How to Enable Your Sales Team to Activate Your ABM Strategy
Learn from Jenna Chambers of Terminus on how to enable your sales team to activate your ABM strategy. Discover the role of sales, understanding data, and achieving sales & marketing alignment.
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Hey folks, welcome to today's webinar, powered by TAC and Club PF with Terminus
My name is Mark Hillens.
My very special guest today is Jenna Chambers.
Jenna, what's going on?
Yeah, I'm good.
I'm excited.
How are you?
I'm good.
I'm good.
How long have you been with Terminus?
Just over two years.
So in some ways it feels like five minutes, in some ways it feels like five
years.
Is in that kind of weird, working from home stage where time doesn't move in a
normal way
anymore.
Exactly.
Yeah, no, I hear that.
I hear that.
If you folks have any questions, one of the letters know where you're listening
in from,
throw it up in the chat.
You should have access to the chat.
If you don't, I can enable it in case for some reason the chat isn't enabled.
Let us know in the Q&A.
So you can use the Q&A in the chat.
If you're listening to this on demand, thank you so much.
Jenna, you've been with Terminus for two years.
But you have a lot of experience in B2B Tech.
You've done many different things over the years.
We're going to unpack one of your favorite topics today, which is how to make
sure your
sales team is truly a partner with you when it comes to your account-based
marketing.
It is a topic that is very, very close to my heart.
As a career marketer who's recently gone to the dark side of sales, this has
been a hot
topic for me from the marketing side and now I see it from the sales side.
It's actually a different perspective.
So it's nice to be able to bring the two together.
I love it.
I love it.
And the key to all of this, when you think about your ABM is the who.
Like who are you trying to ultimately become a customer with the help of your
sales team,
right?
So we're going to dive into this right now.
Jenna, do you want to do any more of an introduction before we dive into today
's talk
and points down?
Do you want to tee anything else up for people?
No, I think it's just, you know, so I came up through, I would say, generalist
marketing,
kind of all aspects from branding to PBC to demand gen, etc, etc.
And I was in-house in a company when we were doing more traditional sort of
lead-in-demand
generation and we decided to make the move to, I'm going to age myself here,
but we called
it strategic key account pursuits as opposed to ABM because it was slightly
before that
was a thing.
And we had to figure it all out on our own.
We didn't realize that there were a bunch of resources out there.
We didn't realize that they were trying to test methods.
And so we went through that move on our own.
And that probably took us about a year, 18 months to do.
And it was a lot of lessons learned, which hopefully are helpful for you guys.
Painful for us at the time.
A bit helpful to be able to kind of path on.
And then since then I ended up agency side.
So I was doing like go-to-market strategies for clients, a lot of those were AB
M.
And those are some of the examples that I'll touch on today.
And then I've now ended up vendor side in a partner role, which is most
recently ended
up moving into heading up the sales team as well because we were just getting
so focused
on how best to run a partner deal that it became clear it wasn't that much
difference
for a direct deal.
And so now the whole new business team, the revenue team sits under me.
Fantastic.
Let's actually get into those conversation points today then.
Let's go right into it.
And those three conversation points are going to be about getting sales to
truly bind to
your ABM, how sales and marketing can actually work together and what sales
needs to know
to excel at this account based marketing motion.
And again, I would love to know people's take on what ABM is.
There's so much debate about this, Jenna, out on the internet, right?
Oh, yeah.
I've not heard any of that.
I don't know what you're talking about here.
Yeah, there's so much debate.
But yeah, let's unpack each of these.
So I'll let you run through the first one.
And folks, again, we're going to make this a conversation, ask questions, give
us your
opinions.
My high level opinion on ABM, Jenna, it's part of your go-to-market strategy.
It isn't like a go-to-market strategy on its own.
It's a way to really understand how to go after that ICP and make sure that you
're doing
it in a unified way.
But at the end of the day, ABM wasn't anything that's remarkably new because
sales has been
doing ABM for a long, long, long time.
It's like marketing is now caught up thanks to terminus creating the category.
That's my general thing.
Well, it's really interesting.
So just before we dive into that first point, I was having a conversation this
week at the
Gartner conference with a massive blue chip organization.
It was their global marketing team.
And they were asking me, is it normal for salespeople to lead evaluation of a
tool like
terminus?
And I was like, no, it's not normal.
They're in the conversation, but normally marketing leads the conversation and
they bring
sales in.
And they were saying that they feel like they're behind the ball because in
their company is
sales that's pushing for ABM and it's marketing that's kind of going, oh, I'm
not entirely
sure what this is.
And they're kind of in the research phase, which is one of the first times I've
ever
heard that that's a thing.
So maybe this transition is already starting to happen out in markets.
This is maybe a very timely conversation that we're having just now.
One can hope.
So let's dive into the first topic, pull up the slide again so you guys can
take a look
and follow along.
Let's go right into it, Jenna.
What do you think?
Perfect.
All right.
So trying to weave a bit of an analogy through this, which is that, you know,
before, so
today's session is all about how do you enable sales for ABM?
And there's two things that you need to do before you can even start to enable
sales.
This is the first one.
The first one is all about making sure that you've got sales buy-in.
You know, thinking about the analogy of skiing, it's, you know, you're not
going to go book
a ski holiday or you're not going to even think about going skiing or getting
on that
plane until you've gone to buy your ski gear.
Like it is step one of what you need to do.
