Patrice will be joining Kathy Macchi and Trish Bertuzzi for a live panel discussion on Thursday, June 8 at 1:00 PM EST
I got a chance to catch up with Patrice Greene, President of Inverta. An original member of the “marketing automation generation,” Patrice’s early adoption of marketing automation has led to successful roles in marketing and sales leadership on both the client and partner side. Now as President and co-Founder of Inverta, she hears the perspectives of marketing and sales leaders every day, and keeps a laser focus on the ever-changing B2B marketing landscape.
[Ashley] To start, I’m curious about “a day in the life of Patrice.” What are some of the reasons that organizations are coming to you? Are there commonalities in the concerns that you are hearing from marketing leaders?
[Patrice]The two largest commonalities across all of my conversations have to do with account-based strategies and the gap that exists between theory and practice. ABM is a trending, hot topic right now and while it’s not new – developing and mobilizing an ABM strategy in a tech enabled world is a bit new. The question I get most often is “where do we start?”
When you think about inbound marketing, for example, or anything that we did with respect to getting your demand generation engine in place, there were clear and cumulative steps to setting that up. Also, it was much broader because the objective was to drive a large audience into the top of the funnel. So common sense would say, “Okay, we need to get our funnel defined. Then we need to have some scoring in place to qualify those leads once they come in. Okay, now we need to get nurtures in place to market to those leads on an ongoing basis.” So it was easier to understand how to get started, and the strokes were broader.
Now, when you think about account-based marketing: You need to treat accounts, or groups of accounts, differently. You need to figure out which accounts you’re going to go “all-in” on. You need to consider which resources you are going to pull in, how much you’re going to spend, what tactics you are going to use, and whether or not there are similarities in those accounts from a segmentation perspective. And if you’re an Enterprise, and you have multiple products and multiple markets? All of those considerations can paralyze folks.
[Ashley] Besides this “paralysis,” or inability to get started, as you described it – has there been a common issue or variable that’s preventing organizations from adopting an account-based strategy?
[Patrice] The word I would add in there is adopting an effective account-based strategy. A lot of organizations think that they have adopted an account-based marketing strategy because they bought certain technologies like Demandbase or Terminus or they bought Engagio. They’re sending cupcakes, right? Therefore they have a set of target accounts and they’re not outbound spraying and praying like they did before. They’re getting a little more specific and disciplined, but it’s still outbound marketing where they are handing leads over to sales. So it’s not really ABM.
I would say the thing that’s preventing people from being effective with it is having a true collaboration with sales: where they are targeting a group of accounts and they are both engaging in activities with those accounts to achieve a common goal. That isn’t happening because there isn’t alignment on the how the organization is defining their specific account based strategy.
When I talk to organizations about their account-based marketing programs, it almost always results in discussions centered on how sales and marketing can be more collaborative to truly surround the target accounts. More often than not they are simply conducting marketing activities to sales’ target accounts. That still results in a marketing to sales handoff versus a true coordinated, all-hands-on deck blitz to penetrate the target accounts as a team.
[Ashley] When we talk about organizations that have agreed to pull the trigger on ABM and they know where they are going to start, what would you say is the biggest pitfall that you see after the project has been kicked off?
[Patrice] One: trying to speed out of the gate. I absolutely understand needing to move quickly. I get needing to not wait and get things in play, etc. But that need for speed means something or multiple things are getting sacrificed. Alignment is usually a big one, and then people are skipping steps on the target account selection. I hear, “this is what my rep gave me. I just got them on board. We’re aligned – they JUST decided to support me with this initiative. I can’t go back and tell them that we need to revisit this list. That is going to set us back, and so we have to use this list.”
And then, I hear, “We don’t have time to take a step back and revisit our segmentation strategy. We need to go with how we’ve always done it – these are our personas, this is the content that we have. We can’t create new content, we have to use existing content.”
What you end up with in that scenario is potentially targeting the wrong accounts with the wrong message because it’s what you have and you don’t want to upset the apple cart.
And it’s all driven by the need for speed.
[Ashley] Do you think there’s a different dynamic in a project that’s initiated by a marketing function vs. a sales function or Chief Revenue Officer?
[Patrice] ] I do think there’s a different dynamic. When we initiate the conversation with the sales side of the house first, and the sales side will bring in their marketing team to continue the conversation, there is sometimes defensiveness like, “We’re doing this already.” Territory becomes an issue, and you can tell that the marketing function feels protective of the work they’ve already put in.
Right there, that tells me that alignment is an issue. If one function hears a new idea and becomes defensive, we can tell that sales and marketing are not on the same page, or in a place where they’re able to work together.
When a project is initiated by marketing, or we are brought in by marketing – it is a little bit different.
