ABE Summit | Nirosha Methananda, VP of Marketing at Influ2

hi everyone welcome to the session stop guessing and start doing how to make person-based advertising your marketing super power i'm naresha methananda i'm the vp of marketing at influe2 and just to clarify this marketing is not smart smarter marketing it is sales and marketing so let's dive in um so just a bit of a state of the union where are we at stuck in the middle with an economic downturn looming so you know from a sales and marketing perspective with business expectations of always you know do more more more um but at the same time a lot of business is taking precautionary measures around uh the uh you know economic downturn and what they're doing is really looking at tightening up their budget tightening up their budgets they're either reducing their workforce we've had a cross b2b a wave of of layoffs and the other thing is that they're usually or there are in place quite a few hiring freezes or cautionary hiring so you know that that

puts pressure from on on existing sales and marketing teams to be able to meet um you know set targets with you know essentially less money less free and less resource so you know conversely to this you still have you know while a business has those expectations the customers still have their expectations and they're going through something similar um from a business perspective so similarly they don't have budget um and also they you know they they're usually very time poor you know it's probably uh exacerbated now by just pressure from from the business to be able to perform and and so on and so forth and the the other thing is i think there's always been um an expectation uh with with um b2b that um you need to have you know it's every solution that you sort of or product that you look at is is some sort of silver bullet but i think especially now that concept of having you know a unicorn um of a solution to investing is is really uh relevant um or that's what the expectation is anyway

um so you know for me i'm like okay well we're more advanced than ever uh in terms of what we have available as sales and marketers um so what's the problem and i wanted to deep dive here a little bit so you know it's what i'm calling the same same so i looked at this report it's the b2b stay of sales between 22 done by linkedin um i put the link in uh reference at the bottom so please feel free to click on that and go and check it out it's full of great stats and facts um but the one that caught my eye was you know 91 of sellers use sales tech once a week um yeah i know that's probably not too groundbreaking because uh you know with covert obviously we all went uh to well most of us went to remote work um and then so from a sales perspective at a marketing perspective being able to reach out to your prospects um became more challenging and we use more digital channels so you know um the sales tech is really enjoying a renaissance at the moment um certainly from from the effects of covert and the after effects but what

that means is you know from the orchestration platforms uh from the the contacts that you get you know data and the context you get to the intent that you get everyone has that so you know everyone has the same tools everyone also has the same approach and it's starting to become a little bit same same because you know a lot of people are getting bombarded and i'll go through a case study later that talks about this um but the question is okay well how do you stand out you know how do you stand out and cut through um back to your you know back to your prospects the second point is is different difference so you know we talked about sales and marketing alignment for so long um and now the rubber is really starting to hit the road in terms of sales and marketing really needing to come together and for me you know what what that means is diving in deeper yes we can you can work collaboratively but ultimately what everyone in a business is working towards is is a goal you know you might have an overarching goal then when you have individual goals as a department

it drives different motivation it drives also different activities and what that does what that means is is that you know you you're not necessarily coordinated in your efforts and then you know they can there's always sort of a tension between sales and marketing in terms of well you didn't do this or you didn't do this or whatever it is so that drives me to ask the question well how do we how do you really align um and you know this is important because what it ends up happening is it leads to a splintered experience for your customer and your prospects so you know in b2b there's often uh more than one person depending on the size of the organization obviously the industry there's more than one person making a decision that is more relevant now than it was ever before you know when businesses are watching their budgets and what the spend is um there are a lot more people involved and need to know about about decisions so if you have a splintered experiences and experience and there is there are different activities happening between sales and marketing and you're not necessarily working towards that uh

holistic experience across all of those different buyers what what happens is it you know leaves them confused or and it lengthens the sales cycles it also leaves room for your competitors so the question there is well how do you focus so following on from this coming into a downturn sales really can't wait for marketing to warm up accounts so if you look what i've got on the on the left is a typical funnel approach which the funnel being you know a length of time so the activity um you know at the top of funnel is typically your demand and abm activities that you that you're pushing out um to be able to warm up the accounts or the prospects to be able to you know lead score them and then you know hand them to your sales your sales team for outreach so you know going from mql mqa sal sql and all of the other acronyms the reason that i say that um sales cannot wait for marketing to warm up the

