28 - From 0 to ABM hero (with Andrei Zinkevich & Vladimir Blagojević, Co-Founders at Fullfunnel.io)

Are you sick and tired of demand-generation bullshit? If you had enough of theoretical advice, impossible to implement? Are you done with these so-called demand-generation influencers? In this podcast, we interview marketing leaders and excellent practitioners to give you real advice that you can implement today. Welcome to Driving Demand. Welcome to another episode of Driving Demand. And with me today, I have Andre and Vladimir from Full Funnel. Great to have you both. Thank you so much. Yeah, it's always really tricky to have two people to interview because you never know who's going to answer. I will try to redirect my questions a bit. But you are, of course, co-founders of a pretty well-known marketing agency now. Full Funnel. Especially a European one, which is also what we focus on here on this podcast. You'll also have a pretty big community called the Trenches. Can you start, Andre, maybe sharing a little bit on how you both got started with that, like how you met each other and how ended up at the agency? I think Vlad can share the story better. So first of all, just a quick correction, we're not really an agency. We work with our clients, we provide training and consulting, and actually train their team to implement account with marketing operations, and so that they can target their accounts and land opportunities. But the way that Andre and I met, I think the first time we met was back in 2018. I've been always working with B2B companies, B2B marketing. Always complex high ACV, complex sales, multiple buyers, et cetera. And a lot of the stuff that I was trying to implement, to be honest, didn't really work. And I learned about Andre and his stuff back in 2018, 2017. I don't know when you-- Andre launched his first community. He's the first version of Trenches. That's how-- I was one of the first members that we met. And then we met in person in Valencia, where I actually lived. And he was doing talk about LinkedIn and how to do a BM on LinkedIn. And that's how we met initially. But how we started and how we decided to do funnel together is when COVID hit, I got a call from one of our clients. Well, actually, it was kind of an accelerator, and they were working with a bunch of startups and scale-ups. And everybody was in panic. It was like, oh shit, we don't have anymore the trade shows, events, like how are we going to get our leads? And I said, okay, let's do it. But then suddenly I had like more than 20 companies reaching out to me. And I was like, okay, we need to do something for the group of the companies. And we need to produce a lot of content. I knew who I needed to talk to, which was Andre. So we set up this together, like an eight-week program. We guided the companies through that difficult times. We developed like tons of material videos, you know, at that time. And I mean, it was such a fun. We decided to basically start full funnel together and work together on it. Really cool that you also started in perhaps the trickiest period in marketing history during the pandemic, right? Where people wanted to also pull back on marketing a bit, kind of like now. But it's a really cool, cool story. And it feels like you have also found your niche very nicely, which is, which I think is really cool. And we talked about that before, like there are a lot of both consultancy, ADCs and those types that are very broad. In a way, they focus on everything marketing. But I think you have made it clear that you have a very niche focus. And one of those topics that I really want to deep dive very practical in today is, is ABM. Because I think now when, when we have a recession going on, people are looking or companies are looking to go a bit up market. It's at least what I hear or what we do as well. And in that, then want to do more ABM. So you want to target less accounts, obviously, but be more valuable. But I think everyone has such a different view on what ABM is. So today I really wanted us to kind of develop a little bit of a pilot program that anyone could use from your perspective to try and make it very simple how you could get started with ABM. So, and before we go into what you need to do, maybe you can touch a bit upon what you need before getting started, what you need as a company to align around ABM, so to say. Yeah, absolutely. We have a lot of such and we usually share the framework, which is called zero to ABM, which includes several stages, how companies can launch pilot program documented and operationalize and I think we can share with blood. Each of the stages and the step by step process. So maybe let's start with alignments where blood can share some sorts and I would complement it. I think even before alignment, you need to first understand is is ABM a good fit for me, right? And I think that's really important for listeners. The first thing to understand is usually it is well, not usually it's basically a good fit for companies that have high annual contract value, which means in practice above 30k or so, right doesn't doesn't have to mean that this is your average deals, let's say your upper market, you're maybe starting with enterprise, it's going like 3050 and above, right. This is the first thing. Second is when you have complex sales, what does that mean? It can mean that you have multiple buyers, it can mean as well that you are selling, let's say into the enterprise with long processes and usually again multiple buyers, but also it means that sometimes maybe you're selling, you know, a complex piece of a complex solution, maybe a software that also