Driving Pipeline using an Account-Based Experience Strategy with Jon Russo

00:03 Welcome to Marketing for Marketers, the series where we interview some of the brightest minds in marketing to unlock the strategies that actually generate pipeline. So my guest today is John Russo, founder of B2B Fusion and a widely recognized voice in marketing operations, ABM strategy and revenue alignment. With over 20 years of experience running both CMO and CRO roles, John brings a unique cross-functional view of what it takes to drive performance across sales and marketing.

00:31 Especially when it comes to account based experience, AKA ABX. So John, welcome. I'm very, very excited to dive into ABX. It's not a topic that we've had on the series before, not a topic I've discussed in any great depth before. So I think it's going to be a really, really interesting conversation, but first and foremost, how are you? Jamie, I'm doing great. And thank you for having me. I'm really excited to dig in and chop it up on all things ABX globally too. So I know we're in different.

01:00 different geographic locations, so very excited to compare and contrast notes. despite the geographic locations, you just mentioned that you came across the Cardiff a couple of years ago for a Beyonce concert, not necessarily yourself at Beyonce concert. Not that I would hold that against you. But yeah, so whereabouts you based yourself? Right now I'm currently in Nashville, Tennessee.

01:25 But yeah, the Beyonce concert was for my twin daughters. we just made a kind of a long family vacation and really got to enjoy all of UK, including Cardiff and Wales. And it was beautiful, beautiful part of country that you're in. is. I've not made it over to Nashville, but it's one of the bucket list locations. think as Brits, Nashville is obviously synonymous with music and it's

01:49 probably probably more famous than it ever has been because of the surging country a country music popularity Especially here in the UK. It's big here in the UK interesting interesting interesting. Well, I'm glad you're still talking to us I know it's been you know, the American name is not always held well outside of the US So thanks for even inviting me and including me in your conversation. Oh, it's much the same for the the UK name and leadership. So we're much in the same boat. But anyway, we

02:18 enough politics or, uh, you know, music and travel, ABX. So what exactly is ABX and I guess how does it differ from ABM? Yeah, that's a great, uh, foundational question, Jamie. And in my experience, if you go back, uh, several years in the U S we're very technology centric and a few of the vendors kind of labeled the industry as ABM, even though sales.

02:47 had been taking an account-based approach forever in their kind of their outreach. Some of the marketing vendors had platforms that started off that were marketing oriented. So companies started with the ABM kind of initial starting point, but what we soon realized was it was very comprehensive. It wasn't a marketing initiative. involves sales. It involved.

03:11 customer experience, customer success, almost the whole umbrella. So ABM in some cases became account-based experience. So it's more encompassing and that becomes more important, Jamie, especially for a certain class of companies that are focused on upsell or resell or cross-sell initiatives that that X comes more into play. The last thing I'll just mention as part of this is at day's end, really doesn't matter what.

03:38 You call it in our experience, like we are a consultancy in account-based, but oftentimes in a prior life, I was a practitioner for 10 years as a CMO and 10 years as an operator. And what I've learned in that experience was you really have to mirror the language that's being used internally. So some companies call it go-to-market strategy or a go-to-market approach. Others call it account-based approach. Others call it an account-based experience.

04:07 It really doesn't matter as long as you're focused on some key accounts, you're focused on that buyer's group and you're focused on their personas. The underlying theme is kind of the focus piece. So giving you a long winded answer to your first question about kind of what the difference is between ABM and ABX. Okay. So if you were to give a, I don't know, like a very brief example of what ABS would look like in reality. So a company running an ABX program.

04:35 If you were to give like a food packaging description synopsis of that, what would it be? Yeah. I would say that, uh, an ABX initiatives got to involve your marketing, your SDR or BDR, your sales team, and potentially your CS team. Those are the key ingredients. And your outreach is toward an ideal customer profile. That's very focused that everybody agrees is the target. So those.

