How to Create a Truly Coordinated Sales and Marketing Program | Scrappy ABM & Influ2
Mason Crosby, founder of Scrappy ABM, and Anna Tsymbalist, head of ABM at Influ2, give a masterclass on building crawl-stage account-based marketing programs using activation plays — simple if-then triggers that align sales and marketing without complex scoring models.
Crosby, who has sourced roughly $8 million in revenue at a 20x ROI with next to no tech stack, explains the three reasons ABM programs fail and lays out a four-bucket play structure: data, distribution, destination and direction.
Tsymbalist, whose team fueled 123% growth in ABM-influenced revenue at Influ2, walks through real ad examples for five closed-lost segments — missing functionality, strategy change, buying-committee blockers, budget constraints and lost connection — plus a fully automated missed-meetings campaign and pre- and post-event activation plays that route prospects to AE calendars, booths and sessions.
hello and welcome to how to create a coordinated sales and marketing program this is a webinar done with Scrappy ABM and influ 2 and let me tell you I'm incredibly incredibly excited to be doing this today with the wonderful Anna who's the head of ABM at influ 2 she's goingon to share a lot of actually practical things I'm going to blab her on around Frameworks and processes and all that kind of stuff she's gonna give you some really practical and tactical examples so if you're joining us live today thank you so much for being here go ahead and drop in the comments what you're hoping to get out of today uh with that Anna thank you so much for being here oh my God thank you so much for having me I didn't know you're such a good speaker I'm like stumbo no I uh for whatever reason professionally they just keep showing up for podcast so I just turn on my podcast voice and it's a good time so yeah all that to say we've got a ton of very actional tactical content to get through today and I want to make sure we dive right into it so again thank you so much for being here
there's always this question when you join a session of like how do I get the most out of it and I'm going to tell you right now so what you're going to do is if you are like me and maybe you've got like a notebook on your desk and you've got like a maybe a pen you're going to go ahead and write down in your notebook a quick framework that is data distribution destination and Direction we'll come back to that here in just a moment the next thing you're going to do is you're here today which is awesome what likely happened is your team team isn't here they're off doing other things so what I want you to do is go ahead and look into your slack and message the team and say hey I'm on this thing with a bunch of people around ABM that they may have some answers for us if you guys are trying to build it so go ahead and send a message to your team curating some questions and just saying hey we're going to talk through how to build coordinated marketing programs and then lastly you want to go ahead and set a time block on your calendar for next week with your content team primary goal here with your content team is you want to ensure that you've got great content that actually speaks directly to the
audience you're trying to go after so with that let's go ahead and dig into some quick questions quick just type it in the comments who is familiar with the crawl walk run approach to ABM go ahead and type that real quick in the [Music] comments while people are typing that in we are going to go ahead and keep running through it because most everybody is familiar with the crawl Walker un approach to ABM and generally speaking when we think about ABM there is this recognition of well we have to crawl like we all know that we have to crawl but nobody likes to crawl because crawling sucks and when you think about the idea of crawling um this is actually my daughter so you may hear her in the background but fun fact it takes a child from age zero to age seven months sometimes 10 months to even learn to crawl from there it then takes them a ballpark of like uh about 18 or sorry
it's uh 10 to 18 months to learn to walk and lastly they learn to run about 18 to 24 months of age so again from zero to run takes a baby about 18 months but again crawling sucks so we don't want to crawl we want to run so how do we run well obviously we take a baby that doesn't even know how to get to crawl and we just give them the best equipment because it's obviously the equipment like it's all the right tools and equipment that makes us capable of being incredibly effective Runners so obviously by taking something that doesn't even know how to crawl that doesn't know how to get started and giving them the best equipment that's going to result in Usain bow we are going to run incredibly well this program is going to take off to the moon it's going to scale forever and ever and ever and ever of course not no we just set a bunch of money on fire because we we bought something and said oh this will fix all of our
problems but we didn't think how we're going to use it so that's the reality for a lot of people when it comes to building an ABM program great ideas great tools but tools without foundations or just the fundamentals aren't very helpful so all that said hi my name is Mason Cosman the founder of a company called Scrappy ABM uh but before I did all that I was a husband and I'm a father and I always like to just call out uh that I can't do what I get to do if I don't have the supportive spouse that I have that helps take care of our little baby girl so love our family uh but as I mentioned founder Scrappy ABM in the past three years I've sourced about $8 million in Revenue through marketing programming that has been with next to no Tech stack it's been next to no resources it's been a lot of like Scrappy approaches that were just really really hard and what that resulted in is about a 20x Roi so we founded this company about a year ago with the intent of being the only ABM service provider that deliver step-by-step programs for the crawl stage of account-based marketing and our goal for today is help
