Building Pipeline with ABM That Actually Converts with Andrei Zinkevich & Vladimir Blagojević

00:03 Welcome to Marketing for Marketers, the series where we interview the brightest minds in marketing to unlock the insights behind their strategies to drive pipeline. Today we've got Vlad and Andre with us, the founders of Full Funnel. I would say probably the most recognized faces in the ABM sphere at least, maybe also in marketing. Vlad, Andre, good to have you on board. Do a quick introduction. Thanks a lot.

00:32 Wanna make an intro Vlad? Hello everyone, Vlad here with Andrej from Full Funnel. What we do is we work with B2B companies with high HCV, high deal size and complex and long sales cycles, helping them implement the account-based marketing to drive more pipeline revenue. That's what I said. We've been for quite a long time in the trenches.

00:58 talking about enterprise sales and marketing pipeline development with account-based marketing motion and happy to share our insights and knowledge today. Beautiful. Yeah. And I think the title we've got here is awareness to revenue. definitely. One thing you didn't mention is you are also, I know you guys as being the ABM guys, but you are doing a lot more on

01:21 demand generation in general and like full funnel focusing on everything in regards to both APM and demand generation. lot of, I think the biggest problem that I observe in B2B marketing is that there are marketing camps that promote one motion against another. And then for example, it's just enough to open LinkedIn or Substack or Twitter and then you'll see product led like

01:50 product led, sales led, marketing led, inbound led, relationship led, account led, whatever, and everything is led. So, and there are fierce debates about what's better, what's working, what's not working, and as you guess...

02:07 There are constant debates about outbound is that paid performances that SEO is that like content is that a con base marketing is that ever since that and the understand from the marketing perspective, what like everybody tries to find their place on the sun. But if you look at business, I think behind the scenes, we always chat about football, right? And I would share that.

02:32 business in some way very similar to the football team organization, right? If you want to win the league, if you want to win your championship, you need to have a great coach. You need to have the right players and these players, they can't work in silence, right? The defenders just tackle and then throw the balls, right? The best teams are the cross-functional teams, right? So these are the teams where there is a cohesive collaboration between them.

03:01 And the same is here, right? If you look at the buyer journey, why I'm sharing all of this, the buyer journey is never linear, right? And it's never repeatable in a way that's like, that every single account, right? Would just, let's say, execute the same steps in the buying process as existing accounts, as existing clients, right? It's always different, but what is never different is the...

03:29 patterns how the buyers become aware of different products, right? So first of all, most of them are not in the market, right? And even everybody who is listening to us today might not be in market to buy Intend Data platform or buy like ABM Consulting Services. But a lot of people listen to this because they want to learn best practices, learn something that could help.

03:54 them with their career, with their profession, with their responsibilities, et cetera, right? That's the key. So in nutshell, a lot of people, first of all, become aware of different vendors. And with Plot, we often refer to a great research done by Pavilion where they interviewed like a few hundreds of B2B market, basically B2B executives, right, from technology companies. And 86 % of enterprise buyers, they mentioned that's

04:22 they always reach out to prioritized vendors, right? So that means that the first step is creating awareness. If you are not there, if they don't know you, you're simply not being considered. As simple as that, right? Then buyers run a specific challenge. You can have the best AI tool, you can have the best personalization in the world, but nothing will challenge the status quo. If they don't see a need to change, they simply won't change.

04:47 As simple as that, right? In startup world, when you sell $15 product, that's completely different. There is no risk. But when we are talking about six, seven figure contracts, it's completely different world, right? So then it means that you need to generate demand and you need to constantly challenge the status quo of these accounts. Why change them? Why change them now? That's the key. And then proving that this change is possible, right? Basically, this is a natural what is demand generation, right?

05:16 And we are moving through the full funnel concept when they start considering you, they demonstrate spiking engagement, right? So you can see multiple signals and website visits, right? Engagement with your signing up for your events, engaging with your content, engaging with your ads. That could be multiple things, right? From this perspective, when you capture this engagement, you build a relationship, you start doing account planning, right? And in natural account-based motion,

05:42 I think we discussed this with Vlad, it's incorrect to say that it's just account-based marketing because it creates a false assumption that only marketing owns it. It's account-based motion, like I said, this is the cross-functional collaboration and both teams should sit down together and think, okay, how can we move this account forward? The same.