05:04 four or five organizations are focused on that one area, that one account type or approach such that everybody's kind of working together to pull that account through the pipeline. it's because it obviously is a marketer myself, think ABM primarily, just think LinkedIn campaigns, right? You're running a very specific personalized specific message campaign on LinkedIn, but we're talking more here about a personalized.

05:31 sort cohesive value driven experience across the entire customer journey. from marketing through to sales through to CS and beyond. I think you're a hundred percent right. So for example, even in your core business, being able to track somebody when they first come to the website and see what's going on, what information they're consuming and then tailoring that content.

05:53 from an SDR or sales perspective toward their interests. That is absolutely all part of account based. you're right, LinkedIn is, that could be one ingredient in the ABX cake, but yeah, it's that holistic experience across all those organizations pulling that one account into pipeline. So you, you, you touched on the fact that there's sometimes some confusion between ABX, ABM, arguably they're very, very similar, one in the same. So what would you say is the biggest mistake companies tend to make when

06:23 trying to do ABX or what they think is ABX. Yeah. And I could base that off our probably seven or eight years of account-based consultancy arrangements that we've done. Long story, but we've built a lot of that muscle through one of the vendors. We were one of their implementation partners early on. So we got to see literally hundreds of experiences of people trying to adopt in the U.S. and even outside the U.S. an account-based approach.

06:51 I'd say there were five areas, Jamie, that we consistently saw that were issues. The first being in, you know, in today's environment, unrealistic timeline expectations where everybody wants everything yesterday, more acutely felt in the U S but a global phenomenon. The second thing, which you probably hear a lot of your guests talking about, it's just that lack of alignment between sales and marketing. That often kind of manifests where sales gives marketing a set of accounts and says,

07:20 go after these accounts and they're typically giving kind of the gristle or the most challenging part of the account side. The third area which relates to Dealfront is data quality. If your data quality is poor, your conversion is going to be poor, your investments in your technology are going to be poor, your productivity will be poor, your AI that everybody's talking about will be poor. That surprisingly...

07:47 And I'd say that's increasingly becoming an issue because of data has been around for a while. The fourth thing is just definitions of what account based is and making sure everybody's got kind of a common vernacular kind of circling to your first question. And then the last category that we see as a mistake is how sales is involved, you know, involving them in the right way or in the right fashion. So those would be the five common mistakes that we typically see.

08:11 Now, the one that jumped stuck out to me there was the first, the unrealistic timelines one, because I think a lot of initiatives, projects, campaigns, when you pitch them internally, I tend to find it's relatively easy to get buy-in for things because you tend to present a rose-tinted view or at least the perception, the misconception is it's all great. Now, when you say unrealistic timelines, what are we talking in terms of a realistic timeline?

08:39 Yeah, it's a good question. And I'll say the way you just described it, first I'll just say six to 12 months on average is when you can kind of really feel the impact of an account base. How you just described the situation is very common where people talk about the philosophical kind of aligning philosophically, but operationally they don't get that alignment. because operations is where the devil meets the detail of philosophical. Yeah, everybody can kind of agree to it and go do it, but

09:09 If you're not aligning on the timeline upfront of what are the leading indicators up to that six to 12 months, you're setting yourself up for failure. And some of that too is a function of how big is the ACV you're going after, how complex is the deal? Is it what flavor of ABM one to one, one to few, one to many are you going after? But on average, you're going to start feeling performance increases in a six to 12 month time frame. Okay. And then so we've touched on, um,

09:38 five biggest problems, is good. So can we do the opposite? Let's do what are the must haves for getting it right, or at least some of the things that you find or spot in campaigns that are performing well. Maybe five, you can give five, that's nice and balanced then. think, you know, on the flip side, and we began talking about this, about the philosophical and the operational alignment is you really have to get executive level alignment on the philosophy.

10:09 Meaning somebody at a senior level, a head of sales, a head of marketing, potentially depending on size of company, a CEO or a CFO, this has to be a top three initiative. And the way it becomes a top three initiative is.

