Transcript
Speaker: Hey everybody, welcome back to the ABM Voice Podcast.
Speaker: Thanks for joining.
Speaker: I'm excited to talk to Davis Potter from 4Jex today.
Speaker: 4Jex basically helps demystify ABM and help implement and scale companies of all sizes.
Speaker: Davis talks a lot about B2B marketing, current-based marketing, current-based experiences.
Speaker: And today I wanted to spend some time with him and then
Speaker: basically go over these topics in detail.
Speaker: Specifically, they talk about two frameworks, which I'm very excited to understand how they approach, namely Growth ABM and Enterprise ABM.
Speaker: Davis, welcome to the show.
Speaker: Arun, thanks so much for having me.
Speaker: I'm psyched to be here.
Speaker: Absolutely, Davis.
Speaker: Let's just get started with a very quick introduction.
Speaker: I know I've covered a little bit about what you do presently, but what has been your journey so far?
Speaker: How did projects happen?
Speaker: Yeah, so a little bit about my background.
Speaker: I've been in ABM my entire career, have had the opportunity to launch scale and optimize programs across every different organization size, which has really made a strong impact on our view of ABM at ForgeX.
Speaker: So from your hyper-growth VC-backed startup, mid-size enterprise organization with...
Speaker: you know, 6,000 plus employees, and then all the way up to the massive 100K plus world's most renowned.
Speaker: And so seeing how your ABM framework differs across each of these was eye opening for me.
Speaker: And that's a little bit about my background and how ForgeX came about.
Speaker: as we saw and there still is a gap in the market for account based market research and so we lean heavily on the research and then advisory side as well but when you look at how abm has innovated and modernized over the past five years it's roughly stayed the same or no neutral source
Speaker: has really progressed the practice forwards.
Speaker: And so that is what we're all about and what we're working to do.
Speaker: Interesting, very interesting.
Speaker: How do you go about this advisory services that you have?
Speaker: Do you help in identifying, let's say, your potential clients on the basics of ABM?
Speaker: How do they get started and those sort of things?
Speaker: Or what kind of work goes into the engagement?
Speaker: Yeah, so we've got a couple different options based off of where you are in your ABM journey.
Speaker: We've got our ABM incubator.
Speaker: offering which will help you go from zero to one on your program throughout the build phase and and we're very much advisory versus execution and then we also have our abm amplifier package as well so if you have your abm program up and running and you're looking to optimize or you're looking to scale
Speaker: We are the partner that can help get you there.
Speaker: And one thing that I'm really excited that we're going to be rolling out again, given that we are a neutral market research firm, we are just about to roll out our ABM certifications, not only for practitioners and leaders, but also for agencies.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: What does that certification involve?
Speaker: Is it for the practitioners within those organizations so they can know the bits and bytes of ABM or anything more than that?
Speaker: Yeah, the ins and outs of ABM will walk you through and really enable you on how to effectively run growth ABM, enterprise ABM, and, you know, we'll also include what are proprietary, not only frameworks, but templates that you can take back to your organization.
Speaker: And we'll really go in depth along how you can build a world-class ABM program that scales.
Speaker: And then at the end, you have to pass our certification exam so that, you know, not anybody can just walk through it.
Speaker: and take the templates and then run and try to do it.
Speaker: We want to make sure that if you are Forgex certified, you are credible and did tangibly take away the learnings that we shared.
Speaker: Got it.
Speaker: Makes sense.
Speaker: So let's just dive into the frameworks and I'm
Speaker: I think based on the conversation, you're really excited to share about the differences and what goes in between these two frameworks and also like why two types of frameworks, right?
Speaker: So let's just dive in, like help us understand what's growth ABM, what is enterprise ABM.
Speaker: Yeah, so the way in which these came about, I think that that context will be really helpful because the frameworks were not something that we just came up with one day and said, oh, this is a new way to do ABM.
Speaker: Here you go, market, like try to adopt it and we'll see what happens.
Speaker: We...
Speaker: The way that these were derived was after going from the sequential order in my background was going from that massive, massive organization to that small VC-backed startup.
Speaker: Thinking about how the ABM approach differs was something that I really had to lean into.
Speaker: And so this completely opened my eyes.