06:03 How can we create awareness in these accounts? How can jointly we create that demand? Now, then the sales process starts, right? When they demonstrate by an intent and an eager talk to you. And a lot of people, close their funnel here, right? If you look at any CRM setup, the last stage is deal one, deal lost. This is where the relationship actually starts, right? So the simple truth, if your clients, I mean your new clients,

06:30 They're not getting value from your product as fast as possible. They will churn in future, right? That's the first factor. The second one that if they're not getting value, you can't expect any case studies, any positive testimonials, and you can't expand your business. You can't cross sell or upsell to these companies. As simple as that, right? Who's going to spend more money while not demonstrating ROI for the initial purchase?

06:59 As simple as that. And a lot of companies, neglect it. And whenever we look, for example, we often get a request to build the expansion motion. But when we explain that we need to look at what happens before expansion, companies always say, it's going to client success. We are not touching this and just client success manages this. And we don't need to touch, we just need to reach out to new.

07:23 business units are buying committee groups and try to upsell our product. A lot of companies, don't think about what's happening after sales. And full funnel concept means, if I touched already the client success team and the product team obviously is involved here, that all teams start thinking in terms of entire buyer journey or account journey, if you will. How can we create an awareness and move from awareness not to revenue only

07:50 because I know a lot of companies on LinkedIn that brag about their revenue, especially in startup world, I guess you have seen this, but they never mention their charm, which is funny enough, right? But in reality, what we need to think about, how to go from awareness to continuous revenue, right? To continue revenue growth and continue.

08:12 across of your valid share with these clients. That's the key. And that's why I don't believe in outbound led or whatever led. I believe that all of these motions exist because they work, but they never work.

08:25 in silos and they never work if you just think about them as gross hacks or tiny shiny objects that it's just enough to buy whatever AI tool and send personalized emails at scale. If you skip all other stages and you think that there is a tiny hack that will help you to land enterprise deals then obviously everything would be bad including account-based marketing.

08:49 So that's why we always say that is full final marketing because this is how you go from awareness to the continued revenue growth. There was a lot to unpack in that already, but I think 100 % on the money. That's probably why ABM fails in a lot of companies, right? Because they come in thinking it's a silver bullet. Do this one thing and we're going to be successful, but they don't actually look at all the surrounding elements and how it's all connected and intertwined together.

09:19 Yeah, that's true. So let's go back to the basics. Just we've said, ABM a lot. You called it account based motion a second ago, which I liked. think that's a nice explanation, but how do we define ABM in today's age? Yeah, think Andrei gave a lot of clues already. And maybe by summarizing some of those important aspects, we can get to a definition. Although there is a lot of discussion on LinkedIn about what ABM is and what ABM isn't.

09:46 And I find that pretty useless to be honest. It's all about, okay, how do you actually generate pipeline? How do you use ABM, which we will dive into later. When it comes to ABM, what we heard from Andre is that we need to generate awareness and generate demand with those target accounts. So ABM is part of a bigger picture. is ideally embedded within.

10:16 the full file marketing. And usually what happens is you're generating demand with target accounts and hopefully everything is aligned, right? They are aligned with the way that you are communicating, generating awareness with those accounts. You're aligned on the ICP and the content and messaging are aligned with your ABM, with your aligned with your sales. And when you have accounts that are being starting to engage, as Andrei was mentioning, they might be like,

10:44 multiple visits to your website, visiting events, et cetera. What happens is you will have accounts, you will have buyers that are ready to buy. And they're smart people, they know how to visit your website, book a demo, book a sales call or whatever when they're ready. But a lot of them might not yet be ready or maybe they are in the buying process, they got a critical question from a colleague they're not able to answer.

11:11 There's like more and more people involved, the complex buying committees that are growing from year to year, more scrutiny in the way that the companies are buying. And the larger, we know that of course, the larger the accounts are, the larger the customers, the more people are involved. And this is actually where ABM really starts playing where you say, Hey, you know what we know, and we can talk about it later. We know where we can win.

11:41 What are our best deals? What are our best accounts? Our ideal customer profile, ideal accounts look like. And we want to now move from that engagement, that interest, that demand that is being generated to building an actual sales quality opportunity and developing that into later into a deal, et cetera. And this is where you start first.