And this is exactly the same for sales and marketing alignment.
So if you can pop onto the next slide, Mark, it's just a fact.
I think we're all aware of it that people hate change.
Like they just hate change, even if it's going to be good for them in the long
term.
There's something very, very confident about the status quo that kind of phrase
of better
the devil, you know.
But I think we all know that if you're going to launch ABM, it is almost
impossible that
you're going to get sales, all the sales team on board almost overnight.
That's just not going to happen.
You can put the best plans in place.
You can have the best strategy in the world, but that is not necessarily going
to happen
because there is an internal like culture shift that needs to happen.
So you've got some choices about what you can do here.
You can be bullish and just mandate that they get with the program or get out.
I mean, that is always going to feel like something that is being done to them
rather
than done for them.
And you're going to have some sort of coup on your hands.
It might be a silent coup.
People might not kind of chat back about it.
You might not hear too much about it, but they will just polish off their
resume or their
CV and they will just go job searching it and you will just have an exit.
And it's just not the way to do it.
So in terms of how you can go about this in a way that's maybe a bit more
helpful for
the sales team, there are three methods that I've seen work.
And then I'll talk about the one that's my personal favourite, which is dead
give way
as the blue harp beside it.
So let me talk about the other two first.
The first one is you can do this by you can change the comp plans.
So it's, you know, if you make ABM a profitable way for the sales team to do
business, you
know, there's a lot of culture change that can come from comp plans.
That's kind of the whole point of them is that they almost are used to drive
behaviours.
So maybe ABM accounts come with higher commission tiers.
When they close, you know, maybe there are kickers, target accounts get to
certain stages
of the funnel.
There are different ways that you can start to incentivise sales to move that
way that
doesn't just wait until the revenue hits the bank because if you only incentiv
ise through
comp plans through a revenue target, then, you know, sales people will go to
the path
of least resistance to get to the most money.
And that's good.
That's what we want them to do.
That's why they add revenue to our bottom line.
But if it's just as profitable for them to keep doing what they've done before,
but
just do it faster versus do it with ABM, they're going to do what they've done
before.
So you need to start to introduce incentivisations like through the process and
ways of working,
not just the net outcome results.
So that's one option.
Okay.
That makes sense.
And you know, I just had a quick thought on that.
Like I've never really, as a marketer, were to think, of course, like, what are
the people
motivated by especially in sales?
Money.
Why don't you align that incentive kind of out of the gate?
That's like, that's a brilliant, it's obvious, somewhat obvious, but it is an
obvious, like
insight almost, Jenna.
Well, and honestly, it was a bit of an eye opener for me as well, like as a
career marketer.
Like we're not as driven by conplans.
That's not really how we operate.
So we've just sat down and redone my team's conplans and step one was, okay,
how do we
want them to work?
How do we want them to get after this revenue?
Not just what's the revenue number, but the how.
And then we built the conplans against that.
And, you know, I was guided by our CRO who's been doing this for a long time.
And I was the same as you.
I was just like, I've not thought about it this way before, but this just makes
so much
sense.
It does.
It does.
And then if we take a look at it is layout the future utopia.
Yeah.
So this is like, you know, you can just like appeal to their innate sense of
what good might
look like in the future.
You know, you can go on a bit of an internal education mission, like explain
the expected
impact that the ABM program is going to have on ECV and time to close and
basically get
them excited about what work in an ABM motion is going to be like for them, as
opposed to
what it's going to be like today.
And basically you just, you just create sheer excitement and will and you do
loads of enable
men and you just hope that you've done such a good job of basically selling ABM
to sales
people that they've just adopted.
You can immediately think of all of the, all of the ways that that can go wrong
And it's one of the reasons that I don't tend to do that often.
I have seen it done, but I've only really seen it work where you have sales
people who have
done ABM in the past, selling it to their peers, which kind of leads me on to
the third point
here, which is what I do, which is about finding one or two innovators.
So you know, you've got that typical bell curve of change.
You find your early few innovators, then you get your early adopters and then
you get the
early majority.
So your innovators are those sales folks who are, they're open to new ways of
working.
So maybe they've done ABM in a previous organization, maybe their personality
is just like, what
do I do next?
Like, why can I do better and how can I do more?
But you know, for the marketing side of the house, it is easier to get one or
two folks
on boarded and fully enabled than it is an entire sales force.
But then you end up, you know, if you do this well and those early innovators
see more
success, you're going to have people knocking down your door, asking why they
're not part
of the program and you've managed to kind of affect that change.
So a bit of a story of how I've done this before.
So when I was agency side, we had a customer who wanted to move to ABM and it
was the marketing
team who wanted to make that move.
Sales did not.
It was a sales team about 60 people and we were just like, this is just going
to be impossible.
So we need to find an early innovator.
So we went actually for the most difficult person.
We found a guy who had retired three times because he was that age.
He just loves sales so much.
He just kept coming back to various jobs.
And we thought, you know, if we can get him on board, we can get anyone on
board.
So we kind of set our sights on him as like the pin to topple first.
And so we did, you know, the full enablement around him.
We did a discovery session with him on his sales process to just basically
figure out
kind of where the gaps were, where the sticking points were.
And then our entire mission for him was how can we have ABM help you overcome
the sticking
points that you're already experiencing.
So don't try and implicate pain that's not there.
Figure out what pain is already there and show him how ABM is going to help him
solve
for that.