Speaker: And then I started looking around the market and saying,
Speaker: How are these smaller organizations effectively running their ABM programs?
Speaker: And through dozens and dozens of conversations, that is where I started to pick up on these patterns and really learn that a lot of these orgs that are on the smaller side are learning how to run ABM regularly.
Speaker: through the ABM platforms.
Speaker: So they'll look at all of the things that they're putting out.
Speaker: And although great frameworks, they're not from a neutral source and it's a bit muddy.
Speaker: And so you've got...
Speaker: the smaller orgs running ABM in one capacity, you've got the larger orgs running ABM in another capacity.
Speaker: And then what was really interesting is once we kind of put down these two different ways that both of these organization sizes are running ABM on paper, then we started having conversations with the larger orgs and they were all saying, wait a second,
Speaker: we are running essentially what these smaller orgs are doing, but it's more on the demand gen side.
Speaker: And so then it was like, wait a second, this is massive and this is how ABM is being practiced in the modern day versus the triangle method, which was great to begin with, but now is outdated.
Speaker: And so what these two frameworks consist of,
Speaker: is you've got starting with growth ABM first.
Speaker: Imagine your total addressable market and then you take that total addressable market and you narrow it down to your target account universe.
Speaker: Who are the target accounts that we want to go after?
Speaker: And this would be, you're on the hook for 50, hundreds, thousands of accounts.
Speaker: And you're taking that account coverage and you're gonna put it in three distinct tiers.
Speaker: So first you've got your tier one,
Speaker: That has the smallest amount of accounts.
Speaker: It's the most strategic for your go-to-market.
Speaker: They have the highest level of tactical eligibility when it comes to the campaigns.
Speaker: They have the greatest personalization, depth, and scope when it comes to your tactics.
Speaker: So that's tier one.
Speaker: Then you've got tier two, which has a medium level of accounts.
Speaker: And the difference between the tier one and tier two is that in tier one or in tier two, sorry, you've got less personalization.
Speaker: You have less tactical eligibility.
Speaker: So to give an example here, maybe there is a VIP executive dinner.
Speaker: and only tier one accounts are eligible for that type of tactic.
Speaker: So you've got tier one, tier two, and then tier three is where all of the remaining accounts sit.
Speaker: And so it's got the largest number and then the tactical eligibility and personalization are at the lowest degree or what I like to call the scale, right?
Speaker: Everything has to scale across the remaining accounts.
Speaker: And so that is Growth ABM.
Speaker: The majority of smaller organizations run this and start their ABM journey in this capacity.
Speaker: And the reason behind that is they don't have the luxury and the ability, and it doesn't make sense from a go-to-market standpoint, to run a true and pure one-to-one or one-to-few play, which one-to-few meaning 25 accounts or less in the cluster.
Speaker: And that's what we call enterprise ABM.
Speaker: So you can't do that because it would make zero sense unless your ACV is so high and you really, really have an account that you...
Speaker: completely believe is going to close and your business is hinging upon it, that's when you could run a one-to-one at the smaller organization.
Speaker: But when you look at the market, the majority is running this growth ABM.
Speaker: And so where enterprise ABM, which is that next framework sits, is it's you're running one-to-one or one-to-few.
Speaker: Again, one-to-few being 25 accounts or less.
Speaker: And the difference is, imagine you're one-to-one, it's a nine, 12, 18 month long campaign specific for that one account.
Speaker: So almost imagine every tactic
Speaker: Everything in your campaign plan, your messaging, your target personas, it is all centered around one account.
Speaker: And usually in these larger organizations, if they're purely running enterprise ABM and they're running that one-to-one motion, you'll see three to five accounts per practitioner.
Speaker: And so you're getting really, really targeted.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And an interesting thing that we've seen within the market as well is
Speaker: After having some conversations with ABM leaders in these massive organizations, I was walking them through, hey, this is how we're seeing smaller orgs do it with the growth ABM approach.
Speaker: They were all looking at me and saying, no, we're actually running this in some capacity within our demand gen, or we're just starting and working to stand up a growth ABM motion.
Speaker: And what they're doing is within, again, if you remember like the growth ABM, you've got those three different tiers.
Speaker: What they're doing is they're pulling their enterprise ABM accounts from the tier one and tier two accounts.