Given the nature of a marketers day to day, going to sales to gain buy-in is a common occurrence. They are habitually trying to gain sales approval. I would say marketers are a bit more skilled at navigating those internal politics because of that fact. Often times they’ve already talked to a friendly sales leader or have selected a few key reps that they feel will be collaborative to kick off some account-based programs with. So the conversation tends to go more smoothly. If there’s any push back from sales – it’s typically related to the fact that they’ve been doing target account selling forever and this isn’t new to them. I’m generalizing – and it’s certainly different in every organization, but on the whole I find the conversations with sales when marketing has pushed for the initiative tend to go more smoothly than the other way around.
Want to hear more? Join us for “Getting real about Account-based Revenue,” a live panel discussion with Patrice, Trish Bertuzzi, and Kathy Macchi on Thursday, June 8 at 1:00 PM EST.
Kathy will be joining Patrice Greene and Trish Bertuzzi for a live panel discussion on Thursday, June 8 at 1:00 PM EST
I got a chance to catch up with Kathy Macchi, a long time survivor of the technology industry who brings over 25 years of sales, marketing, and technology experience to her role of Vice President of Consulting at Inverta. As an ITSMA Partner, Kathy has been working with companies on strategic account marketing for more than 10 years.
[Ashley] Let’s talk about account-based marketing. For people who have just started hearing the term in the last year or two, how long have you been working with organizations on account-based marketing?
[Kathy] I have been working in it since 2007. Ten years.
[Ashley] So why are people treating this like it’s a new thing?
[Kathy] Because of how it’s being positioned in the marketplace. When it first started, it probably began about five years before I got involved with it, it was large service providers with high deal sizes, and it was the idea of, “how do you take your best accounts and really get to know them better?” Peppers and Rodgers published a book in 1996 called The One to One Future, and that’s essentially what ABM was back then. It was one-to-one marketing. If I look at some large technology companies, 85% of their revenue comes from 15% of their customers. It was time they stepped back and said, “why are we marketing to them like we don’t know what they have?” It seems like common sense, but if you rely on a small subset of companies to make your number – it’s worth doing the deep research so you can treat them like you know them. Especially if they are buying millions of dollars of your product.
[Ashley] What are some of the pitfalls you see with organizations who are trying to get their account-based marketing program off the ground?
[Kathy] Couple things. So some organizations will take a bunch of accounts, and just then just batch and blast to those accounts. The marketing isn’t any different from broad outbound, and they sit back and ask, “how is this different from what I’ve been doing?” and the answer is: it isn’t.
Another pitfall is when marketing thinks they can do it on their own. Marketing will say, “I’m just going to do this, but then I’m still going to toss the leads over to sales.” ABM is not about alignment with sales, it’s about collaboration with sales.
Finally, mismanaged target account selection can be a big pitfall. Your target account list should not be comprised only of accounts that you haven’t been able to win in the last two years. There needs to be defined reasons why they are a target account and what you expect to do with them – and making sure those expectations are realistic. This isn’t a situation where you say, “we’ve not had any luck with these accounts: you take them!”
[Ashley] We are seeing a lot of account-based marketing technologies emerge in answer to this trend (and there’s an argument to be made that they’ve created the market as well). How would you describe how you help organizations make sense of all their options?
[Kathy] The first thing they need to do is to define what their account-based marketing program is. The term has lost a lot of meaning recently, and many things can be considered account-based marketing. But you need to focus and say, “this is a strategic 1:1 ABM program” or “this is a precision ABM program” because that helps guide you toward technology that will best support that strategy. So, define what ABM means for your company. Then, think about the capabilities that you need to be able to segment and personalize your message. What level of granularity do you need to do that? You’ll probably come up with five to eight different categories: do you need account selection? Lookalike modeling? Do you need to append coverage or contacts? Do you need to support digital interactions like advertising? Do you want website personalization? From there, you can come up with a grid to help visualize what technologies fit in what categories – and further – which technologies can achieve the level of granularity or personalization that you’re looking for.
Finally, you want to consider your own infrastructure and what is going to work best.
The biggest factors that people ignore are things like, what training is involved? What integrations are involved? Is it going to change my sales and marketing process and how minor or major is that going to be? It’s very hard for a zebra to change its stripes. You can’t completely expect a sales and marketing to change overnight, or at all.
[Ashley] Is there a piece of technology that’s in market right now or on the horizon that you’re particularly excited about?
[Kathy] Yes, there are a couple solution providers out there and it will be interesting to see where they overlap. Everyone has lots of data now – you can scrape the web, you can get intent data, you can get all types of reports – but how do you take all that information and use it to recommend a next action, based on the company, based on the person. We are starting to see software help marketers make sense of all that data, and use it to make recommendations on next best offer, or what that next treatment should be.