12:09 identifying which of those accounts have high revenue potential, fit your ICP, which we can talk about later, and start engaging multiple members of the buying committee, creating awareness there, starting conversations, and basically moving them through the pipeline, accelerating your pipeline, increasing the loan rates with the target account. So when you ask what ABM is, it is account-based motion, which means that

12:36 You're focused on a very specific high value target accounts that you know you have reason to win from the past. You know that you have some sort of competitive advantage with this kind of companies. It is the motion because it's not just marketing. is only can work if we work together with sales having joint playbooks where you know, okay.

13:00 Exactly for the different stages of the buyer journey, what are the kind of playbooks that marketing should run on these accounts? What are the playbooks that sales should run and be in constant communication? Like we usually have these pipeline review meetings every week where we start planning these accounts and what will marketing do? What will sales do? So I think these are probably like, where does it sit in the buyer journey? You're already like picking up and trying to accelerate that.

13:29 demand capture and that pipeline development, usually with ABM. And later on, you can use ABM, obviously not just for net new accounts and developing new pipeline, but also developing expansion and expanding into existing accounts. Second, it is a motion, joint motion between marketing and sales. And in the case of expansion, also customer success. And it is not just a collaboration, but it is using

13:58 multi-ditch playbooks from the different members of the GTN team or your ABN team, if you have that to accelerate a pipeline, generate deals and bring them. Yeah. And I think the fact that you're switching it to motion is so valuable because in my experience, that's where it has always fallen down is when it's been seen as a marketing activity only, the approach to how you're working with accounts hasn't changed with sales. It's still just like...

14:27 marketing and chucking stuff over the fence. We're doing all the normal stuff and sales are following their normal process. yeah, switching to motion, definitely think helps people understand that it's not just a marketing activity. So a lot of companies struggle with pipeline generation. I think a lot of them are spreading themselves too thin. They're trying to do, as Andre mentioned, all these new tactics are out there. They're trying to do a lot of different things.

14:52 So how do you go about identifying and prioritizing the right accounts and just making sure you're targeting them with a account-based motion? I would say this is the first step in developing an ABM program, which must be executed jointly by marketing and sales involving marketing and sales leadership. That's the key to avoid any

15:18 unnecessary arguments in future why we are selecting this accounts or why we are not targeting this market. So this is a joint execution and this is the first step towards marketing and sales alignment. So there are a couple of things here, right? First of all, you always need to come to a narrow scope and strict account qualification criteria. We all know ideal customer profile exercise, but the problem is that a lot of companies...

15:47 treat ICP in a very bad way. So companies talk about persona, motives of different buyer, of different buying committee members, et cetera. But as we spoke in every account, and especially if you are selling to enterprises, this picture will be completely different. Now, what is essential is to understand what approach do you want to take. Do you want to take vertical approach or do you want to take a use case approach? This is the most common mistake.

16:16 A lot of companies that have multiple use cases, right? Like even let's maybe make it practical with Dealfront. You have intent data, you have buying signals and you have database, right? Literally these are three different use cases. We can always say, oh, but we just enable sales processes. But in reality, these are three different use cases, right? Now, if you select a vertical and you say, we want to sell to...

16:45 I know, let's say oil and gas companies to the sales teams. The truth is that you have zero clue. You have no idea what exact use case or what exact need every account in a selected vertical might have. So what's the problem here? Your messaging should be generic, including all of these use cases. But when it's generic, it's not appealing to anybody. The same.

17:15 with the content, right? You need to talk about this multiple use cases, which again makes your like the bigger part of your content as outreach completely irrelevant, right? Or outreach would be instead of precisely specific, could be, it would be something like a lot of software development companies. If you need database, intern data, whatever, account enrichment, buying signals, we provide all of this. Let me know if you are willing to chat with me.

17:44 for minutes next week, right? Something like this. So this is the problem. But only when you have a very niche product, right? So it's simply, there is one use case for one vertical, then you can take vertical approach. Let's say if you have multiple use cases, then I would always take the use case approach. You start with use case and then instead of going like into, let's say blind discussion.