you build those crawl stage programs that said I'm joined by someone much more intelligent than I am named Anna so Anna please introduce yourself thank you so much it's such an amazing introduction and actually hate introductions so following such a great one is a real challenge here but as you can see I've come prepared and I'm trying to get some cute points with my cat here because I don't have that's I think that's the closest what I have to a child right now and in terms of my professional experience can we switch to the next slide here um I've been the head of ABM at influ 2 uh for over a year now and in my first year together with the team we've H we have fueled 123% growth in ABM influenced revenue and that all done through using our own product and at my previous job uh together with the team we've contributed to a 52 and a half million serious B fundraising round and that's all thanks to an amazing result of Forex ARR
growth and back to you Mason so like I said much more intelligent than I am I'm terbly excited to dig in some of the Practical examples before we get into that I always like to level set because when you Google ABM or if you asked 100 marketers what ABM is you're probably going to get a different 100 different definitions so we always like to make sure we're all talking about the same thing and ABM for the purposes of our conversation today is a B2B Revenue strategy that aligns the revenue team around a set of shared Target accounts so I use the word Revenue team that's marketing that's sales and that's CS so it's a whole it's a whole big thing it's very cross functional uh program that you can run the other thing that makes me super fun at parties is why ABM fails I keep talking about this stuff all the time uh but if we don't think about why it fails then we're going to make the same mistakes that are already well documented there are three core reasons why every ABM program generally fails and the first is that there's a lack of sales and marketing alignment the quick example I like to always give is marketing will say we've delivered a ton of leads and then sales will say we have
no leads and sales means when they say leads like in pipeline opportunities that they're actively working when marketing says leads they mean contact generated so we use the same words but they mean different things and as a result we're speaking a different language and then we add in the complexity of the account-based marketing language of like Target account engagement and third party intent data and second party data like it you add a new vocabulary so if you couldn't speak the language in the first place you've now added new words that all have different meanings to different people so as a result we're just not aligned on what we're actually trying to accomplish that's been very well talked about but still is a massive problem and as the number one reason that ABM fails next is the lack of dedicated resources so will often happen in the worst thing that can happen today and I mean this sincerely there's a CMO or a VP of marketing that is on this call or a CEO that listens to this and is likei love ABM I want to build an ABM program so what they're going to do is they're going to take this idea of ABM and they're going to go to their marketing manager and they're going to throw it at them and say you get to build an ABM program now can you go do ABM that
marketing manager though already had a full-time day job doing a lot of other things so now you just casually through cross functional and organizational change at a marketing manager they have been given the accountability to build ABM but not the authority to facilitate organizational change so they don't have the resources they don't have the ability to do what you've asked them to do and as a result it kind of just gets pushed to the side and then inevitably somebody's like so how's our ABM program going and then they get really frustrated because it's been six months and there's been zero progress so if nobody owns it it doesn't get figured out you need dedicated resources especially at the executive level to facilitate this organizational change and then lastly it's really hard to measure like super hard to measure because I would just give you a quick example of how people build out account scoring model they take third party intent data to get in Market buying signals they then take into account firmographic information to make sure you're going after the right kind of people then they take into account first-party engagement data and on top of that they marry that with the individuals within the buying committee that are actually engaging those are
four different points that you then Cobble together to say these are our top tier accounts that are highly engaged and likely to buy that's really hard to measure if you don't have the right Tooling in place so often we'll go bu the tools we don't know how to use to to measure and we end up spending more time figuring out the measurement piece versus actually running a program so like it's just kind of this Catch 22 moment where do you build the reporting you build the program because you build the program you don't know how to measure it you don't know if it's working if you build the reporting and you don't build the program you've got beautiful dashboards that have zero data so what do you do well I'm glad you asked because that's what we're gonna talk about for the rest of this time and what you do is what we refer to as an activation play so the definition of an activation play would just be activation plays are the repeatable process for when sales or CS become involved in specific customer conversations that sounds really basic and it is by Design prime example you have customer accounts that are showing significant levels of utilization they're coming right up against their ability to use the
platform that's an expansion Playbook you activate your CS team to expand that account because they are massively using your platform and they need to move up in tier great opportunity next one target account hits our product page our pricing page and our schedule a call page but doesn't yet book a call probably want to pass that to sales because sales would be like that's awesome definitely want to talk to them that's it and like we just don't do that we're really F really complex programs that factor into all account all these like different data sources but like at the end of the day we have people that are hitting our website that we don't talk to we have people we meet at events that we never follow up with we have closed loss programs that haven't been touched since they said thanks but no thanks but they still have Sol the problem they were trying to solve so if you re-engage those accounts huge pipeline opportunities so with that why does this work again glad you asked the first thing is that the Align between Marketing sales comes way more naturally because again it's not this super complex approach of like oh they hit this perfect score that like nobody