Speaker: So it's almost this grand natural flow of a holistic account-based approach where your go-to-market teams are so aligned because you've got, first off, all of the accounts that you want to go after.
Speaker: They all fall into the different tiers within growth ABM.
Speaker: And then for those really high ACV accounts where it makes sense, they're running enterprise ABM, that pure one-to-one or one-to-few.
Speaker: Very interesting.
Speaker: So you stack in case you're a large organization, then you have growth ABM as the top of funnel, right?
Speaker: That is feeding into your enterprise ABM where you're going a lot more deeper and then personalizing.
Speaker: Do you still have tiers in that or you don't?
Speaker: Or it gets into that one-to-one or one-to-few bucket?
Speaker: No tiers in enterprise ABM, it's just one-to-one or one-to-few, and one-to-few meaning 25 accounts or less in the cluster, and 25 is pretty high.
Speaker: You'll usually see like a 10 to 15 because they're getting full personalization.
Speaker: You want to make sure that you're maximizing impact on the very right accounts in that one-to-few segmentation.
Speaker: And so another really interesting thing that we're seeing in the market as well is enterprise ABM for these massive organizations or even midsize organizations has almost acted as a Trojan horse to bring in growth ABM.
Speaker: And why this is occurring is once you start
Speaker: building your ABM dashboard, highlighting account-based attribution, your sales and marketing and even customer success teams are unified in a way that they've never been in a traditional demand or lead gen motion.
Speaker: when they're running this enterprise, ABM, and they're seeing immense success with not only being unified, but also with the personalized tactics that customers are demanding today.
Speaker: Personalization was a hot topic, as in this is something really new and cool, but now it's just demanded.
Speaker: If you don't have personalization today,
Speaker: You're just not doing it in the best format.
Speaker: And so it acted as the Trojan horse because once these go-to-market teams were seeing how effective and how great enterprise ABM was, the leadership teams are all coming out of their off-sites if it's for 2024 planning or even historically.
Speaker: And they were saying, how do we scale this
Speaker: across more accounts and then they'll implement growth ABM and eventually end up with that holistic account base go to market.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I think it makes sense.
Speaker: I think the moment you shift to ABM, I think that drives a natural alignment, right?
Speaker: You're not talking about lead.
Speaker: particular contact that you touched but you go and say this is an account that I influenced and this is how they are moved this is hot you should take and then persuade right and I think so that happens and I think there's an alignment from maybe success or sales depending on what type of account that is right very interesting
Speaker: Just switching back, revisiting growth ABM, right?
Speaker: So the three tiers that you talked about, right?
Speaker: So you were saying that this is a framework that is applicable for smaller companies, right?
Speaker: So if you have like
Speaker: thousands of potential accounts in your time, you filter through your ICP criteria and you come and sort of divide into three parts.
Speaker: What are some ideal numbers based on your experience that Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 should have?
Speaker: And what are also the tactics that goes into pursuing these accounts which are part of 1, 2 and 3?
Speaker: So the numbers of accounts, it totally depends on how many resources you have at your disposal, how many ABM practitioners you have on your team.
Speaker: Because the core fundamental thing that you want with Growth ABM is you want to be able to support your tier one in that level.
Speaker: VIP type, blanking on the word, but you want to be able to support your tier one accounts in the greatest possible manner.
Speaker: And so that means you want a number that is, it's typically smaller.
Speaker: And the reason for that is you want to be able to effectively personalize.
Speaker: So if you're, let's say you're covering a thousand accounts and you split it up with 200 accounts in your tier one,
Speaker: are you really resourced to be able to personalize for 200 accounts?
Speaker: And personalization is not just adding the account name to the top of a landing page or the account name in an outreach email sequence.
Speaker: It is really looking at what are the imperatives going on within this account, going through the 10Ks in the investor relations, any relevant news and compiling all of that
Speaker: with any sales insights from their initial conversations so that you're speaking directly to the pains and the challenges that the business unit or the buying group is working to solve.
Speaker: And so when it comes to the number of accounts, tier one, you need to be able to do that.
Speaker: So if you're
Speaker: you have a massive ABM team and you're able to support it, put as many accounts as you can, given that support ability.