needs implementation, maybe training, et cetera, so that makes it additionally complex. So there's a number of these characteristics of your business of your deals, et cetera, that make it a good fit. But then there is another bunch of stuff that you should understand to see whether you actually ready to do it, like you actually a question was like, what do we need to get ready and what do we need to align on? Well, the first thing you need to get ready and the line on is the ICP, like the ideal customer profile. And when we talk about ideal customer profile, we're not talking about the way that, you know, maybe a lot of companies are thinking about it in terms of some sort of generic personas or basically, like we were discussing just before the episode you were saying like, okay, the first time you hired an ABM agency, what happened is, and this is what we see every time. And we review, so they take a bunch of accounts, like maybe 1000 accounts and they put it in a campaign. And so how do they select them? Well, it's like some industries, okay, the roles, and then they start marketing on that. Well, that's not really ABM, right? So you really need to narrow down by analyzing your revenue, historic, like where did you have the most success, where do you have, you know, where's the most revenue coming from, et cetera, to really nailed down. What are the target vertical, the geographies, what are those characteristics, we call them accounts, qualification, this qualification criteria, what are those characteristics that really make good fit that I can actually reasonably sell, because again, ABM is high value deals, and it means that for many companies, for most companies, you cannot afford to spend like nine or 12 months chasing a deal that only has 10% of closing, right? So that's the first thing you want to align on this, the next thing you want to align on as well is, okay, what are the actual goals of this campaign, because ABM, a lot of people think about ABM is basically generation, right, or just net new accounts. But ABM can be perfectly used to, for example, expand deals, and in a lot of cases, this is what we notice, based on the revenue analysis that I mentioned, that there is a huge opportunity to expand deals instead of, you know, going after new net new accounts. So first, aligning on the goal, aligning on the ICP, aligning also on, okay, how are we going to do this, so how are we going to exactly go about warming up these accounts, creating awareness in them, how are we going to activate them, et cetera, et cetera, and these are the stuff that we are, I think, going to address in the rest of the. Yeah, I feel like that, I think it's so interesting and I think that's one of the biggest mistakes I see and that I have done is like, yeah, we want to do ABM because we want to go a bit up market, want to increase our. Or contract value size, but we're not really willing to narrow it down so we end up in sort of between some sort of demand and play and ABM play where we decide on like a thousand accounts maybe so it doesn't really become personal, but it becomes smaller than what we usually do in more demand. So it's like no man's land almost, do you see that also, before we continue this episode, I want to tell you about one of today's sponsors albacross. I first started using albacross a few years ago to identify unseen website visitors and personalize the messaging on the web, but only within a few years, they've developed to be a key player when it comes to buyer intent data. So you get account level insights into every direction with a potential buyer from albacross, from awareness, all the way down to retention. And it means that albacross makes it easier to answer all of these key demand questions that we have, which accounts are ready to buy and should be sent to sales, which add campaign or driving the most ICP buyers, what is my ideal customer account interested in and how can I better reach them. So if you are trying to figure out these problems, check them out at albacross.com and they'll help you out. And now back to the episode. Yeah, that's correct. That's absolutely true. And this is one of the biggest mistakes that B2B companies are making. And there is one thing that everybody needs to keep in mind. Education about the Coinbase market and came from ABM vendors and the ultimate goal of these vendors is to sell their software, which is obvious, right? If I was working for that software, I would be doing the same, right? I would be promoting and selling it. The problem is in companies that I was reading during the last days, the create mental models book. And that was a nice concept or mental model, which is called the first principle, sinking, right? So, which means that you need to dive into the facts and understand how the principles work, right? But what most companies are doing and it's not limited to ABM or demand generation or any other marketing program. And I look at the surface, okay, nice. So basically now we just select what we need is to purchase expensive software and from a bunch of ads showing them, right, gated content webinars or maybe just promote on the landing page. So whenever somebody signs up, right, to click the ad, we just transfer everything to sales and then sales need to spam all of these people. I'm saying spam because there is no buy and intent, right? So that's that's the point. And this is one of the biggest mistakes, right? In theory, we have tier segmentation, which says that we have one to one campaigns for tier one accounts or companies with the highest revenue potential and we need to run fully personalized campaigns. We have