Nvidia Case Study: Why B2B Marketers Need A People-Based Strategy In An ABM-Focused World

okay welcome everybody to our session uh called why b2b marketers needs people-based strategy in abm focused world um my name is dimitri lisitski and i am ceo of info2 the first person based advertising platform and i'm excited to welcome artie capogenics who is director of revenue marketing at the media thank you dmitry i'm glad to be here uh very excited to be talking about influent 2 person-based marketing in the abm world but let's dive right into it so old school view lead generation uh you know marketing is concerned with getting leads we're gonna have some point system that's gonna drive them towards an mql threshold a marketing deemed uh qualified lead we're gonna throw them over the fence and we're going to pat each other on the back on how great we've done and the leads we've generated everything from that point forward is on the sales organization to figure out what's what and drive revenue it's a very old school focus that in b2b today is surprisingly still used the mql is still used as a um as an

indicator and how well marketing is doing and any marketer worth their salt knows that it's there's an easy way to gamify that metric and drive that up so that old school view started to shift towards this idea of marketing technology in the marketing technologist and we started driving more and more money into the budgets of marketers allowed us to build up platforms for data sources and intelligence platforms for cleansing and augmentation you know our crm map systems integrated our scoring and routing be getting revenue ops orchestration and then a focus on engagement on and off site and then well we don't know what we're doing now with all this in the mix so we got a bolt on reporting an attribution and what you end up with is the tech stack slide is essentially budget boasting on the the part of the vp or cmo like look what we've built this is amazing 70 80 percent of this doesn't have a champion and it's essentially shelf ware and probably doing more harm to the organization than anything and half the enablement plays that we put in place here we've kicked over to

sales saying okay now you guys should do really well uh we're generating leads we're throwing them over the fence we've bought you all this technology everything should be great new school is a whole focus now on account orchestration it's getting beyond that lead focused view and saying hey how do we drive qualified accounts into the hands of sales how do we leverage this technology and champion it such that the orchestrations the digital experiences the targeted plays that we have in the mix are touching not just net new names but everything from the accounts that we've qualified as being in markets what the current conversations they are with having with the sales organization the conversations from getting a meeting in place all the way to close one business how are we enabling that in the end blurring the lines between two different organizational structures sales and marketing into one revenue ops cycle the problem with that is as good as you might be on this whole account orchestration focus and modern thinking in any organization at scale you'll end

up with say 40 marketers 20 marketers in the mix all working in silo you've got somebody in charge of email nurtures somebody in charge of retargeting paid ads content syndication you've got an outbound inbound sds org each doing their own thing based on where somebody is in this threshold you know do they drop into this nurture versus that nurture and then as i mql or sql or i'm an automation qualified lead i drop into new display retargeting new email nurtures for each of these target accounts that we're going after you on average have nine plus decision making unit members in there comprised of three varying core dmu roles so as i pepper anybody from these accounts coming in with this messaging it's either irrelevant of no interest to that individual from that decision-making unit role or simply confusing and as well if i get hit from six eight different sources between banner ads email and digital experiences of varying quality and varying messaging i'm siding with the worst one as far as

what this account was what this company is really about so you know i always tell the most simplistic view is within any decision-making unit or an account that i'm going after i've got the c-level individual who's concerned with saving money and making money i've got the staff level individual who's kicking the tires on my trials and demos and then i t who's the final decision maker as to whether i can actually use this technology or not if i don't drop these people into those relevant experiences and have cohesion amongst all these traditional marketing levers this whole focus on abm just creates a mess so it brings about as i said a case for relevance typically in the past if an org you know old school lead gen was looking to scale the cmo would come to the sdo individual we have to increase on-site uh visitors from twenty thousand to forty thousand it's much easier to increase on-site conversion from two to four percent than to say somehow i'm gonna stand with a sandwich billboard somewhere on the street and get twenty thousand more people to hit my site you have crumbs on the table typically what i tell people as far as what's being left behind between