Speaker: But if you're one ABM practitioner, which my guess is if you're running growth ABM, that is probably the case in a smaller organization, make sure that you have enough that you're actually able to cover with your resources.
Speaker: And resources is also...
Speaker: your cross-functional ecosystem.
Speaker: So your content marketer, your product marketer, et cetera, can they help support it as well?
Speaker: And then the same goes for tier two as where you want to be able to have a number of accounts in there that given your resources, you can lightly personalize.
Speaker: I mean, you still want to have some depth in there.
Speaker: It's not tier three where tier three is very much that scaled approach.
Speaker: But you want to have a number that will make sense based off of what you have so you can still give those accounts some love.
Speaker: And tactic examples across the three tiers.
Speaker: For tier one, the greatest example that I use every time is it's higher budget type activities.
Speaker: And so, for example, if you were to do an executive dinner,
Speaker: And it was in a city where you have a great majority of your tier one accounts.
Speaker: That is where you're going to prioritize, right?
Speaker: It's VIP.
Speaker: It's where you're placing more of your go-to-market resources.
Speaker: Those tier one accounts should be getting that.
Speaker: Tier two would be, let's say you have a piece of content.
Speaker: Take in an e-book, for example, or you built a custom landing page.
Speaker: That custom landing page would have modular sections that you can personalize for the account.
Speaker: But the difference would be in a tier one, your personalization is really, really strong.
Speaker: So if you were going after an account like a TJ Maxx or a Macy's, maybe you'd have custom graphics or whatnot that is specific to a department store like a Macy's.
Speaker: As we're in a tier two, you wouldn't have custom graphics or you wouldn't have anything different.
Speaker: that is that personalized it would just include maybe the copy is different specific on the accounts uh challenges and pain points and how you can help to solve them and then even carrying this landing page example over to tier three tier three would be very scaled so maybe it is you know
Speaker: adding in very, very light personalization where applicable.
Speaker: So this would be more of that account name.
Speaker: And then depending on the account segmentation, let's say by industry or by pain point that the account is most likely to have that, let's say you found this through intent data,
Speaker: then your landing page would be surfaced to that account based off of that segmentation or whatnot.
Speaker: So it's very much doing it in a scaled manner versus the deeper levels of personalization and the deeper levels of how much budget resource you're putting behind the tactic that a tier one or tier two would have.
Speaker: Got it.
Speaker: So again, sticking with that question.
Speaker: So in the example that you took 1000 accounts, so ideally, so somebody who's just getting started, what have you seen?
Speaker: So the distribution, let's say, one to two ABM marketer or ABMR, from the resource perspective that is available.
Speaker: So what would be the construct of these three tiers?
Speaker: numbers of percentages.
Speaker: Let's say if you have one to two marketers, I would realistically put maybe 25 to 50 accounts within your tier one.
Speaker: And then within your tier two, I'd have...
Speaker: 150 to 250.
Speaker: And then tier three is the remaining.
Speaker: And the reasoning behind this is because tier three is scaled.
Speaker: So it's not like the forgotten accounts, but it is...
Speaker: These are the accounts that we are not able to put in the amount of resource to truly drive that personalization.
Speaker: And we don't want to put in the budget aspect from our go-to-market because based off of our insights and based off of our go-to-market strategy, they aren't the top, top priority to drive business.
Speaker: And that's why there's such a greater amount falling in that tier three.
Speaker: But then you just want to make sure that your tier one is large enough that you're able to truly drive that personalization and it will be effective for
Speaker: for those higher budget tactics.
Speaker: So that is an example.
Speaker: Again, it completely depends on what your organization can do.
Speaker: Another example was, let's say you have 350 accounts.
Speaker: You'd put in 25 in your tier one, about 50 in your tier two, and then the remaining in tier three.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: What's the role of intent?
Speaker: I'm talking about third-party intent, second-party intent, first-party intent.
Speaker: Does that affect any movement?
Speaker: Let's say there is a certain account that you classified as a tier 3 account.
Speaker: You're getting insights from third-party providers saying that they might be in market.
Speaker: You're validating, let's say from a G2 or other sources that they are actually actively researching.
Speaker: And based on your outreaches, etc., they're also visiting your website and you're able to track.
Speaker: So that particular account, let's say it's based on all these activities.