18:11 how we're going to select accounts or even worse, what's happening here, sales say, hey, hold on, we have already done territory planning. We would love to see this logos. We know like Apple, Microsoft or whatever, Coca-Cola, you get a list of Fortune 500. You guys mentioned it's ABM, account-based. So we're expecting deals coming from this accounts, right? So there are a couple of things here.

18:38 First of all, who said that these are the best accounts that you need to target next? tells you that there is an actual need, right? That they are going to buy your product. So where I'm heading with this, the first thing that you need to do is to understand your best clients for this use case and understand their buyer journey. What happened or what triggered their buying process? What were the inconveniences happening? What motivated them to challenge existing status quo and change, right?

19:07 switch if it's switching from another platform, what motivated them to switch from another platform. That's the first thing. You analyze your best deals because with account-based, you want to replicate the deals with your best clients. So I know that lots of products talk now about creating look-alike audience, but this look-alike audience development is ridiculous because it just takes the thermographics criteria and says, now you can, like, you, for example, I don't know, you generate a deal with Microsoft.

19:35 but you could sell to one tiny department, right? But obviously in your CRM, you have Microsoft. Now you can sell to Apple, can sell to Adobe, you can sell to Oracle, et cetera. We built a look-alike list for you, fantastic. What you need to understand is that you dive deeper and then you understand what business units you were selling to. Who exactly was involved? Because bear with me, we speak to lots of marketing and sales teams. They always say we're not our buyer persona, but to give you a precise example.

20:04 We were working this company and one of the target accounts was Stripe. So the guy said, we are selling to like senior IT leaders. Can you share with me exact people? Like VP of IT, director of IT, CIO, et cetera. Can you show me the process, how you exactly identify the buying committee members? Sales development rep takes over the screen, open sales navigator, open Stripe, and then basically...

20:31 select seniority types of your buyer persona titles. And we end up with 6,000 potential buyers. And then I basically look, oh, this guy probably is a good fit and this guy is probably a good fit. So I would send some messages to them. And this is, I'm not kidding. This is the reality of enterprise development. People, so they use generic buyer persona and then they just rely on gut feeling and on luck in this approach. So where I'm heading with this, you need to do...

21:01 a really good deal analysis, understanding business units, understanding exact titles, analyzing the titles of these customers, looking for maybe some patterns. they are mentioning, there's like quite often with what we look at specific keywords they might have in their titles and their profiles that give you a clue, right, to how to narrow down your scope and identify the right buyers.

21:25 So this is the next key. And lastly, based on this, you define, obviously you include pharmacographic criteria and markets that you want to target, that's for sure. Also the verticals, the priority verticals you want to focus on. But also next, you need to define account qualification criteria. What tells you that account that you are going to select is likely to have a need in your product, right? What information, what signals might tell you this information? That's the first thing. And the second one is,

21:55 disqualification criteria, what, even if account fits this criteria, what tells you that this account is not going to buy from you? So this could be certain regions. If the account is located in certain regions. In our case, we always look at the size of marketing and sales team. If they have, let's say less than...

22:17 The marketing team is just two people. We know that ABM is not going to fly. In some rare cases that could be different, but let's say as a rule of thumb, it's not going to fly. And so the team is understaffed and under-resourced, right? This should be approved by both marketing and sales leaders. When you have this criteria, then you will never ever make account selection based on your gut feeling. Oh, I think...

22:43 nice account to have or this is a nice logo to prospect. So that's the first step. And the second one is like you said, account prioritization. Simple exercise and simple question that we always share. What characteristics this account should match? And then people start talking about awareness, about buying signals, buying intent, whatever. The key here is not to leave it like this. You need to make it tangible. Okay, what signals should we track?

23:13 how many of these signals? So for example, if they say they raised money, fine. But does it mean that they're going to buy from you? What tells you that if they raised money, they're going to buy your product? Nothing. So you need to make a list of tangible criteria and the same especially for print awareness. So what exact behavior tells you that they are aware of you? If they opened your automated sales email, is it print awareness or no?

23:42 If they visited your SEO optimized blog post and moved away in 30 seconds, is it a print awareness or no? So this is the key, right? You need to make tangible criteria, right? That should be, let's say, five repeated visits.