abandoners on form pages uh looking at optimizing the experiences and then just creating these relevant experiences for these dmu members and the accounts that we're going after so person-based marketing or pbm in this abm focused world abm is shortcutting uh you know i tell people all the time if you look at a sci-fi movie and you've got matt damon stuck on a planet somewhere and he's no idea how he's gonna get home we're light years away and the scientists come to him and says well actually you know it's not from here to here and he folds a piece of paper and he pokes a hole through it and says what we have to do it's an einstein rosenbridge wormhole that's great but you've basically taken every dmu member and just assumed because they're from this account in this industry any message for them with their logo slapped on it is going to be relevant resonates just not the case as you pull that back and extrapolate between the dmu roles within those accounts and the varying levels of engagement and awareness you create these distinct swim

lanes uh which begets person-based marketing and these person-based marketing swim lanes you're creating relevant experiences to go from that two to four percent or exponentially beyond that on conversion versus worrying about how am i going to get more people on my site the in-market individuals are there on your site you need to capture them so in flue 2's fit in person-based marketing orchestration we're at the point now where instead of worrying about a lead and throwing leads over the fence we're looking at targeted account decision making unit members as they come in we're not worried about them hitting an mql threshold we're worried about identifying in-market accounts where they are intent level amongst these varying members and then identifying automation qualified leads getting beyond this whole marketing knows who sales should be going after we take the automation qualified leads in our world identify them to bubble them up for the sds or sales development specialists to set meetings up against and then create all these varying traditional marketing leverage tracks that are relevant for that dmu member

bolt down account orchestration plays to increase contact coverage for these in-market accounts and then leverage in flu 2 to have person-based marketing ads going right to that individual whatever platform we can match them against in social media linkedin and the like it's fantastic we get in front of the dmu member with the right message at the right time at their stage of awareness their stage of the journey we go from worrying about net new leads and mql into touching them all the way through their journey with us including mitigating churn and focusing on customer success with a focus on lifetime value that is new school marketing that is revenue focused and and that's where influetus fit is with us in this model okay so um like a quick question like why are we building fluto and i think what we didn't like about existing uh abm solutions what we call low resolution avm uh basically there are three things one thing is

when you think about existing abm approach you target you know all company employees and there are some obviously there are some ways to improve it but still there is like tiny buying group that you you really want to go after and we believe that uh you want to go after this specific people not just everybody or somebody inside target accounts second you know what vast majority of engagements uh you know remain um unknown so like if you run typical abn campaigns and you do a lot of like engagement you get a lot of engagements from advertising but you still don't know horace people you can know what account they're coming from but you don't know people and this is crucial and third um when you consider advertising as a part of bigger you know or a bm effort you never know exactly if you're talking to the same people in your advertising campaigns versus other abm activities so you

really can't say it well it was well orchestrated if you don't know if you're talking to the same audience just a quick example of the first problem um let's consider microsoft as a potential target account for your campaign um if you go after the whole account uh you really target 156 000 to play that's your you know target market when when you're on ibm campaign targeting microsoft and you might reach say five thousand people which is it doesn't sound bad i mean like this is kind of uh that looks like a good you know level of engagement on the account level but these are 5 000 people out of 156 000 employees and the question is like what are the chances you are going reaching anyone from 400 you know people that are in your buying committee so this is you know huge difference and you know like there are it's very hard to say if you reach anyone from them and the way we solve this problem is by by actually targeting this buying

community specific people so just you know to see how how it works uh you know from from the nature around person basically utilizing campaigns you get a report where you can see exactly who who who targeted and then what was the result of this activity so you see you know exactly if the person engages with advertising and then when the engagement happens if it was just a click or the person visited your website and then if there are more interactions and we collect all this information and then we pass it uh back to crm so actually your sales people will appreciate this information and we can leverage this for their sales activities for example to some how you know how our clients use info2 is it can be actually applied almost every stage of the funnel that's what articles use call so you can you can really target like top of the top of the funnel opportunities where there's no no prior history prior activities and uh and then obviously you can go after any account and you will know