So for him, he was not getting into deals early enough, like the type of sale
that he
was selling into was like, if you are the incumbent, you're basically locked in
there
for 10 years.
And he was not able to sort of get ahead of those sales cycles.
So the focus for the ABM program for him was focusing on accounts that we knew
were likely
to have projects coming up and that he started to engage with them before there
was an open
opportunity before there was a sales cycle.
So he was able to build relationship, become a trusted advisor.
So I'll tell you a bit more about that story when we go on to talking about the
account
plans, which we'll get to later.
But I could never have been as persuasive as a 60 something year old sales guy
who everybody
assumed was stuck in his ways who wouldn't want to do it, go in round all of
his fears
and telling them that we'd saved him a year's worth of work on his target
accounts.
And that we managed to land him meetings with 80% of his target accounts within
the first
six months, like those floodgates just opened.
And I think by finding your early innovators, like your aim is about creating
fear of missing
out.
And you basically become a magnet for the sales team as opposed to you trying
to persuade
them they're coming to you asking for it.
And that's when you've kind of cracked that internal buy in.
I love it.
It reminds me of crossing the chasm, Jeffrey Moore, right?
You have innovators, early adopters, and then it's like, people need this and
want this,
right?
So it's like, once you do that, everyone in the sales seems like, I need this
and I want
this so I can hit my quota, right?
But like you have to kind of have those, they call it in the book, the
lighthouse customers,
the lighthouse logos.
You need your like lighthouse salespeople almost.
Yes, yes.
That is exactly the book that this idea came from.
That's exactly what that was.
No, great.
I love it.
And actually this slide, let me pull up one more time before we transition to
the next
topic for today's conversation.
This slide is something that I really would recommend like folks use.
Like you could just take this from Jenna.
You'll get the slides and recording after this.
Like, hey, here are three ways we can start making change right now.
The first one I get, I think is really smart, but not too obvious, but when you
hear it,
it's obvious.
Laying with the future sure, I think that's what a lot of people I think try to
do.
This third one is like, I agree, like the thing that's going to really help you
change
behavior, salespeople listen and respect other salespeople.
No offense marketers.
Look, I'm a marketer.
Do salespeople really respect me as much?
Like, no, like the answer is no.
So yeah, I think getting your buy in from your sales champions around this is
so, so,
so important.
Now, let's talk about this now, Jenna, defining the new ways of working.
Look, I love snowboarding.
I ski a bit, but I like snowboarding more.
And I love again this kind of metaphor and algae you have set up here.
You know, you're not going to go block diamond right away.
It's like, and I think it's better than, by the way, the crawl, walk, run stuff
that
we always hear.
I like this one a lot better.
But yeah, why don't you start unpacking this for us because this starts to get
into like
yeah, the charter and the guiding principles.
Well, I mean, I'll let you in a little secret that this analogy has become a
bit of a standing
joke internally because I'm Scottish and I can't ski to save myself.
And I was telling the team the other day about my one disastrous attempt at
skiing where I
did not do these steps.
I basically decided like I'm from Scotland, I'm going to be innately good at
this.
And I just tried to ski and fail horribly and almost killed myself.
So this is like a constant reminder to self as well.
Like, buy the right gear.
This next step.
So, you know, buy the right gear is getting your sales buy in.
This next step is basically go to the nursery slope, like get taught how to ski
before you
hit a slope and that is about defining these new ways of working.
So you cannot just have sales and marketing in their own silos, buy into ABM
and then just
turn on ABM overnight.
You now need to talk about how that's going to change how you're going to work
together.
So on the next slide, I'm going to flag specifically what we need to talk to
the sales org about.
Because again, like you always hear sales marketing alignment and you need to
work differently
with ABM and then everything that comes after that are bullets about what
marketing needs
to do.
What about sales?
Why?
Why do they need to care?
What do they need to change?
So I think the first thing to talk about is the sales cycle.
So ABM is effectively flipping a sales cycle in its head a lot of the time.
So quite often you're engaging target counts and conversations with you.
Some cases it's before they even know that they have a need.
So if you think back to that guy that I was talking about earlier, if they sold
financial
institutions and they were looking for cabling for their data centers, if they
started to
build or maybe put their plans together to build a new facility, by that point
they have
already thought about who they're going to go to for RFP, probably the people
they went
to last time in the built a new bank or a new trading floor.
So what we needed to do was get him way ahead of that.
So he needed to start to get in and influence those accounts and become known
so that the
next time they're even thinking about an RFP, he was already in their mind.
And so that's what I mean about flipping that sales cycle is partly about
making sure that
you have got relationships established for when a commercial need occurs.
So a really good thing that you can do here as a sales team together is sit
down maybe
with leadership, maybe with marketing in the room and also map what you think
maybe some
expected sales cycles might look like with this new way of working.
Don't let somebody else tell you what your sales cycle needs to be.
Takes some ownership of it.
Okay, if I don't have somebody coming inbound asking for a demo, what would I
do differently
and how would I engage with them?
And I say some examples sales cycles because by the inherent nature of ABM they
will be
different.
So mapping out what you think some high level paths and trajectories might look
like.
That is where you can then sit down with marketing and say okay, traditionally
this is our sales
cycle and how we work together.
We think that we might have these three different scenarios now when we do ABM.
So do we have the right content?
Are you able to help us with any of those stages and basically together figure
out how
you're going to work together against this new process in the sales cycle?