really understands we should reach out it's like they did this action if then statements they did this we do this makes it really simple speaking of which keeps things really simple that's why people can buy into it because they're like oh I get it and it's hard to argue with the idea that man if we're going outbound and we focused on people that already know that we exist and have an understanding of our products probably Focus there crazy idea and then lastly this is kind of like the back behind the scenes you can start your transitions within your kpis and your March stack to effectively measure engagement because you're now focused Less on individual form fills and scoring mechanisms around leads but individual engagement touch points to understand they do these actions they engage in these ways we do these resp responses so you're now starting to build a profile of Engagement of what are your highest engagement opportunities that lead to better conversion so it builds in the background all that said how does it work really simple identify a trigger build an operationalize an outbound
sequence run it over and over and over again you will always have more clothes lost you will always have more website engagement you will always have customers to expand you will always have customers to win back that data stays the same the messaging may change over time as the product changes as the market changes but those data sources those worklow those just run and the reason you operationalize an outbound sequence here versus running an ad program as a starting point all the time or running any other programming is it helps that alignment with your sales team because you force the alignment with sales I want be clear we have a lot of AD examples towards the end of this ad programming is a great way to get in front of your target accounts but with the alignment with sales you end up facilitating a longer term engagement and relationship that turns into a full-scale ABM program so how do we think through these programs man I've talked for about 10 minutes so we're about to get into some great examples activation play structure it's four buckets the first bucket is data
you're answering three questions here who are we going after why are we reaching out and how do we message these people appropriately who is it why are we reaching out how do we message them next is distribution these are just the channels you're going to use to get in front of these people could be email could be organic social could be paid social could be paid search could be a webinar could be any number of things but how do we get in front of these people next is destination so what are we pushing them to what is the content that they need to understand to take the next step towards becoming our customer to be clear this may be a Blog it could be a webinar could be a podcast doesn't have to be book a call Page sometimes it should be but probably not most of the time the goal is further education that gets people to recognize the value that you offer lastly is then Direction so how we track any of this to ensure that we're actually engaging with the right fit kind of people so that's the Playbook structure and here if you want to take a quick screenshot here are just a variety of options that work in your prospect buckets your opportunity buckets and your customer buckets so at the end of
the day those are the three places you're looking prospects are to generate pipeline opportunities are to accelerate Pipeline and customers are to expand and retain the customer base so lots and lots of information on that front the question that becomes What playbook should you run so great place to start close lost opportunities so you're going to look at your current close lost opportunities from a filtering perspective of closed lost reason plus firmographics and I put a plus one here if you can also get website engagement like they've recently been on your website re-exploring you or intent data that showcases a third party in Market buying signals so you're looking at why did you lose them who are they and then may be a reason to re-engage around in uh website engagement or intent data if you don't have that generally speaking closed lost is a time-based re-engagement program of like six months has passed or nine months have passed or sometimes three months it just kind of depends on the length of your contract standardly in your industry but your reason to
re-engage is generally tying back to something in our organization has changed or something in your organization has changed and you want to talk about the change as a way of overcoming the past Clos lost reason and if you cohort this by closed lost reason plus fog Graphics you can kind of templae your messaging it's not generalized brand messaging it's like pretty specific but you can cohort this around 30 to 40 accounts and it's a one to few type program next would then be distribution great place to start would be an outbound email program Additionally you can use things like social ads this is super underutilized just like showing up in people's comments or on their content if they post on social is a non-threatening positive touch point that you as a seller can provide to somebody to REM to remind people that you exist like if you've sent them emails and then you start showing up with meaningful comments on their content they're going to remember that you send them an email too next would also be DMS and then lastly are search ads so again if they're already showing in Market