exactly who is engaged with your advertising and what are the results you can connect this to your existing you know abm dimension activities where you can you know register to the same audience that is basically receiving your content through other channels and obviously you know like i think the biggest promise of abm is that you connect sales and marketing organization that's exactly what happens so you can support any like starting from self development to the middle of the funnel opportunities actually you can entice existing customers so you can support sales and expansion process throughout the buyer journey uh and basically talk to the same people as your cell service development field talking to and then provide a lot of value provide air cover for the activities so thanks dimitri i mean it's amazing it's the whole reason i've onboarded in flute2 at multiple organizations at this point used through acquisition funding rounds and the like it's just that perfect foundational

piece of technology that i would have in a stack that 30 that's actually championed by individuals that's actually doing something for my organization and only in covid would i be sitting in a situation giving a presentation like this worrying about the lawnmower that's right outside the window so apologies if you can hear that touching on genres the whole focus here in person-based marketing is hitting that right person at the right time with the right song for that b2b life cycle acceleration so as we touched on earlier these person-based ads that i'm leveraging with the technology like in flute2 basically identify that in-market account identify that dmu member note that it's a named account lead and then for each of these swim lanes that we have in place we'll actually take that viral chop it up by awareness stage and then get the right asset in the hands of that individual and typically this would require a few different marketers across a few different platforms when you're talking posting on social media and the like with orchestration what we're looking at is not worrying about the legwork to do the one to one or one to

few for an entire quarter but do abm at that person level for as many people that hit your website as possible it's just better tactics versus i'm going to put all my resources and eggs in this one basket for these two accounts so we push these into influential based on where they are in the state by stage by role by account by customer non-customer and then drive them to re-engage uh in their experiences instead of kind of spraying and praying based on soft firmographic demographic information and targeting overall performance wise or the two campaigns listed you know for a fraction amount of the work that we've had in the past for what we would have called abm under the pbm model we've hit you know upwards of almost 29 000 of our targets that we've been going after 10 000 of the accounts you know i don't really talk too much on impressions and clicks but at the engagement level what we're talking about is automating orchestrations to create 273 engagements actually get engaged in market dmu members in the hands of our sales

organization through automated plays that in the past would have taken a lot of legwork over the course of a quarter or two at the roi level you know if we're talking accounts i'm able to automate this orchestration hidden account that has these numbers on on revenue uh decision makers in the mix that we're actually targeting at the 89 account match rate i'm driving impressions engagement uh and awareness to individuals that are purely truly in market versus spray and prey hope somebody bubbles through we're getting to the right titles we're accelerating the life cycle of these individuals and as dimitri touched on a big focus for me is diversifying our intent data it's not enough to take everything you have and put it into one platform and hope you throw the switch and then that's going to fix things you know my focus has been getting the organization wherever i've been at beyond the mql get around an aligned automation qualified lead metric and that metric typically is based on old-school marketo scoring

let's say marketing driven scoring mechanisms towards some threshold and then baking in account engagement and lead intent it's not enough to say okay i'm going to go with this vendor i'm going to pull that lead intent that vendors has a certain number of listeners versus other listeners versus on-site behaviors versus third-party review sites and the like the more i can take all that and bake that into a diversified intent metric the more i actually am able to truly identify what's quality and what's not so with the influent 2 engagement i'm not only going after these individuals targeting specific individuals with the right experiences but actually able to score that intent data based on how they interact with these with this advertising and then run super retargeting through influent two as well at that individual level as they do come to the site engage and keep the ball rolling forward so what's next my whole focus is is merging sales and marketing i think the initial slides that i i'm a sales loving marketer um and i i don't say that jokingly

there's there's a different chemical makeup traditionally in the past in in old school between a sales role sales persona and a marketing individual if you want to win in in b2b you you you get that kumbaya alignment and it's not alignment for the sake of hey we invited marketing to our sco sales kickoff at the beginning of the year and then we high five then we left it's not alignment as far as hey we we got together the beginning of the quarter we let marketing know what our target accounts are we don't know what they're doing they usually don't do too much for us anyways but it was a good conversation uh then you get to monthly meetings i run a weekly integrated pipeline analysis meeting traditionally wherever i'm at but that still is kind of like a football play we're going to huddle and we're going to break we're talking about the play we're going to walk out and i hope each individual remembered what they were supposed to be doing and i hope it works somehow so the whole focus moving forward is how do we automate this in an orchestrated fashion how do we get beyond the rift between sales wondering why marketing is determining what qualified leads they should be