24:00 in the last 30 days from let's say, please to buyers and we are connected to one of them on LinkedIn. For example, we know them, they signed up for our webinar recently or for our newsletters. So you basically the key here to make they are aware of us criteria tangible. And again, you apply them without any ambiguity. can say, okay, this is an account that is aware of us. And the same for when this account because

24:29 The next question is, like when an account deserves one-to-one approach? The simple answer for us, this is what we call opportunity likelihood assessment. The simple answer is, first of all, there is a decent revenue potential, which means that in account-based marketing, we will spot, never recommend to do like programmatic ABM and focus on tier three accounts, accounts with the lower revenue potential.

24:57 I firmly believe that they should come out of your kind of standard demand gen programs, which demand generation in nutshell is your one to many ABM. It should be, because if it is not, then you have a problem in your organization. Then, or it should come from light sales outbound. That's the key. You don't invest your resources into low ticket deals. Next. So this this are tier one, tier two accounts. Next.

25:24 They are aware of you. You need to make a list of these criteria. You have relationship with any of the buying committee members and you define what relationship means for your organization. And lastly, there is a clear product need evidence. That's the key. That is, you have enough information that proves you that they have a challenge and you can solve this challenge with your product. That's the key. So in natural all accounts that fit your ICP but they don't know...

25:54 who you are and what you do, is it realistically possible to sell to them? As we spoke, in most cases, no. So the first thing you need to do is to create awareness among these accounts. When they hit your engagement criteria, or they become aware of you, then what you are supposed to do at this point? You need to invest your time in in-depth account research, buying committee mapping, and engagement.

26:18 Why? Because you need to validate if there is anything that tells you that they might need your product. Because again, like with POPE, you can have the best technology in place or the best sales reps, but if there is no reason to change, they're not going to change. The last one is where you basically start developing account plans. How are you going to create sales opportunity with these accounts? Engaged accounts, relationship is there, product need evidence is there.

26:47 And this is where one-on-one ABM starts, right? You go full in with the personalization, personalizing it on account level and each buying committee member level to create sales opportunity with this account. So this is how we go from qualification to prioritization and avoid any kind of wish list. I've got to be honest. I've been in marketing a long time. I've done a lot of account selection.

27:14 And I've gone through it in the detail that you have, but I've never done the criteria for the awareness. I've never agreed on that. I've never agreed on it with sales. I've never shown it to them. I've always gone at a point, I will tell you this person's ready and you're going to go and work on it. But I've never had that alignment at that stage. I don't think that your situation is unique to be honest. All right. So we spent a lot of time defining the accounts. know who we're going after.

27:41 Now we've got to start engaging with them and start building up this pipeline. So what's the core components of building a pipeline? So if you look at what we're Andrej kind of stopped his story, we have our criteria. We can look at the different sources of accounts. We pick them, we prioritize them. And Andrej started to explain that we actually, the way that we prioritize them is based on things like...

28:11 If they are aware of our brand or not versus do we have a relationship? Yes or no. Do we have any insight into their actual needs? What are their priorities and challenges? Do they have a need for a product like ours? And are they showing any buying signals? And the reason why we're doing this prioritization is not only to know, we want to prioritize the accounts and go from the top of the list.

28:39 But also you need to align the activity, your engagement. The first question is, like, where are they in the buyer journey? And that's a very difficult question. And to be very honest, you can't really know. Like, you can't really know. You don't have the crystal ball that tells you they're exactly on their step 42 or whatever. Like, internally.

29:05 So the practical framework that we use there is basically segmenting the accounts into three lists. The first one is ICP. We them cluster ICP because any program is aligned with the use case as Andre explained so that we can align our quantum messaging with the use case. So we call them cluster ICP. So they belong to a certain cluster. So we qualify them. But there is no awareness.

29:34 We don't know them, they don't know us. These are called accounts, right? There, what is the playbook? What is the engagement there? The main goal is to create the awareness, right? Unfortunately, we started this whole story today by sharing account-based marketing is part of the bigger picture. You have proper brand awareness generation and demand generation and then ABM, et cetera. But the reality in a lot of cases is that you don't really have that.

30:02 You have a specific segment of the market where you know you can win and et cetera, but we don't. The reality is if you list all those accounts with a lot of them, we don't have awareness. So we need to generate that awareness. And there the activities will be again, a mix of skills and marketing, a little bit more heavier on the marketing where you will be mainly leveraging content that is aligned with that use case.