signals showing up continued where they are already searching for viable Solutions is a great way to ensure that you keep showing up in front of them next is then destination so you want to again have content that directly addresses why you lost last time this could be if you're a tech platform product updates that outline in some level of detail hey here's what's changed and ideally you're making it contextual to those accounts of why that matters for them not just a feature dump but hey this was a problem that our customer base was experiencing we made these updates that make our your life better here's how next would then to also be relevant industry news that makes you more uniquely qualified to solve the problem this is a quick example uh I know it's tied up in some courts right now but the FTC and the US overturned non-compete agreements so if you're a staffing firm that you're trying to re-engage closed loss deals you now have a very unique opportunity that's a point in time moment that has changed not within that company specifically or your organization but the way that the game is played of
recruiting and staffing has changed because regul regulation has changed as a result you can then create content that Direct addresses how that benefits them so again that is a unique Moment In Time type thing lastly is Direction so you're going to look for Content engagement a book meeting or account engagement on the site so that is a closed loss program and then to close the loop they if they don't book the meeting you just continue to follow up with more nextstep content based on the past content that they engaged with so it's not just a set it and forget it type approach it's an intentional following them along their journey to get them back into the the customer or into being a customer so with that and you've got a ton of very practical examples around specific segmentation for Clos loss reasons so I'm gonna pass it back to you I just I also wanted to add something so one of her best a she's very good with social ads and that means she they go back and forth with her prospects with her
Connections in the comments and she ended up getting three Deals out out of her engagement post on LinkedIn we were like wow so yeah those connections really work and in terms of the cloth loss reasons so I've come up with five main clo loss reasons that you could use for audience segmentation and then also personalization and again just to mention that I'm going to be talking about the ads but what you guys have to be looking at is the messaging and also keep in mind that all of those plays we do in sync with our SDR and with our AES together so the email is an essential part of those campaigns so um let's talk about the five reasons for the Clos loss opportunities so the first one is the no product functionality let's say you don't have the essential functionality that the account needs to close with you and again it's a great opportunity to follow up on that once you have that functionality added to your product let's say there is a strategy onfit there could be a Blocker in the buying
committee that has the decision making power but is just very against buying you for some reason one of the most popular is budget constraints I think we've all had that during the I think I can't remember when we didn't have that I think that's always very popular reason and then again lost connection um especially the last connection when they kind of ghost to you and you don't know why they left and I'm going to talk in detail about each one okay let's move on so the first one is the functionality uh at play um so what I'm sharing right now is something that we've done so everything I'm sharing right now is actually something that we've done and used uh at influ 2 so what happened with us is we used to have a version one of the product and we didn't have a lot of features it was just basically person based advertising contact level intent and we then had a version two released which had a whole bunch of new functionality and what you can see here is that we segmented our Audience by the
clo loss reason and by AE ownership so we have this very generic I would say value prep about Revenue marketing but we are also announcing that there is a V2 of the product and we're showing the face of the AE that they already know that's saying hey let's reconnect and as supporting trust content that we're are showing at the same audience we have um we have a Content piece where our current customers that are already using the version two of the product are sharing their experience so once once you have new functionality that's something that you can do um now the person blocker um so we use audience scope but there is a bunch of tools that you could be utilizing for that to track when the enemy kind of leaves the company and moves on to a different one and use that as a time as a signal as a trigger to time your campaigns and Outreach and again we're
using the AE ownership and the messaging is just like offering are you ready to re-evaluate us we're not disclosing that we know that the guys out or the girls out but we are kind of trying trying to hit them in their DMS um and one of the good things if you are going into a onetoone direction you could try and show them the initial value proposition that sparked their interest or if you're going after in after using a one to few approach maybe just select one of your most like best performing trust content or best performing value proposition should I be telling you next slide or I'm like making this pause okay those said strategy change so basically the strategy if if the strategy changes when the person who's responsible for the strategy changes so basically it's a leadership position change that you can again track either through um LinkedIn or you can
track it using a tool and the messaging that we are selecting here is showing a strategic value proposition let's say here we're going we're comparing accounts versus decision makers and then also you can see that the trust content is very also is also very high level and by the way um it's it's a nice thing here that you start targeting them with ads immediately when they start their position but then start the Outreach kind of nurture them with the ads and the content here and then start the Outreach I mean like three to four months after they've in they've been in uh the budget at play is one of my favorite because we had a bunch of opportunities out of it and um timing is crucial here so there are a few approaches that you could take um one is um looking for funding for funding