I love this because I'm a huge advocate and believer in creating customer
journeys,
using customer engagement data points.
Once someone becomes a customer.
In this case, marketing is always trying to create the best customer journey,
right?
Like from the top to the bottom of the funnel.
But in this example, it's not just like the marketing journey.
It's like no, like here's like the way in which we think we're going to have to
actually
engage with people to get them into a conversation that has a chance of closing
, which selfishly
sounds very much more people first approach than just saying, hey, the brand is
going
to do all these activations and activities to hopefully get someone who's in
market
to raise their hand and do it.
You're taking the customer journey idea, applying it to the sales lands and
doing it
upfront and thinking about what the customer journey could look like before it
even happens.
Exactly.
I think about ABM as like way more hand to hand combat.
It is very kind of like person intensive, especially if you're doing one to one
If you go to more of a one to many model, it can definitely be a bit more
marked in light.
I think one to many ABM and demand gen have become so blurred and blended.
I'm not even really sure that there's a massive difference these days.
How sales teams are going to act in a one to many scenarios?
Probably not too different from what they're doing today.
But this one to one can be very highly targeted or want to feel like this is
where this kicks
in.
I love it.
I'll pull the slide back up and we can go into the next one then, which is...
From Role.
The metrics that matter.
Yes.
Again, if we think about the traditional ways of working between sales and
marketing in
a nutshell, it was marketing's job to bring sales leads and it was sales's job
to close
them.
That's all going to go out the window.
That is not how this is going to work anymore.
First of all, your ABM leads or qualified opportunities or whatever you decide
to turn
that phrase, they are going to be a mixture of inbound and outbound.
Some of them will come to you through your marketing efforts.
Some of them you're going to have to go pick up the phone or message on
LinkedIn or whatever
it is yourself.
We cannot start to measure what marketing's given sales and then how it's
moving through
the funnel in ABM.
It's going to be more about...
Yes, obviously it's going to be a bit revenue.
Are you generating more and are you doing that faster?
Do you have more in the pipeline?
That's a lagging indicator.
How do you know earlier what's working, what's not working?
Those leading indicators are going to be things like number of touches with
your target counts.
How many engaged stakeholders you have from each of those accounts?
What's the speed of the sales cycle?
What is the ACV of that sales cycle?
Understanding from a sales perspective, especially if you've tied the comp
plans to this as well,
you're basically solidifying these new metrics in.
It's just about understanding what you're going to be measured on, not just as
a sales
team, but as an ABM team, because marketing is going to be measured on the same
things
as you are.
Whereas I think sometimes sales and marketing alignment has gone wrong over the
years, is
that you're measured on different things.
It's very hard to become aligned when the CEO is going to waggle his finger or
her finger
or her to you or you over different things.
If you're both responsible for the same set of metrics, it does become a lot
easier to
lean around it and become, "No, it's no longer what are you going to do about
this.
It's what are we going to do about this?"
That's the third piece.
The other piece is basically talking about where the lines are going to be
between sales
and marketing, because in all honesty, I think it can become a bit blurry with
ABM.
In my experience, sometimes marketing can be reduced to a support function of
sales,
or they can go the opposite way and they can get so far into the sales cycle
that they
end up doing the job of sales and that experience, that intrinsic experience of
selling that
sellers have gets lost for the process.
I think one of the best things that you can do is then define basically a roles
and responsibilities
model very early that sales and marketing both buy into.
You can capture that in a RACI model if you want, but you just need to make
sure that
it's neither side telling the other.
It's both of you in agreement about how you're going to work together.
A really good example of this is when I was in-house when I was a morkter.
This is when we made this move from lead gen to ABM.
You'll have to excuse me.
I've got the worst air condition in this room and I've got a very dry throat.
No, no, no, take your time.
Yeah, it's a hotel room.
It's not the best air quality usually in hotels.
Yeah.
I was going for the back of my throat.
So I was on the marketing side.
My sales counterpart and I sat down and drew clear lines about who was going to
do in pursuit
of those accounts that we decided to target together.
My role was intel and messaging and his role was relationships and basically
finding the
commercial in with the accounts.
So with this approach, we met weekly.
We shared stories.
We shared updates, what we'd learned that week.
And then what was crucial was it wasn't just, hey, here's what I learned.
Here's what I learned by C next week.
We would always end that weekly meeting with, okay, how is that going to change
what we
do next week?
Are we going to have to change the messaging?
Are we going to have to reposition what we think the next meeting is going to
be like,
oh, are we going to reach out to this person, to this person?
Or are we going to call them rather than LinkedIn or whatever it's going to be?
It was always making sure that we were learning something from each week's
engagement as opposed
to just adding another data point to the existing plan and ignoring what we
needed to change
in the plan.
So it really worked for us.
So we spotted on a press release that Norway's biggest oil and gas producer was
going to be
moving for the first time to Scotland.
They were going to open a HQ in Scotland, which is where we worked.
And we are, ICP, were oil and gas companies.
So we put together a whole plan to promote ourselves.
It was very much about, hey, we are the company, the oil and gas producers
trust.
So it was very much like social proofing that all campaign became about their
peers who
are already here talking about how much they trusted us and how great we were.
And that was the entire thing.
And that was everything from every person who reached out to them and LinkedIn.
We had a whole team of people reach out and welcome them to the region and
invite them
to lunch, tell them good places to go about food.
It was nothing to do with our tool.