10:24 The revenue opportunity, the cost of acquisition is attractive enough and the long-term revenue plays is very attractive. So getting executive alignment is probably the first solution. The second thing, and we talked briefly about that data piece, data can be done in parallel. And when I say data, it can be contact level data. can be account hierarchy, hierarchical data. It can be unstructured data that gets appended to structured data.

10:52 It's really taking care of your first party data though, to the best of your ability. And if you, if you invest well in that, that will pay off in terms of better productivity and a quicker close opportunity. then, uh, you know, continuing on kind of solutions, we always advocate to pilot first. So, you know, there, there can be a couple of different schools of thought here. One could be your brand new to ABM and some, some organizations are, others have done it.

11:20 And have had a failed experience. And we typically get called, I'd say about six or seven out of 10 times in the second category and a little less because it's a little bit more mature, but I'd say two out of three times we get called up on, we're trying to do ABM. want to go faster. Can you, can you help us? But even if you have to relaunch the pilot, there's a number of nuances there that you really have to dig into in terms of.

11:47 Setting KPIs, agreeing to KPIs, running through use cases for your SDRs and training them. So by starting with a small pilot, you're not boiling the ocean and you have the opportunity to kind of iterate and pivot quickly. Whereas, you know, going back to a common mistake is we sometimes see people trying to do everything and boil the ocean. Oh, I got this new platform I'd there for.

12:10 The entire organization has to train on it. Not necessarily the case. You want to want to kind of learn in a small Petri dish setting before you roll it out to the bigger organization. So the last thing I'll just end with is just a whole lot of focus on the process. So getting sales marketing, potentially CX in a room BDRs and talking about the process of, well, how is this account going through the pipeline? What's the treatment? Who does what to whom and the enablement of.

12:38 your SDR and your sales team. So it's more than just buying technology, which in the U S we've got a big issue. Typically we just buy the technology and think we're done. The technology shines a spotlight on your process and enablement that if you don't have either of those two firmly in place, or if you have bad data, the technology is going to shine a bright spot spotlight on all that. So those are kind of more on the solution side of things. You touched on some.

13:05 I mean, I would call them sort of positive signals, leading indicators, I think you called them. how do you, you spoke about pilots there running a small sample, proving it, proving it out before you scale. How do you measure whether ABX is working? So perhaps give some of the most important metrics from your point of view. good question about metrics. We've got a whole dashboard and we hold up our dashboard.

13:29 which is a process. It's not a product, but we kind of show our dashboarding of ABX as kind of a North Star of what good looks like. And it's a process to get there, but it gives people a direction of here's where we eventually want to head. Where we've seen valuable metrics is looking at a number of different factors and there's a number of different variables. So it's hard to really squarely answer everybody's situation, but on broad brushstrokes.

13:59 You're looking for your tiering of accounts. So if you have, perhaps there's three different tiers of accounts. A tier one is your most strategic, tier two, a little less strategic and tier three, even less strategic. So you should know kind of where your focus area is. You should know the engagement in each of those tiers. So you should be able to articulate very easily. What does the engagement look like in those accounts? Is it sales engaged? Is it marketing engaged? Is it.

14:29 neither engaged. You should be able to show that in a dashboard. Those are kind of early leading indicators. But the way we kind of view the world in dashboard is we look at it in terms of measuring all the inputs into a funnel and tracking both ABM as well as non-ABM for volume and velocity metrics. And why this is important Jamie is you want to make sure that

14:58 the investment of time and energy in, in ABM is actually paying off. So if you can kind of compare and contrast and you have a dashboard that does that, your sales team then spends their valuable time focused on what's higher probability of closing. Now, ideally it's ABM because it's more focused, it's in your target market, you've got product market fit. So your volume and velocity should be the fastest through that channel.

15:25 The last thing I'll mention as part of our dashboard and going back to that funnel is we're looking at how each stage of that funnel progresses from very, very top of the funnel to perhaps there's an intent qualified account that comes through. Perhaps there's a lead. We're chasing all those inputs into the funnel and bringing it all the way down through the funnel and looking at every stage of conversion.

