Influ2: Putting the buyer back into the ABM funnel | June 2021

so welcome everybody to our next session uh called putting the buyers back into the account based marketing funnel uh my name is mitchell sitsk i'm co-founder and ceo of info2 and i also have the john russo here john hi hi demetri uh john russo i'm the founder of b2b fusion where we simplify your sales and marketing operations so you can focus on growth thank you john so the reason why we wanted to discuss the topic of today's conversation is um coming from the research of salesforce and salesforce provided very interesting insights in terms of the buyer's expectations and why why they're not being satisfied is what they're getting and the key to this research is experience uh and then the experience is very different to what they expect so if you look at this situation you will see that um you know having you know perhaps understanding uh their you know buyers and providing meaningful insights and making personalized

is crucial and then it's very hard to deliver in real life so so buyers end up you know disappointed and not happy with the conversations they receive for the sales processes and and then uh obviously uh it's it's ending up with much less results much less you know success than um you know organizations expect when they when they play this strategies and um and our pastor john to talk more about his point of view on this topic yeah thanks dimitri we've seen an evolution here with marketing measurement and marketing measurement has been a passion of mine going many many years back i've been a former high tech cmo and everybody in marketing right now is in the hot seat to produce measurable results serious decisions has provided some frameworks now forester that have evolved over the years and evolved from a people-based model

to an account based model in 2017 and then most recently uh another buying group focus in 2021 which are really good theoretical constructs and that's the key thing i say theoretical constructs i've attended 10 of the serious decisions conferences over my career and in my experience in doing uh kind of taking their frameworks and bringing it into companies there's always been a challenge of taking the theory and bringing it into practice which i'll share in the next slide part of the challenge that we've seen in our own organization as we help other companies with their measurement journey is everybody's got a unique go-to-market situation so they may have leads they may have partners alliances so many different variables that one model doesn't necessarily fit all then as i mentioned to you measurement is really really challenging

because you get multiple different funnels you can have a lead-based funnel which is in the language of marketing and that was historically built uh as a person or individual based approach well marketing has their own funnel and then sales has their own funnels so suddenly you've got two different funnels and so a big question is well how do you operationalize this in a way that both sales and marketing can focus on one unified funnel it's very challenging to align on metrics and measurement from a sales and marketing viewpoint and a lot of the account indicators are lagging uh lagging in terms of indicators of marketing success so that too has been problematic the other challenge out of the box is salesforce as dimitri mentioned in the previous slide doesn't really account for how the account journey is taking place from start to finish in an account similar to what a lead or a contact person is going through an account also goes through that so in

the next slide we endeavored to kind of fix that approach and there's two aspects of this next slide to consider one is the hardcore measurement which i'll dive into in a moment and it's a bit of an eye test the second is the insights so on the first piece after uh talking to a number of customers and looking at this model for years what we figured out was a way to with a scalable unified approach take any go-to-market motion and put it in salesforce this gives the marketers the ability to measure uh volume and velocity from start to finish through the funnel and they can tell and filter by the different channels so there's a huge marketing benefit to building this type of funnel that accommodates both a lead-based motion as well as an account based motion what's not on this slide is the insights and that's what we're here to talk to you today about so marketers we're really good

at understanding the measurement and we're really proud when we measure something and we're saying hey we're making impact but think about our sales counterparts they're struggling to get the insights around their buying committees and really trying to understand who is doing what to whom within an account so the more insights that you can provide the better so by building this architecture in salesforce we're able to push some of those insights at the account level so the sales team can engage and then there's a higher level of probability of closing um with that on the insights i'm going to turn it over to dimitri to share what he's seen in terms of the evolution of the funnels yeah thank you john yeah so yeah so we believe uh strongly that uh you know um what's happening right now is that uh um you know marketing and sales people have to rethink their approach to the funnel uh

in order to succeed in their alignment and i think traditionally before digital times um i think the the real challenge for marketing was to prove they do anything they really help people in some meaningful way besides just bringing you know sales decks and building booths within at conferences um and and and i think with digital times as as we have seen a lot of success with this kind of lead generation strategies that brought you you know you know lots of mqls and marketing could start being responsible for top of the final opportunities everyone i think got excited and i think marketing started to own very specific you know magic in their southern marketing organization and being accountable for this magic but that created a lot of bad practices and disappointment later because of multiple reasons um one reason is uh when obviously we have this kind of marketing