It was all about establishing relationships.
All of the ads that we hit them with were all about just basically trust in the
fact
that we were very experienced and that 80% of their peers worked with us, et c
etera,
et cetera.
We then paid top dollar for PPC for the messages that we were hitting them with
in the ads.
And it worked.
And we were ready to launch the RFPs.
We were already connected with a bunch of them.
We were already multiple people in multiple conversations.
We were invited to the RFP not only to answer it, but we were invited to help
shape the document.
And then surprisingly, we won.
And we got the business.
So it was, if Andy and I had not worked together like that, traditional
marketing would never
have come up with that because obviously you just can't at scale.
So that's maybe an example of how you've seen this work together.
I love that example.
And also reminds me of it.
You used at least three, maybe four principles of influence shouting out to
Robert Chaldini
in that example.
Like you used authority, you used reciprocity.
There was definitely consistency.
So anyway, that's probably a webinar for another day.
But I feel like you use techniques that are just so innately, again, people
first, psychological
techniques to say, hey, look at us versus throwing your product at the company
or throwing
your brain at the company.
Well, and then I also think, like side tangent and your rights, probably a
whole other webinar
is like, that is the really nice thing about ABM.
Is that you can break out of like the normal way that you do campaigning and
you can just
apply a bit of common sense.
Like, what do we know?
What do they need to hear?
What's going to make them feel good?
And you kind of have like the time and the ability to make that happen.
I sometimes feel like with mass campaigns, like they're often running and you
slightly
lost control of them and they're out and they're happening.
Whereas this, you're much more, you know, sales is much more of like the
conductor of
the whole relationship and they're bringing the right people in and they're
making sure
the messages are there and marketing is also reflective of that.
So that is a target account.
You just get this very simple, very elegant experience and it just makes you
feel like
this becomes a natural choice.
No, I love that.
Yeah.
Nikita says it's a bit of common sense.
Yeah.
It's underrated.
Honestly, like the amount of times we sit down as a team about things and
Sunday's going
to be like, hey, are we going to use this methodology or this?
Do you know, like, I don't know what do they need?
Like if there's a book about it, like, what would I want to happen and let's do
that?
Are you ready to hit the slopes now, Jenna?
I think so.
Are you?
I'm ready.
Oh, yeah.
I wish I was on the slopes right now.
Man, that would be tremendous.
But we're not.
You know, it's fine.
So, yeah, let's go hit the slopes.
Let's start putting some of this stuff into action.
So you should see that next slide now and we're moving into the third topic of
discussion
today.
How do you make this very, very practical?
Yeah.
Well, exactly.
So like we've now been chatting for half an hour, but it is so important to
make sure
that you've done those first two steps before you start.
So anything I'm about to speak about from now onwards, if you hadn't done the
first
two steps, it's not going to work.
So this is very much like now it's time to kind of come hit the slope.
So if you go to the next slide, I basically have like three enablement points
that I think
are really important for sales when it comes to ABM.
So the first one is about making sure that you have got sales involved in
identifying
target accounts.
So there's a bit more detail on the next slide, I think, Mark.
So you don't want to just hold on just before we do that.
You don't want to just say, "Hey, sales, here are the accounts we're going
after?"
No, you do not.
And actually, as an agency, like the amount of times that we would have
customers come
to us and say, "Oh, hey, we're about to start ABM.
We'd be like, 'Great, do you have your target account list?'
And we're like, 'Yeah, sales told us who they want to target.'
And we would all just sit in like a facepalm and go, 'Oh, no.
Oh, no, this is just not going to work from the start.'
So it goes both ways.
You don't want sales just telling you and you don't want marketing just to tell
you.
It's not going to happen.
Okay.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So we're like, 'It can't be a wish list from sales.'
And then nine times out of ten, that meant that they would go back and go, '
Okay, well,
we'll just tell sales who to target.'
I'm like, 'No, it's neither.
It needs to be both of you.'
So this is what this is all about, is just making sure that you, first of all,
that you
have defined your ICP.
And again, that should be something that both sales and marketing are in the
room for.
So ideally, you get to sit with RevOps and do this if you have a large enough
team.
That makes things a lot easier.
There's a lot of data crunching that they can help do.
But it's basically about finding like, what are the common traits of existing
customers
as well as opportunities that have progressed well through your pipeline, not
just customers?
Where they have basically spotted patterns in what makes a good fit customer
there.
So I always think that the key to a really great ICP is almost like a two-tier
ICP, a
bit like a sales process.
One is qualification and one is discovery.
So at the qualification level, it's basic math, it's firmographics.
Are they this size?
Do they have this revenue?
Are they in this geo, et cetera, et cetera?
It's a bit more binary.
And that's just pure qualification.
Like, could they be a good customer or could they not?
Yes, no, divide.
And then off those groups that could be a good customer, what are those more
intrinsic
things, things like behaviors that you can't necessarily see just by looking
like on a
balance sheet or looking at their annual report.
So you can find tools, there are loads of them out there to help you find
companies that
fit your ICP.
And that's going to help you create your total address goal or total relevant
market.
And from there, you're going to want to find your best bets.
And that's where the second tier of almost like the discovery across that total
relevant
market kicks in.
So who are those accounts that you're going to pull into your ABM program?
And this is where sales marketing together can be incredibly powerful.
So you've got your third party and sometimes even your first party data points
from marketing.