30:32 So you're selling to companies in fast moving consumer goods manufacturing or brands like that. And you know that you can really win when there is a merger acquisition and you can solve a number of problems there, right? Whatever the product. Let's say you're selling some HR product, right? And then you know that you need to integrate these companies need to integrate.

30:59 the people from the different, from acquired company, what not. Doesn't really matter what the product there is. Now we know this is the use case, this is the account cluster. Now we can create content that is going to be relevant to those accounts. We are going to talk about what happens when the consumer product companies go through the merger and acquisition and we can talk about the people problems and solutions, cetera, et cetera. So you start to create awareness.

31:27 related to the challenges that they are likely to have because they went through that. So that's how you selected them. Now, very important also in EBM is that as you're creating the awareness, there is also a role for sales. And especially like these days when there is so much out there with AI and automation and there's so much noise, not only with messaging and that used to be the case that we only had too many messages in our inboxes.

31:56 But now there's also a lot of BS content that is being generated. For you to these days, to really get your content and your messaging to those target buyers in those high value accounts, which ABM is all about, you need to collaborate with sales already there. They need to be personally out there connecting with those target accounts, whether that's on target communities, whether that's like in physical life or in virtual world, let's say.

32:25 Whether that's on social, probably a combination of these different channels where your buyers are, right? they can help. So like very simple example is if you're creating content about those challenges, we can share them on, let's say LinkedIn profiles of our salespeople who are also connecting with those buyers from those target accounts. So you're helping position those sales reps.

32:52 as a trusted advisor, an expert in your industry, et cetera, creating awareness in a meaningful way. So going back to the framework, we have the first list. These are unaware. These are accounts that don't know you, you don't know them. Your goal is to generate awareness, mainly with content, social engagement, community engagement. You may run some field events, webinars, and things like that. Next step.

33:18 is you have created awareness or you have accounts that have some awareness and both you and Andre discussed like this specific criteria, what does that mean? They hit a certain threshold and we can consider them to be aware. So they start to know us and what we are about and what kind of solutions or what kind of challenges we can help them with and what our solution might be about. But now we might not know them as well as we want.

33:48 Because the reality is there is, unless it's an inbound opportunity for somebody, they have awesome demand generation, they're reaching out to you, right? But ABM is also helping you to create opportunities with those that are not coming inbound. So let's assume they didn't come inbound. There is only one way for a salesperson to book a meeting with somebody. And that is they actually have a two-way conversation with them before.

34:18 It's a simple thing, right? If they're not coming to me inbound, I need to be able to have enough of a relationship so that we have a two-way conversation that's not about the weather, right? That's about relevant stuff, what's going on in my business, cetera. So your goal becomes here is twofold. Your goal becomes, I need to start developing those relationships. I need to turn that awareness and engagement into those conversations

34:46 so that I can do, like I said, two things. First, build those relationships, establish these two-way conversations, but also get insight, get the insight about those accounts because now we want to get to know them. Now we want to understand what are the real challenges that they have because without that, it is difficult for me to create proper account-based marketing and account-based marketing is one-on-one marketing in the end. There'll be one-on-one marketing.

35:15 where I'm going to say for the problems that you have, this is how we can help. So it's like very specific to the account. So you need to do proactive relationship building. You need to do what we call progressive profiling. You need to do a lot of account research as well. You need to dive deeper to understand are there any signals or you have identified initially what are the typical signals you want to dive.

35:41 deeper, okay, have them, we mentioned like acquisitions, maybe new executives being hired like a quarter or two ago. Maybe there is every product will have specific signals. For example, if I'm selling deal front and I know I can sell it to, let's say, ABM teams, maybe them hiring an ABM person and giving them maybe a quarter settling would be.

36:10 good signal for me to track, I don't know. Marketing and sales really start working here together. Like you can leverage a lot of marketing touch points to build those conversations and get those insights. Somebody is registering for an event, for an account based event or a webinar, is a salesperson can connect to them. I can say, Hey, I saw that you registered. Thanks a lot. The speaker asked me to collect the questions that people have. Would you mind sharing what is the top challenge that you're trying to learn more about?