you know marketing handover handing over the at least to salespeople uh there are multiple questions that uh you know arise when this handover happens the first question is um i think the most obvious one is if if marketing passes the mkls to sales people they essentially they are not accountable for these opportunities anymore while sales people actually need marketing support at this stage even more than before that because um you know like talking to to to your leads and talking to your prospects without any additional marketing support is easily tough and painful and you know sales in general is very hard work and and then but then from from marketing point you don't want to talk to existing prospects anymore because it will not give you new mkls it's just all the kills you already bought them so so it creates a lot of misalignment between marketing and sales people second

the good question that i think serious decisions were probably the most um i would say passionate asking over the last couple of years she's okay what about other people if if you have a champion somebody inside the organization that is excited and interested in in in some piece of content or or even in in double later product uh i don't think you can name a single in organization where you see one person making decision so why what about other people like involved in decision making process you don't want to talk to them at all or how why do you grow them uh you know if you're thinking about mkls and then the third question is um um you know if if you lose this opportunity loses so we also call it kind of like traditional kind of marketing approaches excitement journey because you you build up excitement at every stage of the funnel until the person loses their interest and sometimes it just means that the person was like kind of

on vacation or you know you know or the content you you provided to the person or the connection you made to the person was not optimal at some stage and then this final final thinking assumes you lose this opportunity so you lose this connection so does it really mean that you want to stop to talking to a top decision maker and last you know account just because this person lost interest in what you're talking to them uh over the last couple of weeks probably not so this kind of mkl mentality and this kind of split funnel created a lot of i would say initially it created a lot of excitement but then like we have seen a lot of new questions coming and then the whole idea of you know mkl became very questionable uh and then um we basically came up with this idea of you know shared funnel where you basically have marketing sales people truly aligned around uh you know working together uh to

from really top of the funnel to to the middle you know the final opportunities and even to talking to the existing clients and obviously marketing people can help some people at every stage including you know retention um and then there are three elements in success in this kind of shared final approaches first you you have to talk to exactly the same people which is by the way not happening in many cases when when people think about shared funnel if you if you just do it on the account level and i will talk about this little later um it's not good enough you still want to talk to the same people not just same accounts right so they're same exactly same buying same buyers in the same organizations second you know marketing especially if you can see the middle of the file opportunities you don't want to you know to to uh you know to to speak uh not considering you know existing sales contacts that sales people are having

so obviously you first need to understand what is the context of sales conversation exists with this specific opportunity specific person and then you want to provide the best possible marketing content that fits into this context and third you know if you consider marketing engagements okay like like advertising is a good example people don't click advertising most of the time so they don't respond to your effort and then in the num from number standpoint what you really see is that out of say you know 100 impressions to serve if you have one click it's perceived to be a very good result right so it's like 99 of cases people just don't click advertising so every click matters and every click means the the banner you serve to the person was actually meaningful it attracted the attention they paid attention to it and then from sales standpoint you don't want to miss on this signal this signal is crucial for them

um so what what they came up i mean in the executional level what you want to do is to to have this kind of shared file where you have sales people and then as you like i i think majority of kind of larger especially enterprise-focused organizations they you know they have i would say salespeople reclaimed their ownership of total funnel opportunities so self-development you know teams became much bigger and much stronger especially considering you know this and i would say um i would say major advances in uh you know sales enabled technologies that really helped um self-development people to make their job really efficient and to scale these programs fairly quickly so so essentially sales people own own the whole funnel from from the top or at least participate in major part of activities that are happening from the

top of the funnel and then uh marketing people need to provide really meaningful and impactful you know support for those activities at every stage of the funnel and that really depends on the stage so for every opportunity every buying team and every person uh that sales people are talking to mark you need to serve that content that is connected to the need of this of of this stage of the funnel so essentially if you consider say sell like clearly called let's lay called opportunities then you know sales development people will appreciate any any effort in terms of building awareness so the way our actual sales development people tell you like it's much easier to talk to somebody who who knows who you are who knows your company because you know like even this kind of little you know little help in terms of building awareness is is changing their life and changing their conversion rates and dramatically and then uh when it comes to middle the final situation where when