15:52 And why those metrics are important is you can then take a backward look to see what's working or what's not working and make key improvements process wise. All that should be ideally in one dashboard. We do it in Salesforce because it's a common common platform that a lot of enterprises use, but having that one dashboard gives you that ability in those metrics to kind of see what's working and what's not working. mentioned the

16:18 all inputs into the funnel or as many inputs as possible. Can you give us a few examples? Yeah, great, great question. So it really depends on your go-to-market strategy and what we've noticed like in Europe, for example, typically your companies in Europe are more partner based than that of the U S so partners could be a key ingredient to also measure throughout the funnel. That would be one ingredient. You might have a lead based approach and

16:48 A lead meaning somebody could come onto your website, which again, you deal front has the ability to kind of see, they may say, Hey, we want to demo now or contact us. Now there could be some validation that goes on, but that input could be a lead based inbound and not necessarily an account yet. It could be just one person that's coming through. Some of the platforms as you're aware of can identify accounts as ready, quote unquote ready.

17:17 Now, in our experience, that is an input into the top of the funnel to answer your question, but it still requires some sort of validation from a person, either SDR or BDR, to make sure that whatever the technology is saying, yeah, this is ready, that indeed is ready. know, the technology is a good directional indicator. It's not an absolute in our experience.

17:44 Another element or another input could be the outbound efforts of BDR, SDRs, if they are outbounding or outbounding of AEs. In some cases, AEs are doing a lot more outbounding now than they were three years ago. So being able to track and compare the outbound efforts to inbound efforts or your partner efforts, being able to kind of compare and contrast all of those ingredients all into your funnel.

18:11 And there's other ways you could also measure that too. You could have classifications around leads. So for example, the contact us demo now could be a very high intent lead that comes through very quickly versus say an event. You go to a physical event and you talk to somebody in a trade show booth by categorizing each of these inputs and tracing them through the funnel. It gives your team the intelligence, your BDR, your SDR team, the intelligence.

18:39 to then figure out where do I spend my limited time? Because I know what's the higher probability of conversion is going to be. Perfect. Okay. And you spoke there about where you would invest time based on the success of each of those inputs, but can you share an example of ABX driving revenue? I guess a use case or a case study, you know, what worked, what did you learn? Yeah. Gosh, I can think of a bunch of them.

19:07 One share more than one if it's, if it's difficult to pick one. Yeah, no, I can pick one and I could kind of start with the scenario that we first started with was, and you know, we come in during a chapter in the book. So the chapters could be three or four chapters into the book and then we're coming in on chapter five. So in this case, this company tried to do account based, went through a big acquisition of technology and was like, we can't get any measurement for our ABX initiatives.

19:37 The technology is not good. And then we got parachuted into that situation after they had failed to roll out an account based strategy. Now the way we kind of re-engage that or pivot that and saw the business value, and it was a process. First and foremost, we looked at the data and we realized that the technology that they had and the data didn't match up. So the technology couldn't recognize a lot of their internal data. And because of that disconnect.

20:07 The technology was not super valuable for their specific use case until they improve their data. That was a process to kind of educate people on because a lot of times people think, Hey, I just bought the technology. It's like a light switch. Boom. Why am I not doing account base? Well, your internal data was in such bad shape that it didn't matter what platform you put on it. You're going to have this frustration. So once we started showing how the technology worked relative to the data and saw

20:37 you know, could connect those dots, the light bulbs went on. So that was the first step. The second step was we relaunched the pilot. got very tight KPIs agreement definitions around what success looked like, who we were going after, how we were going after. And we involved the SDR BDR team and leaders right out of the jump, but it was a subset. So we started with a smaller subset from that point. We iterated.

21:03 While we were improving the data because improving the data is a process as you're well aware of Dealfront, you know, you're, never arrive with data. just kind of continually improve it. After that point, we started seeing success and the SDR BDRs were like, Hey, the platform's actually pulling out really good prospect of accounts for us that are indeed in market. And a very small percentage of your target market, call it somewhere between five and 10 % are in market at any one point in time.