signals and um then your messaging would be wouldn't be say hey we know you got some money uh let's let's talk again but asking if it's a priority at the time but the example that you see right here is something that we did at the end of 2023 uh where we went after all of the Clos lost um no budget um accounts hoping that they did have some extra budget that they were really needed to burn before the next fiscal year so make sure you track when the fiscal year ends for your prospects because sometimes it's not the end of the year in some Industries and we were very polite with asking um are they planning their 2024 initiatives and again it's AE that they already know asking them to reconnect and that supporting trust is really about building the future Mark solution which is something we consider ourselves to be and we've got a great question from
Matt uh his just question is love this signal where are we getting the funding signal data well if it's a close it depends on how many accounts you have sometimes they will do that manually I think you can also go and look at that crunch base and have like um like once for three months you can go and look at the accounts that you interested in to see if they have had any funding added awesome the other thing that I've seen they also do PR releases when there is a huge funding so yeah like Google Alerts are are a good way and then also there's a a tool that's like 20 bucks a month called FYI GTM that's a research tool so you could actually just type in uh funding rounds in specific verticals and then it will just serve up all the funding rounds that have happened in the next or in the past two weeks so variety ways you can get those signals um and then Kyle is also just maybe saying from the insights of the sales team so maybe
the sales team is getting some some uh pointers on hey things people are getting some funding rounds because it often sales is looking at some of those things more closely y with that uh the lost connection when they ghost you so sometimes they don't mean to ghost you and when they don't mean to ghost you this is the message that we're trying to use is asking whether we are getting lost in their inbox basically there is the s are owner of the account and we are just you know assuming that the person's priorities changes they got overworked um you know they work in marketing they priorties change all the time things get thrown at them so just reminding them about yourself and using ads as another Channel and again the SDR is also emailing them sequences um right at this moment um is something that we like to do and then if they are not responding to that we try to kind of spark uh the interest with them by showing some use cases that we think are going to be relevant or some most um you
know most popular use cases that you have that you the best results love it so again that was just five Super practical closed loss reasons segments plus messaging and a a couple of practical ways that you can start to actually implement this and again yes ad programming is absolutely fantastic and is a great way to engage your audiences but if you don't have an ad budget right now this this can be done through email using the same messaging it's just that ad program will add a new channel that engages the same audience in a different way that they may be less likely to ignore I think we all have some uh mental spam blocker fatigue in some of our emails sometimes so all I that to say love those examples as we get into kind of a Mis meaning Playbook depending on how you're using your CRM hopefully you've got your CRM integrated into your sers calendars and they have meetings that are showing up on the contact and the deal record and even just kind of natively with an HubSpot you can actually do a what was
the meeting result and it could be a no-show and whenever you have a meeting that is designated as no-show that becomes then the trigger for a re-engagement program on missed meetings so your distribution channels again can be email social ads social engagement and DMS admittedly for a lot of these playbooks the distribution channels will likely be largely the same the core difference will then be what you send them to what your triggers are and how you message them appropriately so as we look at destination admittedly this is going to be largely focused on just rebooking if they don't rebook for a while then I'd go lean pretty heavy into use case and case study content that builds the pain because again if they booked a call they likely already shared with you through their booking link or through some form of information those a problem we're trying to solve for so if you can build that pain and help them understand that you are the viable solution to overcoming that pain then it's a higher likelihood that they would actually re-engage and then the direction pretty simple did they rebook the meeting if they did you did it if they didn't you didn't so as we look at
then some practical examples around messaging gonna pass it back over to Anna yeah so when when we're talking about emails your messaging is going to depend on how much communication you had with them and what you actually know about their pain points so I would suggest going after their specific points in the email but through the ad from the ad standpoint uh this is what I do and this is one of my favorite things to do I have that set up for missed meetings and I also have that set up as a show up rate like as a show up campaign so why I like it so much is because it's completely automated so once from the marketing standpoint once I've created the ads and landing pages it then works for me I would like to say that it works for me while I relax but I just do other tasks actually so um the two data points um that you're going to use here is again account ownership and the information that the call didn't take place and they didn't show up um in this example you can see that that distribution let's move to the next