Speaker: So you have a fair confidence that they seem to be market, there's a demand.
Speaker: What would you do with that account?
Speaker: it can fluctuate throughout the different tiers.
Speaker: And intent is such a interesting topic.
Speaker: I think that we're just starting to hit intent maturity.
Speaker: And the difference is people are seeing
Speaker: a lot of false positives with third party.
Speaker: It is just surfacing enough engagement insights for account prioritization.
Speaker: And that is really important.
Speaker: Where it falls off after this regard and first parting intent has been the gold standard for leveraging intent.
Speaker: It's how can we de-anonymize who's coming to our webpage, who's going on what product,
Speaker: And then map that back to the different messaging and tactics that we're using.
Speaker: But intent is almost, it's one tool.
Speaker: It's not that end all be all or that one specific thing that will completely dictate where the accounts fall within the tiers.
Speaker: But
Speaker: It is something that if you're seeing a lot of first party intent from one account, you're seeing that correlated with a lot of third party intent and you're seeing engagement through maybe direct or indirect signals within your systems, that could be a great indicator where if there's an account that's a tier three, maybe you're saying this might be right and this timing might be the best to bump them up to a tier two.
Speaker: They don't go to tier one.
Speaker: Tier one is like high revenue and must win sort of an account, right?
Speaker: In order to be a tier one, you have to be high ACV.
Speaker: You have to be the go-to-market priority because you're pushing more resources into these accounts throughout the year.
Speaker: So it will most likely fluctuate.
Speaker: but you're not going to see these massive shifts in accounts with your tier ones.
Speaker: And that's not to say that a tier three couldn't move up to tier one based off of market conditions, or maybe there's an account that is right to move up, but your tier one accounts are going to be pretty solid.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So let's say an account,
Speaker: matures and then you're able to create a deal opportunity.
Speaker: So what happens?
Speaker: Are you classifying?
Speaker: Are you going to have a subclassification for those accounts?
Speaker: Because essentially once the deal is created or an opportunity is created, essentially what you're going to do is to provide some coverage, air cover, try to help.
Speaker: sales close faster, right?
Speaker: So does the strategy change because you're going from, let's say, an acquisition to an acceleration kind of motion, right?
Speaker: So what happens in those situations?
Speaker: Yeah, even on the tiered approaches, I mean, your ultimate goal is to bring as many accounts throughout that motion as you possibly can.
Speaker: So if an account, let's say a tier one account, just opened up an opportunity, you're still going to support them through their life cycle.
Speaker: It's not...
Speaker: a, you know, oh, you've got this opportunity.
Speaker: Here you go, sales.
Speaker: Good luck.
Speaker: Your ABM support just concluded.
Speaker: It is how can we continue to help accelerate this deal throughout the process now?
Speaker: And the attribution in which you're measuring success supports this.
Speaker: And the reason why I bring this up is because in the traditional lead gen, demand gen models,
Speaker: This would be the scenario where you may be SQL and then created that opportunity and then marketing passes it over to sales and says, hey, sales, you know, good luck.
Speaker: Go go close this account in that conveyor belt style fashion.
Speaker: But the way in which we look at it.
Speaker: And where the top ABM programs are finding success is looking at contact engagement.
Speaker: So over the past 90 days, has a contact had a meaningful interaction with your go to market team?
Speaker: That's spanning across marketing, customer success, and sales.
Speaker: So it could be they opened a webinar from your webpage and they rewatched that or they responded to a sales email for a couple examples.
Speaker: So what you're looking at
Speaker: is overall contact engagement within the account.
Speaker: So from that holistic standpoint, how many contacts are engaging?
Speaker: What are they engaging with?
Speaker: But the most important piece, and this all ties back to how you're helping these accounts go from that initial opportunity all the way through the close, is you're partnering with the sales team
Speaker: to identify who the contacts are within the buying group and you're tagging those contacts within your crm and measuring the specific engagement levels of the buying group and you're also looking at what the buying group is engaging with
Speaker: So instead of having an MQL, SQL motion where it's just, you know, going through this linear journey of which I think everybody agrees that the buying process is not linear in that capacity.
Speaker: What you're working to do now is partnering as a go-to-market team to drive engagement with
Speaker: with not just an account overall, but drive engagement within the right contacts.