21:32 But when they started seeing success, then the word got out. We did some subsequent use case training with the SDR BDRs, and then we started seeing the revenue starting to flow from that one particular segment of the market that they were focused on. That was probably a six to 12 month horizon that I just described in four minutes. But it was a bit of a process and they definitely saw value of the technology that they invested in.

22:02 the SDRs that they were spending money on, know, their outreach efforts, the platform that I was saying the technology right at the jump, but the platform was giving the right information. So that's when they started seeing the business benefit and the tangible benefit of the initiative. Now you, in that particular scenario, you, like you said, I think you said you were parachuted in to essentially fix something that didn't, didn't quite work the first time around. So given that it can take, did take six to 12 months.

22:33 What are some of the tactics or advice you would give to people listening or watching to help bridge that six to 12 months, especially in a situation where they're already skeptical, let's say, or they've already been burned. How can you buy yourself those six to 12 months? We've already spoke about these leading indicators, but it's not always that easy is it in terms of those leading indicators being very consistent month on month pointing in the right direction? it's a thoughtful question.

23:03 Like, let me make sure I'm understanding the question. So you're asking like, how can you ensure that the six to 12 months is going to pay off or how can you buy yourself the six to 12 months in a situation like that where they've already been burned? How do you show, how do you show that it's working? How do you show value in that six to 12 months? Like real world example. Gotcha. More of a, we've been burned and there's some probably time pressure to get the results, you know, quick.

23:33 you know, quick results. Well, a lot of it is situational about that time pressure. But one of the reasons that the companies are in that situation to begin with, and sometimes you have to mirror this back and reflect it is, look, we rushed the first time. And here's the result of rushing. We've got a technology we're not, you know, sure is working. Our data sucks. We're not getting revenue right now. So to rush again may not make a lot of sense.

24:02 What may make more sense though, is to follow that quickly up with a roadmap of here's what to expect between zero and six months of data improvement, process improvement, training of the SDR function on, you know, the different use cases of how ABM is to be kind of worked on. And I probably should spend a moment on that too, where I think a lot of sales teams globally.

24:32 the last 20 years have been trained to follow up on leads. Lead, lead, lead, lead, lead, lead, right? And an account-based approach is like taking a salesperson from a Beat Street cop to a private detective. They have to synthesize and understand what just happened on the website from your core product, or what is this person really interested in and who's the buying committee? Am I talking to all the buying committee? So it's more of synthesizing a lot of data.

25:01 And it's a different unit of currency that the sales teams, and generally speaking, not all, but some are not used to having to deal with. They're just used to like the smile, dial, smile, dial, like, you know, point in the direction. So you have to teach them the different use cases of this is account based. Here is how the account came about. Was it intent driven? Was it driven by activity? You know, how did it, how did it become?

25:30 something that we wanted to focus on. So that training is part of that zero to six months and those use cases are very important. So I would focus on the roadmap, the short-term data strategies, the processes leading up to the results of the six to 12 months when you start seeing the engagement. And on average too, it takes a while in B2B sales to see success in any kind of selling environment.

25:58 This is probably the most challenging in my career that I can remember ever that sales is in. So to expect instant results is very, very difficult on an account-based kind of motion. Now there are things that can speed things up. AI is certainly helpful. You can do a lot of account research and we've been helping some companies with that strategy to speed up their...

26:22 you know, private detective kind of methodologies there. And so there are ways that you can speed aspects of it up, but on balance, still takes a while before you start seeing those results. So the net of it is I'd spend those first six months hunkering down on a roadmap that everybody agrees to and get your fundamentals down to buy you some time to get to that next six months of results. I don't know if it's the same over in the U S but teachers always used to say, make sure

26:51 Okay. Or you, you've got the right answer, but how did you get there? You haven't shown you're working. So is there an element of, like you said, that first six months is you, you show. You show value in the prep, the planning, the workshops, the alignment, all of that sort of side of stuff. So you, you show your value in the work that you're doing before, before the results. yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, it goes back to that roadmap. If you start off with the roadmap here's and you're regularly updating.