slide and how we do it in the background in our CRM we're using Salesforce so once the opportunity status is changed to noow the prospects are then automatically moved to an AE dedicated no-show campaign in Salesforce that has already been synced with the product and that already has the content in there so they are then started uh they're then seeing the ads that I've programmed for them every time that there is a noow and they drop out automatically um also again you can set up a whole bunch of trig you can use a whole bunch of triggers to take them out it could be a time period a call actually taking place so that would be an opportunity change or a Gong signal and then I'm going to tell you more about the messaging that we use so I designed into a two-step campaign so the first one we just assume that hey maybe something got on the way maybe they forgot so we offer a very easy way to reschedule with us it's a direct um
uh it's a campaign that gives them direct access to ae's calendar to reset the meeting with a specific AE that they've been talking to and if that doesn't work we're like Okay so let's assume that maybe they their interest kind of faded and they don't want to commit to that 30 40 minute meeting so we try and lower the bar and have them commit to like a 4minute video about our product um that has a chance to ignite their interest again and I just have to say when you shared that with me when we were preing for this I was like that is absolutely Genius Like There's clearly expressed interest because they booked the meeting in the first place it may just be something like I don't have 40 minutes but I have four and I can put on on 2 xped and watch like that is just so genius and you can tempti those based on verticals and common problems it's like you don't even have to make it all like you can make them pretty high quality if you end up doing it that way so super super uh awesome approach a couple questions already uh of just one would
be around ad budgets I mean for some of these programs you guys are running uh specifically to individual accounts like do you have any benchmarks on how you guys are spending for individual accounts uh it's not too much because we are um running ads for decision makers so even when I'm going after a huge account because I have the luxury of using our own product I'm going to be going after like eight to 10 people in the account and we only pay for the content that's been served so that's that's not going to be a huge budget awesome the next question especially for these Camp sorry especially for these campaigns where your audience is not not is not huge it's not it's um it's very easy yeah which leads in actually to our next question which would be how are you finding and breaking down your one to one and one to many targets so I this is a slightly separate but I
think it's a great great question of like for me personally I do one to Ones based on very very specific criteria around engagement just because again I run a company called Scrappy ABM so our oneto ones are generally highly engaged people that would be like a Mis meeting program or a Clos lost opportunity or things like that honestly for most of our other programming we focus on vertical specific programs or problem specific programs that are largely one to many or one to few so that's how I like to think through the breakdown but Anna I know that you've got a different perspective well I think that when you have really high intense signals going with a one to few can be more effective you just because if they have high if they really have high intent and you have captured it the right way you know they have it they're going to convert even from a one to few you don't have to wow them with a onetoone campaign so for a onetoone campaign I I'm leaning towards and I changed my mind from time to time so but right now I'm leaning towards running onetoone campaigns for
like very specific mostly desirable logos that we want to conver and that we know are going to benefit from us because we know that they have the right setup in their marketing and sales departments to UTI infl too but maybe they're not showing that demand so building that demand for a onetoone campaign would be something I'll be um interested in but for accounts like this where we know that there is a high intent I would go with a one to few and they're going to convert just as well yeah great other followup question from Kyle would just be how do we then separate our one to many or one to few or one to one programs for o from other larger General demand gen programs it's a very like open question if you you I can just yeah what do what do you think Mason yeah I mean it's just segmentation from from my perspective you've got your always on programs and for so many people a good starting ABM program is just account-based promotion towards your larger demand gen programs so if you
have good segmentation in place which is what you should for a solid amm program you're just creating exclusions or inclusion lists based on the different a es you're trying to serve so that's that's the most simple answer uh but to your point that is a very open-ended question that is got a lot of nuances based on the individual text stack and the overall strategy but for a simple answer list segmentation yeah uh I also am realizing what time we are at and we've got about 10 minutes and a couple more examples so we see the questions in the chat first of all we love the fact that there are questions second of all we'll come back to those at the very end so that said let's quickly run through event activation uh for event activation this is pre-event so we're focused on how do we book meetings when we are at events um Matt's in the chat and knows that I love a good event activation Playbook because he actually saw me book and close a meeting uh at bdmx so just for context the way that I like to think
through the data sets would be one of three places first would be the event website or event app uh there are speakers that are listed on the website speakers can be targeted accounts so you already know the speakers are going to be there there may also be sponsors that you would want to also work with so the website actually gives you some pretty good indications of what companies will be there and then if there ends up being an event app of some kind you can log into the event app and actually see the entire like event registration list before the event and you just use the event app as a way of identifying and then starting to book meetings beforehand next would be social lots of events have specific hashtags so you can just search by hashtag to see who's posting like people are already posting about inbound an inbound is still like two months away and they've been posting about inbound for like four months already so if there are significant events then you can actually see pretty early like who's going and then lastly would just be if you've been an event sponsor I tend to go to the same events most years because I've already validated that those are good events for