[Ashley] Let’s change gears from technology to skills. What marketing skills are imperative to have when you want to get account-based marketing off the ground?
[Kathy] If I look at a skillset for a 1:1 ABM marketer, I think they are seasoned, experienced marketers that can hold their own with senior members of their sales team. They have market knowledge, and consultative abilities. They are well-rounded executers – they know the different areas of marketing. You look for leadership, people who are collaborative, strategic thinkers and who are creative. And good communication skills. That makes the difference because, in a 1:1 scenario, they are usually working with a top sales rep.
Want to hear more? Join us for a “Getting real about Account-based Revenue,” a live panel discussion with Kathy, Trish Bertuzzi, and Patrice Greene on Thursday, June 8 at 1:00 PM EST.
Trish will be joining Patrice Greene and Kathy Macchi for a live panel discussion on Thursday, June 8 at 1:00 PM EST
I got a chance to catch up with Trish Bertuzzi, a fellow Massachusetts native and renowned sales development expert. Trish’s book, The Sales Development Playbook, is the bible for high performing SDR organizations. Trish’s practical advice, zero tolerance for BS, and sterling reputation has amassed a substantive cult following on both Twitter and LinkedIn, and she spends her days dolling out tough love to organizations who want more productive sales development and inside sales teams.
[Ashley] Trish, what are some of the biggest reasons that companies are coming to you?
[Trish] Companies come to us when they aren’t getting the productivity and yield that they want out of their sales development team or inside sales teams. Maybe they’ve been executing the same model for a really long time and they’re not getting what they need out of it anymore or there’s a new product introduction or a shift in the market and they just don’t know how to adapt their strategy and tactics to address their new reality. That’s typically when we step in.
[Ashley] How has the popularity and of account-based marketing, or what you refer to as “Account-based Revenue” changed the types of questions you are getting asked?
[Trish] My introduction of the term “ABR” was very intentional. I wanted to move the conversation away from account based marketing. We were talking silo city with that term. I wanted our clients to understand that to execute an account based strategy not only does marketing have to change what they do but sales has to change the way they sell too. I think bringing term Revenue into the conversation accomplishes that task.
What got me thinking about this was hearing less of “How do I get more productivity out of my teams?” and more “I can’t get the market to respond to me anymore. What has happened?”
I will tell you what has happened: organizations are realizing that they’ve bored the ever-loving crap out of their buyers with banal messaging and vapid emails so much so that their buyers have put up a wall.
So, it’s not always the team itself that is the problem. I’m seeing more that the process and message is the problem. Organizations know they need to change but they often don’t know where to begin.
[Ashley] Circling back to the term “Account-based Revenue.” How did you come up with that term and why did you feel there was a need for that term?
[Trish] Well, I’m a sales person at heart, right? I’m a sales development rep and I’m an inside sales person – no two ways about it. So-my-focus-is-and-always-will-be: REVENUE.
When I heard people talking about account-based marketing, or account-based everything, or account-based sales development I thought, “Okay, well those words are … interesting. But if all paths don’t lead to revenue, it doesn’t matter what type of account-based strategy you execute.”
So by naming it Account-based Revenue – it puts the visual picture of dollar signs in everybody’s head, and so every conversation needs to lead there.
[Ashley] You’ve obviously worked with lots of organizations trying to get this ABR strategy off the ground. What would you say are some of the most common pitfalls?
[Trish] The first pitfall is thinking that it’s a silver bullet for every single company out there. It’s not. Much as I love ABR, not everybody needs it.
You have to sit back and look at your market. If you’re selling to the SMB, you don’t need an account based strategy. Just do a fabulous job of getting more interesting and relevant with your buyers, and that’s going to uptick your productivity.
If you’re selling to the mid-market, and you’re selling a commodity product or a well-understood product or a product with a lower price point – you don’t need ABR. Just get smarter about what you’re doing.
But if you’re selling to the enterprise, and your deal size is over 50K (that’s an arbitrary number that I selected), or you have a complex solution – you might want to consider ABR. Having said that, I’m seeing a lot of companies that need multiple strategies – because these companies sell into all of those markets! So you may need a traditional demand generation strategy AND you need an ABR strategy.
But because ABR is a buzz word, everybody is picking up all their eggs and putting them in that one basket because it’s nice and tidy.
Well guess what: winning isn’t tidy. Winning is hard so we all need to be smart about our unique market requirements.
Want to hear more? Join us for a “Getting real about Account-based Revenue,” a live panel discussion with Kathy, Trish Bertuzzi, and Patrice Greene on Thursday, June 8 at 1:00 PM EST.