27:20 especially to executive stakeholders. Here we are. Here's where we said we were going to be. Here's where we are now. Here's where we're going next. Like you've got to constantly, those first six months are critical communication reset situation there that you have to on an ongoing cadence, like, okay. And that's why I have that roadmap right out of the jump is really, really helpful to kind of have that calibration.

27:46 And so also they don't get lost along the way as well. And unfortunately, it's just a necessary evil because there's so much, a lot of these companies these days have a lot of process overhang. They've got a lot of data debt. I call it data debt in terms of some companies have been around five to 20 years. Data is going bad 3 % per year or 3 % per month per year. So because people are changing jobs and losing jobs. So

28:13 You're, you're fighting up against a lot of things that are headwinds. And you got to really nail those down in that roadmap, those first six months to the best of your ability and keep communicating with your stakeholders or your executive stakeholders. I'd say more savvy CROs and CMOs that have been through this process now know that it's not necessarily a quick win. There are quick win aspects of it, but

28:41 On balance, the seasoned ones are saying, okay, I know this is a process to get there and I know there's revenue that can be had if we do this right. Once you get that down right, then the payoff comes. The analogy I would end with would be an AI tool. A lot of us are playing around with AI tools right now. And I know a lot of people that just discard the AI tool. Oh, this thing is not working right. But the people that are kind of going through the muck of it.

29:07 Once they invest the time and energy, it's really paying off in spades right now. It's no different from ABM. You have to go through some muck. Once you go through that muck, you will see benefits on the other side of it for sure. can agree with you on the, think Matthew McGonaghy talks about sitting in the mud. And I've been sitting in the mud with some AI stuff this week. I think I was on, I did.

29:32 40 plus versions of a agent that I was trying to build. And I finished it this week, but the amount that I've learned and researched and pain I've gone through to get it to a point where I'm happy with it. will now sit there and automatically write blogs off the back of episodes for this series and happy days. It's hours every week of great stuff, but I had to go through 40 plus versions to get to a point where we were happy. a lot of people, what's it, there's a podcast stat that's similar, like 99 % of people.

30:03 give up podcasting before episode 20. And it's something like a large proportion actually give up after two or three episodes. So you only have to get to episode 20 to be in the top 1 % of podcastings. And it's the same approach. You spoke about stakeholder management, stakeholder communication. What is the sweet spot in terms of how often you do that bi-weekly, monthly, because there's always that element where you want to keep them updated enough, but you don't want them

30:31 involved too much because they're going to share, they're potentially going to get too involved and steer things in the wrong direction. So what's the sweet spot from a communication point of view? Ooh, I could say I'm balanced and on average, I don't know if there's a silver bullet here. You know, I always worry and you know, cause I was one, I always worry about executives because they can take you off the rails in a moment's notice and, and get you focused in a completely different area. I would go loose on regular.

31:01 Like I would want to regularly inform them maybe monthly or two to four weeks if you're pushed to go beyond that. However, at the working level at the sales exec, marketing exec, maybe CS that weekly or biweekly, especially starting off and SDRs. you, again go using that mud analogy. You have to get in the mud to figure out what's working, what's not working. So.

31:27 Like it's almost one layer down, but a super executive sponsor or whomever, I would go light on that engagement. Here's the roadmap. Here's a couple of simple things we're focused on. Here's what you can expect as a result. Keep it simple and try to get them focused in other, other areas of the business to buy you some time. But at that next level down is pretty frequent meeting. Perfect. All right. Now we were discussing alignment then. So what does.