me so like I'm probably just going to go again next year so if you already know who went last year you can just Target them you're not going to have 100% hit rate but it's a much higher like Hood than going cold to your entire LinkedIn Network and just saying hey what's going to this event so that's why I like to think about data next we distribution so this gonna be email LinkedIn ideally I used to think it was so stupid to use the event app because I was like all this data is GNA get lost but what I realized is that nobody uses the event app for any messages and when you send a message in an event app it then likely also emails the person that they got a message so it's actually two distribution channels for the cost of one where it's significantly uncrowded so you may log in they may not do it like right away but again it's there and almost nobody uses the event apps to send messages and then last you have social ads as a way of getting in front of these people to maybe route them towards uh your booth or a session next is in destination so again I'm recommending two if you're hosting a session push people to the session if you have a booth push them to the booth
or you can just push them to a meeting so again those are really the two core places SL Three core places you would want to send people to and then lastly from a direction component if you push them towards a session did they register if you push them towards a meeting did they book a meeting that's how you track this so again it's not intended to be overly complicated as we think through then some of the Awesome event things that they've done speaking of BWB MX uh you guys killed it so Anna walk us through that yeah I feel like this is goingon to be a little bit complicated I have so many I have so many slides by the way about the event app um something that works really well for outreach is actually reaching out to the person on the event app and if they don't see you can follow up on LinkedIn and be like hey I actually messaged you on the event app and they feel guilty and they respond that works oh my gosh they're like oh I missed it I'm now interested what's there I missed I missed it's like the feeling of the missed mail um so again thank you for covering the
audience select selection part for me and I'm just going to cover really quickly uh the messages that we like to do so uh once we have the list we're going to segment it into a bunch of different segments but I'll cover that later so the first thing you want to do is you want to introduce your team and you want to make sure that their faces are on the ads because they are going to be in one room they're going to be talking to each other bumping into each other at the event and they will have this like additional layer of recognition like fa facial recognition um and people are more likely to talk to them of course if you have a speaking session uh it's best that you promote it to get as many as many listeners as possible next slide yep uh again there is a whole competition of incentive uh at events right now and everyone's trying to come up with new and new ideas so it's very easy to get lost uh in the competition so we try to promote what incentives we've prepared for them and try and make it as as interesting as possible and an
interesting part here is that um on the right you can see an met with Chris our VP of Partnerships and I've actually segmented the audience out by their titles and selected the people who are um who have Partnerships in their titles for that Chris actually wanted to talk to and I targeted them specifically with his face because I don't want him to talk to our CMO I don't want him to talk I want them to talk to like our AES we want to talk to Partnerships and if you are doing any side events um in this example we did two and again they were separated based on who was hosting which event so we pushed marketers and customers to a dinner and we then pushed sales and OBU a golf because because that's that depended on who was hosting and um it becomes even more
interesting after the event because we actually know the level of Engagement that you had at the event with certain people and we like to divide them into two buckets um we ask to continue the conversation you know let's keep the Good Vibes going with those that we've connected at the event and that data you have either from your diligence salespeople who have an Excel sheet and uh track everyone they've spoken to or you have a you know a scanner and you just scan everyone who comes to your booth and then for those that you didn't get in check to talk to the event we say hey we didn't get a chance to talk to the event but we want to talk so let's connect and here's this level of personalization that you know we really want to talk to at the event that we all been to and if your list is just too small and you you don't have the capacity to divide them into uh two buckets here's an example of what we've done for a B2B rocks which is a slightly smaller event
than a B2B a mix where we just say hey let's CH let's chat after the this event and of course we share the recorded session with people who were there and we also share it with our you know entire list because that's great content yeah and this part is going to be a little bit more product focused but we've been talking about you know building sales and marketing alignment uh together and as you can see all of the campaigns that I've shown they all depend on the sales context that you have and that means you're going specifically after the audience that your sales are interested and you're not wasting any of the marketing efforts on the audience that your sales are not going to follow up on because you are literally going after the perfect the perfect people for them and um what you can actually do is not just use the sales context to um show ads you can actually use the ad context and engagement with person-based advertising