going after and just automate this for every account that's in market at that person level for each of these dmu members so separate psyches this was the focus earlier on you know it's still marketing driven marketing is organizing technology to try and enable sales hopefully not causing enough to do more work but we've got new school thinking in the mix as far as in-market accounts and what decision-making unit members we're going after we're driving automation qualified leads we're leveraging the influent 2 to put the right ads in front of the right dmu members at the right stage they're at with the right message across a variety of platforms and then scoring based on that engagement bolting that into diversifying our intent data the gap here is i'm still in a football huddle i still broke with sales and now i or one of 20 to 40 marketers is hoping i do the right thing i'm supposed to be doing with the right quality and the right message and then hopefully it enables driving revenue on the train now when we talk about enrichment when we

talk about accounts identification when we talk about lead scoring there's always some kind of point bump or or minus bump based on is it a business email address or not um so if it's a business email address in a match domain it's fantastic right so i get a match my enrichment plays come in i get further data put into them i'm able to run them through buying centers and orchestrate based on that increase contact coverage um and the like in addition to all the goodness that we're getting via influent 2. but what about all the personal email addresses that come in i mean on average i'll see 80 maybe our personal email addresses if not more if you're selling to developers who don't want you to know their business email but the sales individuals still on the phone with these individuals still getting in contact even the requests for contact forms that are filled out are predominantly personal email addresses so we don't have info on them they don't fall into industry tracks they're not seen by campaign managers that are in charge of particular industries or particular accounts and the like but the sales individuals on the phone with them so marketing kind of washes their hands

of it and just assumes that's that's the population we didn't match so we didn't enrich we didn't run these plays for them and the like so what if we were able to merge these psyches and create sales driven digital marketing so my focus right now is push button orchestration for these tactics that if i'm an sds or bdr or what have you and i'm on the phone uh with an individual right now that came in with a gmail email address so there's no info in our system for them i hang up i know they're a competitive shop i know exactly what their pain point is i know exactly what their role is traditionally all that happens next is the bdr as a cadence as far as when they're going to reach out again or maybe run an outreach sequence towards them and the like they're not part of marketing tactics at this point and if it's an outbound effort they might be sales accepted but that's about it if i'm able to put these digital marketing tactics in the hands of my sdrs and bdrs such that when they hang up they can click button trigger and orchestration for this competitive shop for this dmu

member of this account uh versus having to update data and hope everything enriches and the like it's real time orchestration it's push button driven in flute2 ads in front of the dmu members from these accounts across a wide variety of platforms right in real time in the hands of the sales org that's my focus i mean the whole focus moving forward is blurring this line between old school marketing and old school sales into this new revenue focus and not just saying we're revenue focused because i created some cool dashboards that show where my leads are creating revenue or not but how do we get to one unit where it's real time regardless of whether it's personal email address or business email address uh so a lot of cool stuff on the deck and i'm i'm very happy to have influent ii in the mix accelerating that effort moving forward thank you well thank you ari for this interesting really exciting presentation and um uh it's it's always great to see you know um sales loving marketers

uh because these are this is where you can see the best interest most interesting strategies coming from um so and i believe they appreciate your your your support you know because like under you know lockdown times it's it becomes even more important more difficult for them to do their jobs to me to say that we're not at that point yet i can tell you i'll hear when there's something wrong but you'll never hear when there's something good and i tell my team all all the time like don't sit back waiting for a pat on the back we're still uh sales and marketing two different uh organizations i firmly believe i've got one foot on either side but the chemical makeup between the players in the mix are two distinctly different things well anyway thank you it's really interesting presentation thank you for that thank you dmitry