31:56 good alignment between marketing and sales look like with ABX? Paint a picture. What is, what is perfect alignment? Yeah, perfect. Yeah. Okay. Let me rephrase that alignment doesn't exist. So what's good alignment. Yeah. It's, um, it's an interesting question. We've been talking about alignment for 20 plus years in my career between sales and marketing. It's unbelievable that it's still,

32:23 a pretty hot topic. first and foremost thing is you've got to have a shared understanding of definition and ownership. Definitions meaning, and I've written about this on my blog about a racy model of ownership, but definitions of what is ABM? What is ABX? Whatever you're calling it. What are these different stages? What do they mean to both sales and marketing? With common definitions, you can then report more effectively and cleaner because everybody's operating off the same playbook.

32:52 And that's, that's the, the, uh, the number one thing that has to happen there. Marketing can't do this on their own either. It's gotta be cross-functional collaboration for alignment to work. marketing can kind of, marketing usually takes it on their shoulders to bring the initiative forth or to do things. And typically the reaction from sales is like, sure, yeah, bring more revenue. Sure.

33:16 without fully understanding, what does that exactly mean? But it can't be just a marketing only initiative. Otherwise the alignment's going to get off base really, really quickly. And then, you know, the other thing that I would think about alignment would be kind of the process side.

33:33 Where you understand, and this is, goes back to the RACI model of who owns what and what the workflows are. When do BDRs engage? When does marketing run their playbook for LinkedIn, for events, webinars, what other content? You've got to have a clearly defined process. And that goes back to the, you know, my very first point too, the shared definitions and ownership, but a real understanding of workflow too. Workflow within how do BDRs work, how do SDRs work? Because the last thing.

34:02 marketers want to be doing is injecting ideas or technology. And we're really good at this as marketers, by the way, and I'm guilty of this because I'm one where sometimes you get really excited about the technology, but you don't realize the workflow implication on a BDR, SDR function or a sales function. And they want simplicity. So you've got to kind of rewire yourselves to get that alignment. Marketers have to think about.

34:31 How can I simplify things for my BDR SDR function and for my AEs to go operate? By the way, AI might be helpful in that regard too, right? There's a number of ways you can kind of preach you some of this information to kind of spoon feed it to your BDR SDR function using AI. So I think those are the three things that I would look for, you know, in alignment.

34:57 Okay then. So in terms of getting started, then we've kind of, we've kind of touched on the leading indicators. You should look for the alignment, the timelines, but what would be your single. Biggest bit of advice or maybe top three pieces of advice for a marketer looking to get started with ABX. So they've, they've listened to this episode. They've read into it. They saw it on LinkedIn. They'd love to give it a go. They think it's going to be that next big.

35:23 sort of focus for the, for the upcoming year, biggest advice on how they can get started. Biggest advice. And when you say get started, I guess I could take two, two, two means that could be the very first time that they're getting involved in the organization, or it mean they're restarting something that failed. But I think, you know, the first thing would be start simple and try to build trust. And how I would go about doing that would be I'd not lead with technology.

35:55 You know, I would look hard with what do I have on hand? I would almost say like, begin with what you have as opposed to what you don't have. And you can kind of figure out what gaps you have from that. I would intentionally involve sales very early on in the process, specifically the BR team lead, not necessarily for the rollout, but just involvement so they're aware. And you got to be thoughtful because you're also taking

36:25 people off of phones, which is productivity time. So you got to be really thoughtful about how you're going to engage the BDR, but the BDR leadership or SDR leadership, the sooner you can involve them as part of the process, better off that you'll, you'll be. And then the last thing is you're trying to cultivate internal champions here. And that's how you're to build the trust is you got to, you got to find somebody either AE BDR.

36:53 If you're a marketer, you're looking for somebody who's sympathetic or somebody or an account that you know you can succeed an existing account that has a high probability of success. Like pick something that's easy that people can rally behind that they can see success that you can get an internal advocate to say, Hey, this ABX thing is worth. This is worth spending our time on. It's almost like you're rebuilding your reputation or, or you're trying to build some credibility.