36:38 Yeah. And plays two roles. It helps me connect with that person. It's another touch point, non-salesy touch point, but also maybe they will share a challenge. I will get this insider information about that account that is not visible from the outside, from my basic desk research or AI research, if that's what you're using. And I'm using...

37:05 So I'm here working closely between marketing and sales. mentioned whether that's like them registering for an event or maybe engaging with your content. There are different playbooks that you can use. And then finally, what do you do for those accounts that are now know you and you know them. So these are the, call them the first list, the cold accounts, no awareness. They just feed the ICP. call them cluster ICP. The second one that I was talking about, we call them future pipeline.

37:36 There's interest, we are not really sure what the priority and the need is. And the third list, are the Hot Shirt and the Warmer accounts. We call them active focus because this is where as a salesperson you can spend the most time. They're aware of your brand. There were multiple engagements. You have some two way conversation there going on. There's enough of a relationship there and you have some insights. have some signals, right? They've been...

38:04 Maybe they shared an important top priority challenge with you, which aligns with what you can help them with. Maybe they're also engaging and maybe you'll pick inside of your deal front instance, there's multiple or increased visits to your high intent pages, such as your product or pricing or case studies. Now we change again, we adapt, if you remember what I said at the beginning, we adapt the activities to the buyer journey stage, right?

38:31 by using these practical signals, right? So now they're aware of us, we also know what their challenges are, right? And now we can create more personalized account journeys, right? We can create personalized proposals or solutions, whatever you like to call them, where we can, for the challenge that we know that they have, we can outline how they can solve the challenge and how we might be able to.

38:56 hope we can share that one-on-one, can share that as a follow-up maybe to that webinar where they joined. We can offer them a strategy session with one of our subject matter experts or maybe with an AI if they're frequently AI's, me. Stories about AI, start calling it even for account executives, AI. We want to talk about AI. Anyhow.

39:24 Again, this is where you're starting to do much more one-on-one and your goal becomes not just relationships, your goal actually becomes let's create that qualified pipeline, right? And this is how you would measure it there as well. There's a, again, you've got so much knowledge and I'm not saying you make it sound complicated, but from a marketer who maybe hasn't run ABM or they've tried a little bit of targeted marketing, but they've never run anything like this, what could they do?

39:54 just to get started. Like how could they, you've obviously seen people make a lot of mistakes in the past. You've seen people try and fail. So how could they get started? What advice would you give to them? Yeah, absolutely. So the first thing is not thinking from the scaling perspective. Start with small scope pilot program with just one sales rep. The first mistake is thinking, okay, we need to launch a massive campaign to demonstrate the results because the more accounts you involve,

40:23 the less personalized your campaign will be, the less engaged would be. And if you involve a bigger team, the less engaged the team will be and it will fail for sure. So don't leave even a small chance to make it work. Next, when you select sales rep, this shouldn't be the most knowledgeable sales rep. On contrary, I would recommend to look for the most marketing friendly sales rep.

40:50 a person who is willing to talk to you, who is willing to collaborate and the person who is open to the new approach. That's the key. In nutshell, all you need to, the three core roles that you need to have is you as an ABM marketer that would maintain the program, the sales rep and the content marketer.

41:10 Or if you have skills and for example, you can also create that content for sales. Depending on your team setup, you can involve partially rev ops to track the signals, to track account awareness criteria, et cetera. If you don't have this resource, you can do it on your own. But the key point is, right, next you have the sling team, then you do as we spoke, account qualification, then account prioritization.

41:36 And then basically there are four pillars left in your playbook that you need to execute. And you need to be realistic. So next one is account research. Again, you need to create an internal benchmark. What a good account research looks like. You need to create a unified process, go through one account, and then see.

41:55 which information marketing can gain, which information sales should gain, what information could be collected via desk research, which information should be collected only via one-on-one interactions with these accounts. then basically three key pillars left. How you're going to warm up these accounts. And again, don't think about display ads and cold out bounds.