um to pass it on to sales and I'm just going to have like a couple of slides explaining how it works yeah so an example of data provided by contact level intent that you see here you know that as a marketer and your sales team and your sales keeper will know who is actually engaged by name they will know what the person engaged with and when they engaged with it and you as a marketer will have an overview of the email Outreach and say was being diligent and following up on all of the engagement that you think are relevant so basically with that you know who's clicking who's seeing and who's clicking on your ads and when and using those signals in bulk will help your sales prioritize Outreach because they know maybe you will integrate it into your scoring system maybe you will um you know build your journey so that at certain point a Target becomes prioritized for sales Outreach so that all depends on how you do it but basically you can build a
prioritization model um using contact level intent and on the next slide I'm going to tell you how I'm going to show you how um this engagement data can actually be used by the sales so instead of um instead of going when when they're reaching out to the prospect instead of going to the LinkedIn and saying hey I really liked your post on LinkedIn it was amazing they can actually go and see the ad and the value proposition or any kind of content that you're promoting that the person has engaged with and then incorporate that in their email because you can have a strong assumption this is something they're interested in this is the topic that would would catch their attention again and I think that's it awesome so we've got a couple of questions that are already in the chat and I know we're already right at time but if people have other questions go ahead and drop them in uh Matt you asked what are you using for person targeting
where you only have eight people to Target per account platform wise there are so many minimum audience size to even run ads well Anna I think you have some great expertise on ad platforms well the thing is I only use influ 2 to run ads and influ two takes care of all of those limitations so um but I wouldn't suggest doing like it's a lot of work to do like one to one um after eight people but what I would usually do is I will have the audience to have a one to few audience size but again that would not be a limitation for info 2 but it's not advised I would say you go um like you collect a number of Clos lost opportunities to have enough audience you will go after specific people but since you're going after a number of accounts you will have enough audience to do that perfect and then last question that we've got right now would just be curious if you've tested video ads for any of these for these event or post
event ad plays yes I have tested and I'm going to be doing a video ad for this event we're recording right now and they work a lot better especially if you get a good editor that uh will have like will have like like an engaging video ad and something I suggest doing for your video ads is highlighting the subtitles because you never know whether those sub whether you will be the ad will be muted or the ad will be will have the um we'll have the sound so yeah so I think the what's important either having a really nice edited video ad or make sure that your title is spoton because sometimes title is like the only thing that matters you can have a crappy ad but if like the topic and the content is great and relevant people are going to click on it it sounds perfect well Anna no more questions thank you so much for joining me today again you'll get the recording
if you've registered for this if you have any other questions obviously you've got Anna's LinkedIn right there you can also follow me on LinkedIn and if you want more content like this go check out influ 2 or go check out the scrappy ABM podcast for this will also be uh released as well so again thank you so much for joining us today and we'll look forward to see you in the next one thank you
Key takeaways
Chapters
Q&A
Anna suggests checking Crunchbase quarterly for accounts of interest and watching PR releases for large rounds; Mason adds Google Alerts, a ~$20/month research tool (FYI GTM) that surfaces funding rounds by vertical, and insights from the sales team. — Anna Tsymbalist
Budgets stay small because ads target only 8–10 decision makers per account and Influ2 charges only for content actually served, so even large-account campaigns are inexpensive. — Anna Tsymbalist
Mason reserves one-to-one for highly engaged accounts and runs vertical- or problem-specific one-to-many programs otherwise; Anna prefers one-to-few for high-intent accounts (they convert just as well) and saves one-to-one for highly desirable logos where demand still needs to be built. — Mason Cosby
The simple answer is list segmentation: with solid segmentation in place, you create inclusion and exclusion lists for the different audiences each program serves, often starting with account-based promotion toward existing demand gen programs. — Mason Cosby
Anna uses Influ2, which handles those limitations, but advises against one-to-one for such tiny audiences — instead collect closed-lost opportunities across multiple accounts into a one-to-few audience large enough to run. — Anna Tsymbalist
Yes — they perform notably better with good editing. She recommends burned-in subtitles since ads may be muted, and notes a spot-on title and relevant topic matter more than production polish. — Anna Tsymbalist
Quotes
“Great ideas, great tools — but tools without foundations or just the fundamentals aren't very helpful.” — Mason Cosby
“If nobody owns it, it doesn't get figured out. You need dedicated resources, especially at the executive level, to facilitate this organizational change.” — Mason Cosby
“You will always have more closed lost, you will always have more website engagement, you will always have customers to expand, you will always have customers to win back.” — Mason Cosby
“You can have a crappy ad, but if the topic and the content is great and relevant, people are going to click on it.” — Anna Tsymbalist