Speaker: So you're also partnering to identify and tag who those contacts are.
Speaker: And the really cool piece about this is when an account maybe starts in the beginning of its journey with you and you're still in that demand creation phase, you'll see engagement
Speaker: you know, with maybe a couple contacts who you think are in the buying group or maybe it's like two.
Speaker: And then as that account progresses throughout the sales cycle, you're going to see the number of buying group contacts increase.
Speaker: You're also going to see engagement within the overall account increase.
Speaker: And then more specifically and more importantly, you're
Speaker: you're going to see engagement with that buying group increase.
Speaker: So it could look like 30% at the beginning in terms of how many buying group contacts are engaged.
Speaker: And then when you're in that legal stage or once you've closed that opportunity, you're seeing 90, 95% engagement with that buying group.
Speaker: And so watching the engagement levels, watching what they're engaging with,
Speaker: is really critical and another component is making sure that you're not losing engagement out of contacts in the buying group.
Speaker: And if you have the capacity and are able to take it even a step further, you can stakeholder map
Speaker: The buying group and you're able to effectively say, here are here are the champions, here are the detractors that we need to turn into into people who are going to love and appreciate what our product and solutions can bring.
Speaker: But.
Speaker: Again, it's that buying group, which is so critical.
Speaker: And a lot of organizations are just looking at MQAs or marketing qualified accounts, which is just surfacing up accounts that have high overall engagement.
Speaker: And then they're passing it over to sales.
Speaker: But where they're missing is identifying and tagging and tracking engagement of the contacts who really matter, which are the ones in the buying group.
Speaker: That makes sense.
Speaker: Excellent points.
Speaker: I just wanted to talk a little bit about the tactical stuffs, right?
Speaker: So have you seen, especially smaller companies starting with their APM programs,
Speaker: doing this three-tiered approach in tandem, or do you start with tier three and then based on some engagements, et cetera, do you progress?
Speaker: And that's my first part of this question.
Speaker: The second is, how do you structure your teams?
Speaker: tier specialists who are looking after tier one accounts, tier two accounts and tier three accounts and also another set of people or a person helping and really working closely with sales and accelerating an opportunity or a deal that was created.
Speaker: And so I can give you an example of an organization who has done a really great job with this.
Speaker: They have one ABM practitioner.
Speaker: And what they've done is instead of starting with tier three and then working their way that way,
Speaker: What they did was they actually took their complete target account universe and tiered the accounts from day one.
Speaker: And what they're doing, and this is definitely what I would recommend as well, but they're testing and building for their tier one accounts.
Speaker: And the different messaging that's resonating or the different tactics that are working really well,
Speaker: they're then scaling across tier two and tier three.
Speaker: So it's almost leveraging your resources to build those hyper-personalized assets and do it really, really effectively and also test within tier one.
Speaker: And then all of the learnings they're just carrying out through tier two and tier three.
Speaker: So it's a really great way to find out what's working and then scale it.
Speaker: To the second point of your question, the team structure, my guess is if you're a smaller organization, you might even be a demand gen or
Speaker: marketer who has been tasked from your boss to, hey, go test this ABM style program.
Speaker: It's either going to be that capacity or you'll be a solo ABM manager brought on to run your first initial ABM program within this company.
Speaker: And running a growth ABM strategy is most likely going to be where you start because of the fact that you're able to have that increased coverage from an account standpoint.
Speaker: So you're not putting all of your eggs within the enterprise ABM basket.
Speaker: But that's also not to say that you can't start out with enterprise ABM because if you were able to, and it makes sense from an ACV standpoint to put all of your eggs more in that enterprise ABM basket,
Speaker: I would run a one-to-few.
Speaker: So you're not running a couple one-to-ones because that can be a bit challenging, especially with an ABM pilot.
Speaker: But you definitely still run enterprise ABM if it makes sense.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So sticking to growth ABM and tier one, and you said this is an idle sort of a start for anybody, right?
Speaker: So starting with 25 accounts at max, right?
Speaker: And these are must-win accounts, right?
Speaker: A lot of people see that as a risk, right?
Speaker: So I'm putting all my eggs onto these 25 accounts.
Speaker: Could be a great fit, but I'm used to seeing some kind of a conversion motion, right?