37:22 before you really go deep with ABM. That's where I would say advice wise, where I'd focus. There's probably too much advice I gave everybody, but that's kind of where I'd focus. think three's a nice number. So in terms of that, that internal champion, is it just the case of during the early stages of scoping out the project, you identify someone seems relatively interested in the initiative. Is that when you get buy in, is that when you engage with the champion or?

37:50 Are there any specific role profiles that you would advise making champions rather than waiting to identify one? Yeah, I'd say the making of a champion is critical with the BDR function with ABM. If you have a BDR function, a lot of companies are going through fits and starts on that, but the BDR leader can instill the discipline into the BDR team. And maybe there's one or two team members within the BDRs that eventually you want to get to.

38:19 I think that's helpful. And then getting somebody on the, on the AE and the sales side to say, this is meaningful. This matters. And how you do that is showing them the data of the revenue opportunity, the accounts that are in their territory, that they could be closing, that they're not closing. You got to get somebody on the sales team to say, this matters a lot. That's where I would invest the time. If you get those two personalities right, the probability of success goes up immensely.

38:47 in your account based approach or strategy. final question, where is, where is ABX heading in the next few years? What are your predictions or trends that you're, you're seeing that we need to be prepared for? Well, we couldn't have a conversation without AI on predictions and trends. So, um, I think you're, you're going to see a couple of different things. And first I would toss out for your listeners, I've pulled together

39:15 If anybody's still listening at this point, I pulled together kind of an AI and ABX, um, white paper slash PowerPoint presentation of how we're seeing things right now or where we see the future. So if anybody has interest, link into me, references podcast. So I know you heard it and I'll be happy to send you a copy of it, but AI is going to be everywhere. And, and you're already seeing that you've spent your own time this week trying to, to speed up your content processes. I think you're going to see AI.

39:42 kind of enveloping ABX on two approaches. One is on the technology approach. prior to AI, you have, you used to have, at least in the US, big platform players, big expensive platform players. Those days are done. That worked out really well and that still works well for bigger companies. But I think there's going to be a real opportunity for the unbundling and unpackaging and leveraging AI in new and creative ways to outreach to your prospects.

40:11 that didn't exist five years ago. So I think that's the first thing. I think the other thing organizationally that you're going to see, and you're probably already beginning to feel this is whether each marketer has their own agent or multiple agents under a marketer or a salesperson. That will be the force multiplier organizationally. When you can start delegating workflow to others,

40:40 That will change kind of the future of how we work. And I could totally see that happening in account-based. I'm already seeing it in research right now. So I'll give you an example. For a client, we built a research repository using a technology called Notebook LM, which enables any person that has access to ask a question about an account. And Notebook LM is populated on an ongoing basis with real-time information from emails.

41:09 from notes, from tasks, and that way you can just ask a prompt like, Hey, we're going into XYZ. What should we be like? We have this product. Where are the holes? And notebook LM spits out an answer to say, voila, here's the hole that you have to identify. I think you're going to see a lot more of that kind of an approach where the technology is going to speed up the process and understanding and.

41:39 I don't know if it'll shrink the sales cycle per se, but what will happen is if companies don't adopt that technology as part of their selling and buying their selling and marketing process, those that do will be able to address the pain points of that prospect more effectively. And they'll stand a better chance of winning than those that don't. So I think AI is going to develop everything here in a big, big way.

42:08 technology wise as well as organizationally. Yeah. No, I, what we'll have to do is get that slide deck or white paper that you referenced and we'll, we'll chuck it in the, check it in the description for people to, to, to access it. Um, cause I think that'd be very, very, very useful. That's been, uh, 47 minutes. That's been a very, very interesting, useful 47 minutes, especially for myself and for those potentially interested in ABX or at least thinking about it, it's on their radar.

42:37 Definitely go and check out John's LinkedIn and obviously all the information available on there. But John, thank you for joining me. That's been a very, very informative episode. Jamie, it's been a pleasure and I appreciate you including me. Likewise. And for those watching and listening, we will catch you in the next episode.