So things like third party intent, web visits, how accounts are engaging with
your content
and how they're engaging with your marketing campaigns.
But it's also so important to also have what sales know about those accounts.
Like what conversations have they had?
Who do they know over there?
Who, which partners do we have that we know that have got ends over there where
we can
start to understand not just are they a good fit on paper and are they showing
the right
behaviors, but are they actually willing to engage in a conversation and blend
all of
those insights together to help you figure out who your target accounts should
be.
A really great way to bring that sales insights is to maybe use a tool like G
ONG where you're
not relying on a sales person remembering 50 conversations that they've had
over the
last two years, you're able to like scrape all of your code data or all your
recording
data and start to like pull out patterns and things.
That's where somebody in RedWops can really help with that element as well.
Yeah, with machine learning now, there's a lot of AI tools, even GONG might
have one
inside their platform now natively built that allows you to like literally say,
all right,
out of this data set of this many calls, this is what I want to know.
How many of our calls or like not even how many?
What are the top three problems that are heard most often in all of our calls?
Who are asking those problems?
What, literally, you could just ask the data set through conversational
interface now,
those questions.
It's super powerful and I love your whole thing around like I call it like fit
and you
use that word fit versus intent.
What's the fit of the account versus the intent of the account or really the
intent of the
buyers in that account?
Exactly.
Exactly.
I could fan girl about GONG all day long.
GONG engage is a new module that they have and I think that we're all about to
become
like supercharged versions of ourselves with that because the things that we'd
have taken
us weeks to do, we're just going to get the answers to.
And that's what I really like about the use of how GONG in particular has gone
about
AI is it's all about kind of helping us do our jobs better.
It's not about replacing anything, it's just about helping us be more
efficiently, we
have more insights.
And then okay, so then you figured out basically all of the accounts that you
want to pull into
your ABM program and then you need to remember that not all accounts are
created equal.
So you ideally want to have a blend of accounts that are maybe showing buying
behaviors right
now versus those that are more like those quite well accounts that you want to
go after.
And so you're basically looking for a blended model across various tiers.
So you know, the way that that tends to come up in ABM is who's going to be in
your one-to-one
campaigns versus your one-to-many versus your one-to-two.
So like your one-to-one accounts are going to get the white glove treatment,
the one-to-few
accounts are going to be put into a cluster, they're going to be treated like a
really
tiny market.
And then maybe accounts that are a good fit, but they're not necessarily
showing the most
amount of intent at the moment, but there's definitely something there.
You maybe wrap them into a one-to-many program.
So after everybody has agreed on the target accounts, the sales team should
then take
lead on creating account plans, especially for those one-to-one and one-to-few
accounts,
which I've neatly led myself onto my second enablement point of that.
Now, this is super important.
I can't wait to get your perspective on this.
So we just flipped to the next slide where Jenna has laid out a few more
details of these
target account plans.
I have seen this done well.
I wouldn't say amazing.
And I've seen this not done at all.
I would argue that if you don't do this at all, I don't think ABM will be super
effective.
I mean, you could do all the other stuff, but if you don't take the time to
truly hone
in on an account and study it and understand how to go after it and how to
engage with
it and what makes it a viable, high-ACV account, and it's basically trying to
play a game
without any preparation.
You know what I mean, Jenna?
I don't know.
It's like never going on the bunny slope, just trying to go down the black
diamond.
Yeah, well, like me, like a fool, exactly.
Well, this, I think where I see people with good intentions and where it goes
wrong is
that people will put together very detailed research dossies on each of their
target accounts
and they will understand to the nth degree everything about that account, which
is brilliant.
And you should absolutely do that if you have the time and the resources and if
not, do
a cut down version of that.
But they don't do what you just mentioned was that, okay, but how do we use
that information?
What does that mean for how we go after them?
How do we, I don't even know if there's a phrase for this, but go to market to
one account,
go to account.
Like how do we do that, given all the information that we have today?
And that is what these account plans should do.
That is a blow to account.
I don't think I've ever heard that term, but that makes a lot of sense.
Well, I just made it up.
Maybe we should coin it.
You go to account plan.
You go to account plan.
Yeah.
Make it a thing.
And this is where I think a lot of sales people start to feel a bit more in the
drive
and seat and a bit more comfortable again, because sales folks are used to
putting together
plans.
There are normally deal plans for opportunities that already exist in pipeline.
And so this is really, it's exactly the same, but there are two key differences
One is that we're starting earlier.
So before there is an open opportunity.
And the second is that the plan should be from the perspective of the target
account,
as opposed to from our perspective.
And if you make sure that your entire target account plan is written from the
perspective
of the target account, you are not going to be able to help but make your
touches personal
and consistent and meaningful for them.
It's just, if you read through your target account plans that you have today, I
almost
guarantee they're going to be written from your perspective, not from their
perspective.
Make that flip and put it in their perspective.
And suddenly you're messaging your content, what to say to the next, all
becomes a lot
cleaner at that point.
That way, yes, and hot.
Yes.
Well, that will be a clip from this webinar for sure.
No, that's really interesting.
Yeah, unpacked is a bit more for everyone than, yeah, like, yeah, this is very
important,
I feel like.
Yeah.
So then, so things that I think are very important to go into these, these
account
plans are making sure that you have uncovered a North Star metric that you're
selling against,
because ABM is about creating long-term profitable relationships.
It's not about getting to that first signature.