accounts um you know this is some research that was done by nielsen a couple of years ago now so it's probably actually accelerated since since this was done but you know this is related to advertising and brand memorability with regard to advertising so you know what what this chart is telling us is from the time an ad is first viewed within 24 hours of viewing that ad the brand memorability drops by 50 and you know then if you look for for day five it drops another 25 so you know if marketing is going is doing all this these advertising campaigns and creating all this awareness and then there's no follow-up um specifically from a from an advertising perspective and obviously you do you do also have the ability to you know send send emails and so on and so forth and retargeting but you know if depending on what your campaign is if it's really quite pointed you know having that outrage um you know having that timing is is everything um to be

able to drive that so you know one of one of the answers to be able to help this in your account based engagement is person-based advertising and um rather than me tell you what person-based advertising is or how it can help um i've enlisted my teammate vlad to be able to tell you have you ever imagined that your sales team would have a superpower that allows them to control who sees your company's ads and who exactly interacts with them imagine all the possibilities this would open and that is right all of the possibilities that that would open and it is kind of a superpower because it's something that's unique but essentially it's what vlad said you know person based advertising allows you to deliver relevant ads to decision makers at your target accounts and the way that you do this is essentially you create an audience based on your icp or your target accounts to use within your campaign uh you obviously create uh custom content and landing pages for them to be able to

accompany them so that it they what they see is relevant to them and and uh has some impact flight those campaigns through the best channels to be able to reach your selected audience so you know um this is a network of various display and social media networks um and then what happens is uh you can track you know the engagement of of uh uh that they have with your advertising at a very granular level so you know you can look at it at an aggregated account level you can look at it at you know who you've engaged at that account specifically and then you can also look at specific individuals and see how they've engaged and what what they've done and so essentially what this does is it allow allows you to align it allows you to stand out and it allows you to focus so you know what does this mean from a marketing perspective why is this a superpower um you know as i talked about sales and marketing alignment is a big is a big

focus and has been a big focus for account based engagement and what this allows you to do is really in you know in addition to what you're doing at the moment is take your advertising and use it throughout the funnel to be able to help support from top of funnel through middle of funnel through bottleneck funnel and be able to engage uh you know and and reach across the buying group which is one of the points there as well and when you reach out to them you can really personalize the campaigns to what is relevant to them uh in terms of okay well are they in finance are they in legal are they in marketing what are they in hr what do they need to hear or are they an executive what do they need to hear to be able to help um pull pull your solution together and create the business case from it and what helps this is the person level engagements being able to provide which essentially provides you a sense of intent and context for the outreach to

be able to make that relevant so being able to have tangible insights from your advertising around who is engaging and being able to give that to uh to the sales team to follow up and work in concert uh that's something that is very unique and starts to bring to life that that engagement um and then from a budget level and i'm sorry i'm skipping around a bit um but essentially you know uh your display in social media advertising is something that doesn't hasn't particularly had this level of granularity and what it does is it starts to make take that budget and really make it work for you in terms of being able to start tracking what the engagement was what the influence was over specific accounts and over specific stakeholders um and be able to help through through you know as i said through the to the bottom of funnel and through close of deal and one of the other things i want to mention i'm only mentioning this because we are in the economic time that we are it also becomes a predictable media spend for your display and social media and this is specific to influent 2 just

given given our model our subscription model also includes um the media spend and for those looking you know to be able to lock down their budgets and really uh focus on what they need to do for the rest of the year and have some consistency i think that's that's a that's a big plus um so you know i've been talking about heading into this downturn and while person-based advertising has a number of different use cases you know these are the three that we've identified that will be most effective you know heading into in the into the downturn um essentially like the low hanging fruit so the first one is supporting uh passive prospecting and what that means is you know you have a lot of um leads that come into your funnel and you're trying to convert them to get a meeting you're trying to move them through the middle of funnel and engage the group to be able to go through and close and that's essentially what you're able to do with person-based advertising you can engage those pipeline prospects that

are already in the pipeline you can help with help the sales team and support them with air cover um we use you know info2 uses it for to be able to help with our sdr air cover and humanize them um and so what essentially that does is to it helps accelerate conversations and opportunities which is super important right now in being able to reach and have efficiency around who you're reaching and have cut through especially with reduced head count and resources in a lot of cases the second example is to mine your existing audience so you know there's a big focus on retention and you know there's always this balance between well how much does it cost to uh on board what a new customer a new prospect or to a customer versus uh maintain your existing customers in that revenue stream so being able to uh you know mine those existing audiences and engage them really presents great opportunities to keep them engaged educate them potentially upsell them and look for