Speaker: So you're doing my typical demand junk programs and now we're starting with this pilot and I've picked 25 accounts, right?
Speaker: While there is some kind of a strategic fit and all of that, it's still random.
Speaker: So there is no other signals that you're using except to say that, okay, these are accounts that eventually I wanted to convert.
Speaker: So how should people approach this and how should they mitigate?
Speaker: Should they factor?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I'll just cut the question.
Speaker: So how should they approach?
Speaker: Yeah, and so with this, sorry, just to clarify, is this a enterprise ABM one-to-few motion with the 25 accounts or less, or is this growth ABM like that?
Speaker: This is growth ABM in tier one, right?
Speaker: So there again, you suggested a limited set of accounts, right?
Speaker: So where you're sort of providing that white glove kind of service, like a lot of personalization and things like that, right?
Speaker: And the question can actually apply for
Speaker: for both the segments, but I'll stick with growth ABM, right?
Speaker: So these are tier one accounts, a hand-selected set of accounts that you're trying to really personize and then do this, right?
Speaker: And without, let's say, layering something like an intent or other signals, you run at a risk of not closing any of these accounts because maybe there's no demand within that
Speaker: Totally.
Speaker: And one of the biggest things in areas, even where ABM practitioners, what they're not doing when they're building out these, let's say, 25 accounts for tier one is they'll just go to the sales team and say, hey, sales team, who should we have in here?
Speaker: Who are the most important accounts that you all want?
Speaker: And that is definitely not the way we would recommend going about it.
Speaker: before having that conversation with sales, it is on you as the ABM-er to do your homework and create the best possible data-backed target account list that you possibly can.
Speaker: And so running through a couple different ways that you could look at this, one is a revenue assessment.
Speaker: So where are the different industries that are crushing it when it comes to, you know, net new or maybe it is cross sell upsell?
Speaker: Where are you seeing the revenue?
Speaker: What makes sense in that regard?
Speaker: You want to look at.
Speaker: what your go-to-market has in terms of prioritization.
Speaker: What are the accounts, if they already have it segmented, what are the accounts that are already getting the most strategic resource?
Speaker: You also want to look at engagement.
Speaker: Who has a high number of MQLs or has been engaging with a lot of your content currently?
Speaker: Intent, again, is another piece.
Speaker: I would really focus in on first-party intent.
Speaker: And then, you know, firmographic data as well.
Speaker: And if you're running it or have the ability to look into what account exec or what account executives might have the greatest appetite to be a good partner with you for this ABM program, that's another thing that you'll want to consider.
Speaker: But take all of those different factors and
Speaker: and build a first pass at those 25 accounts using that data.
Speaker: And what you'll be doing is coming to that conversation with sales saying, hey, sales, we ran all of this analysis.
Speaker: We know to a degree we're not the experts like you are, but we know to a degree what's going on in these accounts.
Speaker: We've put in the work.
Speaker: this is our first pass.
Speaker: How does this look to you and to what you're seeing and feeling within your conversations?
Speaker: And when you start the program and build the target account list in that regard, that's when you're going to find success.
Speaker: So it
Speaker: has to be a data-driven exercise.
Speaker: And you're not only going to find more success with the accounts that you're putting your resources into, but you're going to have so much more respect from the sales side because they're not just seeing you as someone who's coming and saying, hey, just toss over some accounts.
Speaker: You're actually showing how you are putting in the work as well and that this is a partnership, not just marketing done for these specific accounts.
Speaker: Makes sense.
Speaker: Fantastic.
Speaker: So this is awesome.
Speaker: I think we can continue talking about these frameworks, the applications and things like that maybe for some other day or be mindful of the time that we scheduled for this call.
Speaker: Davis, this has been a super exciting conversation around the frameworks, the overall ABM approach and things like that.
Speaker: Thank you for taking time and talking to me this morning.
Speaker: And if you have any final parting thoughts, please share.
Speaker: This was awesome.
Speaker: Thank you so much for having me on.
Speaker: This was a lot of fun.
Speaker: Absolutely, Davis.
Speaker: Thank you so much.
Speaker: I think we'll link the LinkedIn profile of yours and Forgex to companies or people want to talk to you so they have that input with you.
Speaker: Davis, thanks so much.
