Laura Lewis

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.

Unfortunately, I don't have a good answer for this one. I have never actually had success with a 3rd-party demand generation agency! I truly believe this is a role that requires a level of project management and organizational understanding that you cannot outsource without heavy involvement from someone internal to the organization. And now with generative AI entering marketing workstreams, nurture emails can quickly written up by AI and then edited by an internal human in much less time than it would have taken to do the entire project from scratch. However, I do believe you can be successful outsourcing highly skilled or technical roles, like digital marketing, marketing automation, or web development. These roles have a clear objective/task and require less project management: "implement a cookie consent banner on our website / build a lead scoring model from this spreadsheet outline / launch these ad campaigns." KPIs are is the required work done, done well and on time, and for digital marketing, are any metrics like CPC or CPL improving over time.

I have some standard 30-60-90 bullets that I apply to any new role. Roughly, those look like this: 30 days - "Listen and Learn" * Complete formal onboarding * Get to know my team/boss/peers * Schedule introduction meetings with cross-functional peers * Understand my job description and key responsibilities * Review current performance data, budgets, and plans * Understand company long-term goals and strategy and how I fit in there 60 days - "Find the Red" * Continue with 30 day items * Dig deeper into metrics, sales performance, customer data, partners * Understand technical workflows and processes * Identify key project areas 90 days - "Build and Change" * Continue with 60 day items * Build formalized plan and socialize with organization * Begin implementing needed changes and working on key projects

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!

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.

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,

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.

When I'm looking for a new role, I have a couple of steps in my process. First, I narrow down the job titles and types of companies I'm looking for. This might mean I only apply to Director of Demand Generation jobs at SaaS companies over 500 employees. At the manager level, decide if you're looking for Manager, Senior Manager, what type of company your experience best aligns with or you are most interested in, and if there is any other criteria that is important to you. Before beginning interviews with companies I've applied to, I'll do my research. Who works there, according to LinkedIn? How much funding do they have, according to Crunchbase? Who is on the leadership team, and how much experience do they have? What are employees saying on Glassdoor? What is the salary range for this position in general, and this position at this company? I've turned down interviews before because of Glassdoor reviews. If you know exactly what you are looking for, you can filter companies in and out based on that. If you're not sure or can't find enough information, go through the interview process to learn more. I'll ask a lot of questions during my interviews, as well, as tailor those questions to the person I am speaking with. When you meet with a peer reporting to the same boss, ask them about your potential boss's management style. When you meet with the most senior employee, ask them about the financial viability of the company. When you meet with sales, ask them what their biggest challenge is right now to close deals. The company is evaluating you, but you are also evaluating the company.

I find interviews to be the most successful as a hiring manager when I prep the questions I want to ask in advance. For a 30-minute interview, I'll have 6 or 7 questions ready to go. These questions are a mix of situational questions "Tell me about a time when..." and more general questions around the person's goals, strengths and weaknesses, and achievements. I'll also ensure that any cross-functional partners in the process have a good understanding of the seniority of the ideal candidate we are expecting and what to focus on for their interview time. For example, a sales interviewer can focus on sales collaboration and partnership, while a marketing operations interviewer can focus on skills around analyzing data. If I'm ever blanking on good questions, a quick google search and perusing a few blogs usually gets the ideas flowing.