It is about, you know, five years from now, are you still a great partnership
together?
So making sure, like, what is very important to them?
So I always have my sales team put together these account plans and they are
always identifying
six months post the first signature.
What is going to make that economic buyer, that decision maker, the CEO, super
happy
that they made the decision to go with us?
Like, what metric has moved by how much in what timeframe, like make it time-
bound, make
it like an actual number that measurable.
And that becomes, you know, such a key part of this target account plan.
And you know, the usual sales process applies here, like, don't take the first
answer, keep
digging, keep asking why, keep getting further and further into that.
You know, what they think they need to measure might not quite be right, you
know, maybe they're
measuring against a symptom rather than the cause.
So make sure that you get kind of get down to that proper cause.
The next part is about a decision making unit map.
So before, obviously, you start to engage the account, you're going to be a bit
limited
on what you can put in there.
And the whole point of these account plans is that they should be living,
breathing documents.
You shouldn't just write them and leave them in a digital shelf.
You should be constantly adapting them.
So you're only going to really be able to put things like job titles and who
works for
who at the start.
But as you start to engage the account, you start to get into more conversation
with
them.
You're going to be able to evolve them up to become, okay, what do each of
these people
care about?
What are they personally being measured against and how does that layer up to
that North Star
metrics?
So you're making a link between the people and the business objective.
Another thing that I think is really useful to capture are things like, what is
their
personality?
Like, how do they like to be communicated with, you know, who gets on with who,
who will listen
to who, who's in competition that you should never have tried to make decisions
together
because they're always going to beat each other, stuff like that becomes
invaluable
if your target account is one account and you don't know those interactions.
You can get lost for six months in some internal politics because you didn't
navigate your
way around that.
So, you know, it sounds like a very flippant thing to put on there, but it's
actually really
important.
There's another tool that I've used before that I find really helpful before
you engage
with stakeholders.
It's called crystal nose.
Oh, yeah.
Yes.
That's excellent and that basically sits on top of their LinkedIn profile and
like gives
you personality typing and gives you tips and tricks for communication styles
for people.
So before you go into that first meeting, I find it very helpful to have a
quick look
on crystal nose and just get an idea of the type of people I'm going into meet
with.
I always make sure that the team have got current state listed out on the
account plan.
So how are they going about solving the problem that you're hoping to solve
today?
Is it working?
What could be improved?
What pains are they feeling?
And then really vitally, how does your current state stack up against that
North Star metric?
If you keep doing what you're doing today, are you going to hit that North Star
metric?
And if the answer is no, great.
You've implemented enough, implicated enough pain, like from a mid-air
perspective, that
they know that they need to do something about it.
Then finally, where are they investing?
So are they, you know, where are the flagship project?
Have they made any acquisitions?
Do you know about their tech purchases, especially if you're a tech company,
been able to know
their existing tech landscape?
Is that going to block you out of the account?
Can you integrate some of their techs?
Or if they just bought a competitor of yours and they're locked in for three
years, they
might be a perfect target account, but you're never going to sell to them.
So you should demo them and put someone else into your AVM program.
So those are the highlights in the high level sections.
I think we need to go into those account plans.
I love it.
I'll pull up one more time.
So I mean, just take a quick look at it.
If you want to take a screenshot, feel free again.
You'll get the slides after the fact.
You'll get the recording.
It's all going to be in the tech network and Club PF.
But those five things, North Star, decision making, unit map, current state,
places where
they're going to invest in a tech stack.
I love crystal nodes, by the way.
I forgot about that tool.
Highly recommend it.
Thank you for bringing that up, Jenna.
Yeah, I am obsessed.
I was a bit unsure how accurate it would be.
So the first thing I did when I got it was I put it on top of my profile and it
was like
holding the mirror up to myself.
What it's that back, I was like, yep, that's me.
Yeah.
It's like the dis...
It's a personality.
It's not so much behavior, but it's definitely more personality.
Yeah, it's a...
Myers brings whatever you want to call it.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And then the third and final enablement point then for sales when it comes to
ABM is around
data, being able to kind of read it and know what to do with it because
everywhere that
people speak about ABM, they're always talking about data first and data led
and there's
a lot of triggers from data that help marketing, but salespeople are left going
, I've just been
inundated with a whole bunch of data and there's actually not much insight from
it.
It's just a bunch of stuff and they just don't know what to do.
I think the first thing is making sure that your sales team is aware that you
need to
be able to spot engagement with your target accounts because obviously you're
not looking
for the Kabbukah demo or a lead.
So what does engagement look like and work with marketing so that you know what
that
signal looks like so that you know what you're looking out for?
So something is happening and if you have a tool in place, you'll get some sort
of trigger
or alert, but if you don't have a tool and you're doing it manually, there are
still
many, many things that you can look for that it implies that an account is
starting to
engage with you.
Sorry, just because you've started to see that engagement does not mean it's
time for sales
to start blindly calling, emailing, messaging those accounts at semi-regular
interval and
hope that they can just nurture them into submission.
The whole point of this data is about is meeting them where they are.
So are they only showing third party intent?
If that's true, then they're probably solution, they're problem aware, but they
're not solution
aware and they're certainly not brand aware.
So you and marketing might want to work together to start to make them brand
aware and that
might be the next step that you take there.
Maybe they're coming to your site and they're not doing anything more than that
So how many people are coming to your site?
How often are they coming to your site?
What are they spending time reading?