42:18 This is this is just a fancy in this case Obviously you select accounts and because if you want you can call it account based marketing or account based motion The problem is that I would disappoint maybe everybody but it will suck it will it simply won't work So you just waste time define how exactly you go into connect and engage the buying committee members This is what I mean by account warm-up next

42:43 When they move to this active focus stage, right? So you have, I didn't, you build the relationship you have identified. What exactly are you going to do to create sales opportunities? Because quite often for buyers, they might see the value and you understand their problems, but they still can't connect the dots to their situation. Yeah. For example, I know deal front or I know full funnel, but I don't see how that will help with my exact situation. Together, just establish this bridge activities, how you can.

43:13 challenge the status quo and explain how you can help. And it could be from the, in our case, it's different because we are service-based company, but for the product base, it could be snapshot of data, product overviews, sandbox accounts, even maybe sometimes it just an audit of their processes and explaining, for example, how to use intent data, what are the best practices. So for example, using the guide that we have co-created together, right? And showing some examples how that might look like.

43:42 So this is the key, right? So then the dots are connected for them and they would be ready to try the product. That's the key. And last, of that last pillar of that playbook is how you go into report on it. You need to create clear metrics. Obviously, everybody wants to see revenue. Everybody wants to see pipeline. And then for this input, you need to define clear leading indicators, the actions that you can actually execute, right?

44:11 And this is what you report on. make, and again, you present this before launching the program to the leadership. You set up the expectations. You present the list. When you went through this account qualification and prioritization, let's say you will have 100 accounts in cluster ICP. So those vendor unaware accounts.

44:31 then you have maybe 60 in future pipeline, those that hit your kind of awareness criteria and maybe two in or one inactive or maybe even zero inactive focus list, right? In most cases, it would be zero from my experience. And then your sale cycle length, just because it's called account based, it's not a magic wand that could drastically shorten that sale cycle. So presenting this numbers and knowing your sale cycle length,

44:59 The next logical question would be to your leadership. If you are looking at this numbers and our sales cycle length, what do you think is realistically to expect out of it? So I would instead of making forecasts out of thin air, sometimes we get this question, like what are the benchmarks? we saw you guys generated, for example, one of our best case studies is with company that we generated 2.7 million pipeline in six months.

45:26 And closed one with enterprise. is the company which I mentioned about Stripe example. And the closed one was close to 1.5 million in six months. The sell cycle is, I forgot, maybe one year, maybe more. But what makes it ridiculous that, and everybody is, oh, we want these results. How can we achieve this?

45:48 But you don't know what was happening behind the scenes. We had completely disengaged sales team and marketing agreed to execute on their own all sales activities. So it's just a huge credit to the marketing team that made it happen without any help of sales. A lot of companies, sometimes they come to us with just simple qualification. And then we realized that all of the accounts are sitting in this cluster ICP completely unaware, like literally called accounts.

46:17 Sales cycle length is two years and they ask, so what would be our forecast? So how many sales opportunities can we expect so we can report to leadership? If somebody will make a forecast based on these numbers, this would be the best fairy tale tailor in the world, I would say. But in reality, you need to take a sober look at these numbers together with leadership, accept the reality and ask each other, okay.

46:45 With these numbers, what is realistically to expect, for example, during the pilot? What would be good indicator that this program was a success?

46:55 And I would say that in this scenario, sales opportunities would be an added value. On contrary, when you have an existing motion, pilot program becomes your internal benchmark, right? And it already creates for your future pipeline. So obviously, next program, you should, again, depending on the sales cycle, but you should expect real sales opportunities coming with assigned pipeline value or even seeing revenue coming from it. This is how you need to think about it. And you need to establish these expectations before the program

47:24 to avoid any surprises in the middle. Okay, guys, you are doing this for one month, but we are not seeing revenue. So we are probably going to shut it down. Making sure everyone's aligned in the beginning. think definitely I've made that mistake in the past. know many have. Look, we've reached the top of the hour. Really appreciate you guys joining, coming and chatting with us. Vlad, Andre, where can people find you if they want to keep the learning going? Obviously, for funnel.io, the name of the company.

47:53 We post a lot on LinkedIn. also do these chats. We are going to make a break during the summer, but we do them live. So if you want to join us for the discussion, I guess as of end of August, beginning of September, you can also join our full funnel lives. But meanwhile, meet us on LinkedIn, reach out to us if you have any questions and I'm sure we'll do another one with you guys. Thank you very much guys. I really appreciate it. Thanks.