how I would go about looking for the analytics and surfacing insights. Problem/hotspot: Account X is not hitting the ACV target. Why? Logic: "Analytics is showing us that the pipe gen is flat YoY and we are behind target attainment by X percentage points - the trend was surfaced up last week as well." The hypothesis here is that we are behind on pipe gen, an early indicator that we'll miss our revenue target. This requires an action/get back to health plan right away. In search of insights these are the questions I would answer and gather the analytics for: * Are we simply not piping enough? * What's the close rate/win rate this quarter compare to last quarter and last year (is the hypothesis we're losing to a competitor or is this an enablement problem?) * Is the pipe stuck in a certain stage? What's the average days/weeks it's been stuck in that stage for? The action plan is to figure out how to leverage marketing touchpoints to progress the pipe. * Is there deal compression happening because Account X is putting projects on hold or swapping licenses in an effort to drive vendor cost down? These questions then become guidance to help us surface up the right analytics so we are not lost in analysis paralysis.

Quarterbacking with the rest of the marketing team is critical to your success. You can’t create all the marketing CTAs on your own and you need to rely on your marketing counterparts to drive focus for your ABM accounts as well. * Partner with your field marketers to ensure your ABM accounts are getting priority at executive & hospitality events. * Plan with your events team and see if you could carve out VIP experiences for your ABM contacts (i.e priority seating at keynotes, executive summit spaces, special customer meeting, VIP/backstage passes to special events). * Work with product marketers and ensure you have the right sales enablement and product demos that you can include in your journeys. * Collaborate with the campaigns team and leverage content and assets so you can easily customize and make it work for your ABM journeys. Marketing is a team sport and you cannot scale and win alone.

Get the metrics for these following measures so you can share with your internal stakeholder how ABM is impacting the business on 1 page. * Marketing's contribution to revenue including YoY compares (as a percentage against the business overall revenue & dollar amount) * Marketing's contribution to pipe generation including YoY compares (as a percentage against the business overall pipe gen & dollar amount) * Marketing's contribution to pipeline maturation including YoY compares * not sure how your organization measures this but typically this is measured between stages 2-closing and marketing's effort in trying to accelerate and speed up the deal cycle * X number of VP+ responses including YoY compares * Average deal size * X number of net new contacts added Then you can deep dive into 1 account example and show how your ABM program/journey and touchpoints are hitting a specific objective you set out to solve in partnership with sales.