And therefore, what do you need to get them to do next to move on to that next
stage?
So that's kind of one of these keys to data is to read the data for ABM is
understand where
they are and what the next action is that you want them to take as opposed to
when can
I call them?
It's not about that anymore.
It's about kind of like, okay, you're a, how'd you get them to be?
They're d great.
How'd you get them to e and it's just constantly helping accounts move along
and move along.
There's a flip site to the data point though, which is about personalized
messaging and
content.
So again, that often gets interpreted as what messaging are we going to put in
our ads and
what content will marketing produce.
But actually where sales teams can really excel as if they can take the data on
an account,
understand where they are and where they need them to move next.
That helps them craft the most personalized messaging for outreach or future
calls or
for the next account that they're, or for the next meeting that they're going
to get
into because that account feels like the vendors then in lockstep with them.
So two quick stories about this and then I'll around this side.
So the first thing is my team and what they do today is they prep for their
meetings by
looking at all of those engagement triggers and all of those data points.
So they'll maybe had one conversation with the account.
They'll have agreed the agenda for the next one.
They will always cover off the agenda they've agreed with, but they will also
look at all
of the engagement data and they will figure out what else the account cares
about and
they will naturally bring that up through the course of the second call.
And the people who are on the receiving end keeps saying, oh my goodness, yeah,
actually
we are talking about that.
And how did you know that?
And just it makes them feel seen, which is very vital for that relationship
building.
The other side of that is maybe before you're in a conversation with them, so
social selling.
So using that data to segment and prioritize within your target accounts.
Map your messaging to their pain points and challenges that the data is telling
you that
they have.
Being able to then take that messaging and making it persona specific and then
reaching
out via social selling.
I did that for a client once when I was agency side and we added 1.2 million to
their pipeline
in six weeks, which was just phenomenal.
And one, I think the key was all of the messaging was written based on the data
, but then sales
and marketing wrote those messages together.
So marketing didn't write a fluffy marketing message for sales to send and
sales didn't
try to sell.
Together they came to the perfect kind of just start a conversation message.
And it was just, I've never seen results like it was game changing.
I love that.
That's really smart around.
Yeah, I mean, not all signals of engagement are equal.
It's kind of a lesson right there to sum it up.
And then when you think about preparing to go down the slope, to go down the
slope, it's
not just about the practice, but it's almost maybe not just in time, you know,
research.
But if you do it that day or the day before, using the signals to understand
where the
buying team is right now, since you've last talked to them or since you last
tried to
reach out to them.
Exactly, exactly.
Like we had one, it was actually a Monday, one of my team messages in the
morning and
he was like, oh, I'll have a conversation this afternoon and all conversations
to date have
been about ads and we were about to close a deal.
But actually this morning, they have been all over the site looking at our chat
bot feature.
I'm going to bring that up as well.
And I was like, go ahead, go forth.
And they were like actually because it hadn't been mentioned in the sales cycle
, we didn't
know that you had one, but we were looking at one anyway.
So could we do both?
Yes.
And a totally different sales cycle, which wouldn't have happened if all we'd
done is
just take the agenda from last call.
So to that point, for that just in time research, like it does change the
trajectory of deals.
No, I love that.
Folks, we're wrapping up.
If you have any questions, we can stay on for another five minutes.
Jenna has generously also given you folks some resources, which you'll have in
the follow-up
as well.
But there's a great ebook you've identified in a course that you guys have to
from the
Terminus website that people can check out to go deeper.
So the course is completely free.
It's a bit of a time investment.
It takes about seven or eight hours.
It's not quick, but I had done EBM for quite a long time before I took it.
I had to do it as part of my onboarding and I was a bit snobby about it.
I was like, I don't need this.
I've done EBM for a long time and I took it and I took a lot of notes.
It's actually really good.
So highly, highly recommend.
And then I've left my LinkedIn on the next slide.
So if you guys want to not have a conversation here, if you want to follow up
with any of
the points that this will come out, not about Terminus, but just about sales
and EBM, then
more than happy for you to connect.
Let me actually just copy this link right now and I'll drop it in the chat for
everyone
so you can connect with Jenna right now on LinkedIn.
Big thank you, Jenna.
Folks, if there's any questions, like I said, we have about four minutes or so.
We're right on time.
Fantastic content.
Thank you so much for this.
I learned a couple things today, which is always the goal.
When you go to any of these types of webinars or you consume any content, does
it teach you
something?
I think that's kind of like the watermark, right?
So hopefully you folks learn some stuff.
Sam, you're welcome.
Jenna, any last, you could say key takeaway or anything you want to leave
everyone with?
No, I mean, I'm glad if it's been useful.
You're all welcome.
I sit through a lot of webinars and I get so frustrated if I get to the end and
I'm like,
"Oh, that was just so high level.
There's nothing I can take away from that."
So hopefully there was at least one or two nuggets.
I've had a really good time.
This is a great chat.
Thank you, Mark.
Yeah, no, thank you, everyone.
Hope you have a great rest of your day.
Again, if you're listening to the recording, thank you for taking the time to
do so.
Check out more resources on the TAC network.
Terminus, of course, has a ton of things about a company's marketing, a company
selling,
check out terminus.com.
And folks, we'll see you at the next one.
It's in a couple of weeks, end of June.
Talk to you soon.
Thanks again, Jenna.
Thanks, bye.
Bye. [BLANK_AUDIO]
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