you know sales people actually talking to to the buying team then probably you don't want to build awareness anymore because majority of the buying team already knows about the company but at this stage you definitely want to you know to to to use marketing channels to show you know case studies and testimonials and all the great you know content that you produce so so that while sales people are talking uh same buying team members would see a lot of relevant content that would you know build the trust uh your company and then you know reinforce the messages that sales people are delivering and then speaking about the buying teams i think also it's it's impossible to have a good marketing sales alignment if if marketing just focuses on on the account level uh targeting and account based marketing um just focus on the account level um activities because as you consider in this example um if you just target

you know microsoft as an account and then which like you basically try to talk to 163 000 people which is a lot it's it's kind of it's kind of significant time i would say and then in this situation you might want to have like 20 people buying team so so the chances that you hit right people with your marketing campaign are very low so you know just account level targeting and account based marketing is is not good enough when you consider buying teams uh because uh buying teams are much much smaller it's still like if you try to talk to 20 people inside that live in the town of like hundreds of thousands of people so the chances that you you just go on street and talk to the right person are very low so you really want to drill down and make your economist marketing activities much more precise than just targeting accounts [Music] and then from from inside standpoint uh what john uh mentioned uh i think sales people are really craving for for any

indication of of any intent and any you know engagement that marketing people create and we use this example uh of an engage account where you have three people in the team and then you have like a team who is like traditional you know dimension type of um lead that have seen retiring over the last nine days and then he suddenly came came to the website actually clicked on advertising came to the website and then filled out the lead form and that's kind of straightforward you know what the person is he he he just created the inquiry and then the job of unbounded jars who will handle this is pretty straightforward but then as you pass this engaged account uh to to to sales development team you have other people in this group and then we have journey who who who clicked on advertising multiple times visited the website downloaded content but never filled out any lead forms so technically in traditional situation you just have no idea what to talk about this johnny and

obviously you want to have kind of person-based approach when you deliver advertising and marketing activity marketing communication because you want to know that journey was interested in this specific content and what what excited him before so that sales development people will know exactly you know how to engage with him what are the topics that are relevant for him and then speaking about eddie if they try to reach out to eddie then it probably won't be successful because he never clicked or anything he was not you know never paid attention to advertising that was delivered to him so probably they don't if they touch i mean like there's no harm to to try to talk to this person but clearly it's a cold you know completely cold opportunity and then you need to be with us developing people people need to be aware of this as well so this kind of market and sales alignment truly happens when when you have this great granular very detailed um insights for every person that market people are talking to so just you know to sum up of what we

have so far uh so we have this unified file you know john if you could just provide summaries uh sure dimitri and just to um reemphasize the benefits of the unified funnel as you get cleaner predictable reporting and uh really it it's helpful from a sales viewpoint in that it's providing the insights so it's not just like marketers we think a lot about reporting and we need the reporting but the byproduct is the insights as well and within that reporting we're able to share the different metrics of which channels and when i say channels it could be inbound outbound it could be your partners or alliances people use the word channels differently but which channel is performing the best and therefore where do you put the investments from a marketing viewpoint where do you put uh the targeted efforts uh to really go after those buying committees depending on those channels and their performance and it increases the accountability across the board uh so it helps tighten down sales and

marketing when you're looking at one funnel as opposed to multiple funnels and with sales getting valuable insights they're more incented to to look at the one funnel as well thank you and then speaking about the buyer focus i think there are basically three elements that uh you know practitioners feel will benefit by doing this is that first you you have you know buying a committee and if you focus on buying committee you know that you're talking to the right people and then you capture 100 of the intent because you have this person based in 10 data that are crucial to them and then you can create messages and create your campaigns that are targeted as specific people so you can choose the right messages choose the right content that fits into their roles and and and the stage of the conversation that the that you have right now and then uh from sales standpoint um it's super crucial to to understand to prioritize your uh effort depending

on the engagement level so you know exactly which accounts and which people actually inside these accounts are most open to to talk to and then uh when it comes to you know you know connecting marketing sales activities for for sales people having this insights is crucial to to to improve their conversion rates and in general can make their life easier and and make the results uh much better um so with that we we then end our presentation uh thank you john for for this very interesting insights and here here's our details so for those who are interested uh happy to answer your questions please you know write to me uh write to john if you have questions and uh we are around in this conference we have our booth so stop by if you want to see how our product works and again we're happy to answer your questions john thank you dmitry it's been an honor and thank you for including me in on this

thank you