expansion especially in those large organizations where you might be working with one department and you know you might have your eyes on another it's a great way to be able to tell that story and engage across that full account um and the third one which we're calling not here not now but not never so you know because person-based advertising is at a person-based level um you know it it doesn't matter actually where that individual is at and right now in the b2b uh ecosystem there's been a lot of movement and change um and i and i assume that it will continue to be so but what it means is if you have a prospect who you know is in that field that is interesting to is a person of interest to you in terms of your product being able to have your brand in front of them educate them around what you do and leave an impression for them where it might your solution might not be right for them right now but it might be

for the next role so being able to have that option is an opportunity is always is always great so you know what i really wanted to go through was just really quickly um a couple of case studies so you know via is an intern marketing resource management solution particularly for finance and they were really challenged um through covert uh and particularly in terms of you know obviously the events went away they use direct mail a lot they also rely on form fields quite a bit and you know as i mentioned before there is a lot of bombarding of emails uh through covert and and continuing so you know it really reduced their form fills um they also have limitations in terms of their existing ad advertising programs and channels where they weren't necessarily getting the reach or the cut through that they wanted um and you know their their vp of marketing and sales martha france was looking for a solution to be able to help target exactly who they wanted and see their activity to be able to inform the sales team um and get

some efficiency um and that's what that's what the person-based advertising did for her give give via um and their team some inkling of buying intent to the point where they've actually built their marketing and sales process around uh around that engagement that happens through through the um through the person-based advertising campaigns so going left to right um you know via creates uh content based on needs and pain points to be able to gauge what intent uh what the buyer intent is and they look for interest so they have you know they use a clicker influence clicker system so you know once someone clicks on that they look at what that activity is and then they follow up through with a sales with an outreach sequence which you know you can sort of see here and then what happens is that our prospect becomes a multi-clicker and from there they kick off you know into back into their direct mail uh with a linkedin you know with the linkedin connection and then it that goes off into the meeting and demo process um and so what you know

this has meant for bio is that you know their their sales team has um some great uh insight around what intent people have in there be able to really customize their outreach to them um from that perspective and you know over the over the year that uh via has was using uh was using influence you know 25 of their targeted individuals clicked click their ads so that's a pretty great result the other example i want to talk about is hexaware so hexware is a software solutions company that's um transforming it services uh and primarily for for enterprise solutions so hex clear really wanted to get scientific you know and it's as i said it states here they wanted specificity in their targeting they wanted more visibility of their high conversion prospects and velocity across their sales cycle they really wanted to optimize that um and so they used the consumption insights from the cam and the campaign analytics and in and lead

scoring to really zero in um you know as rishi kalepi says uh on that perfect moment to reach out to their targets and what they did was they created a lot of very pointed content that uh that was for the buying for essentially for the buying groups at their account and what and what they would do is they would look at where they were in the funnel and then push this content to them so you can see you know in the again going from left to right uh you know they have content for a decision maker influence and for bottom of funnel and by taking this this very strategic and highly scientific approach you know it's meant that like their overall visibility has improved you know uh in terms of their their brand and their ads but the conversion cycle has also improved from a velocity and volume perspective and this led you know for to hex where for you know a three to four times increase in their sales rating prospect lead scores so what what marketing was pushing to sales

it also um you know was a 900 increase in their uh potential reach to their relevant prospects so for them that's that you know that especially dealing with large enterprises that's uh that's a significant result so just wrapping up for you know for an egg from an account based engagement um perspective person-based advertising means that marketing and sales can work together meaningfully from top to the bottom of the funnel and that's something that i think you know is going to really make a difference um especially in the environment we're in um the other thing is it uh it gives you the ability to take that multi-threaded approach across accounts you know with those buying groups and being able to you know do that through the prospect um phase but then also be able to do that through uh your with your existing accounts and expand i think that's a great advantage um and then you you know you can take a true account based approach um through a channel that's that's typically you know

uh advertising is a necessary spend but it's not necessarily always roi rich as you as you would like it to be so you know really that's what person-based advertising does it makes um your your advertising a lot more tangible and that spend a lot more meaningful um so that's all i've got for you today i thank you so much for your time um if you have any questions or you'd like any further information please feel free to contact me my contact details are there otherwise i wish you all the very best thank you