one to few where we run, let's say, a campaign, which is semi personalized, a personalized by job role, right, to a selected group of accounts, which is not huge. And then we have one to many where potentially you can do, you can include lots, lots of these accounts. But now the truth is I came from enterprise world to consulting, right? The truth is that there is no one to many account based marketing, it's just a lazy excuse for not doing appropriate demand generation. And now the question is how both functions are working together, right? The key point is that there is no convert, you shouldn't even have conversations like demand generation versus account based marketing, right? The key point is that you need to have a cohesive market and what we call full funnel marketing, right? The point is that demand generation, the goal of demand generation obviously is in bound by applying lots of that stuff, but in relationship to account based market and the goal of demand is creating a pool of accounts that demonstrate a specific interest in your product or a specific engagement. And then you move these accounts to do appropriate personalized marketing. So account based marketing stands for personalized marketing, right? So there are only one to one and one to few place. And that's it. That's something that everybody needs to understand now to address the question about, hey, but what if you want to include thousands of accounts? A simple lead most test for you, how many SDRs and marketers will you need to prospect in a personalized way, thousands of accounts? Yeah, I thought that was a great, great differentiation between demand and the EBM. So basically you can run, you know, your regular demand in place and from that, take those, you know, companies that actually show intent that are in your ICP. And then we start our EBM efforts and can be very personalized. I like that. That's really, and I think that's a quite unusual, like, look on it actually. I think it's more the one to many that we see far too often that that is basically a demand. So it's really, but if we continue down on like we have talked about now how many accounts to accounts to include and so on. If we then talk about like both about tools, do you actually think you need tools to get started? And then maybe the biggest question you can start with the tools one, but how do you then execute on this? How do you develop an actual playbook on what to do towards these accounts? This is also where I feel like it's really tricky. But start with the tools one, like do you actually need tools to do you have ABM? So to kind of address your question in a way that also links to your big question from the start about, can we define a pilot, right? And how do we get started, right? So I think when you think about it, within a new program, whenever you're introducing a new program, and in this case, it's ABM, you need to start with a pilot, right? It doesn't make sense to start running before you have learned how to walk. And especially when it comes to ABM is that you are going to spend a lot of time and effort marketing to one account or per account, you're going to spend much more time. So the cost of mistake is much bigger, right? So you how you select the accounts, how you do everything with them is really important that you kind of have that pilot to refine, get the feedback, learn before you scale that up. Now, when it comes to tools, especially in the pilot stage, you don't need a lot of tools. I mean, we rank campaigns for with our clients that generated, you know, even like millions in revenue for the first, you know, during the first pilot months, let's say two quarters or something like that. And we were doing that with a stack that maybe was, you know, I don't know, three, four hundred bucks a month, right? No, no specific tools like, okay, what are the concrete tools that we want, we would definitely recommend you need to have some sort of some information, some database about the target accounts. This can be as simple as LinkedIn sales name, you might have whatever zooming for whatever you have. Of course, you need to have that, so be able to enrich those accounts to find the buyers, et cetera. You need to have other than that, I think you what you want to have and what we always recommend is having some sort of sales content sharing platform or like collateral. Starting a sharing platform, simply because it's a we call them content hubs, but it's basically a collection of content that you can create per account, right, so that you can personalize. And second, that it has some content analytics that allow you to get additional 10 data about those accounts. And, you know, there are tools like, for example, what we use the paper flight, which started, I think like 30, 50 bucks a month, right? So other than that, you don't it's like a mention, so LinkedIn sales and I have maybe zoom in for something other equivalent, I think Apollo, I think it's also very affordable. Another piece of software that is really very valuable, going back to your discussion about the manjen and then looking at who is engaging, et cetera, is like a very simple source of intent data. Some of the more advanced marketing automation tools might have this, but for example, if you take any tool like, for example, lead feeder, any IP identification software will give you these insights. So instead of like buying six cents or buying some expensive intent database that everybody has access to, you start with your own data, you start with people who are people and accounts for engaging with your demand gender engaging with your brand, because it's easiest to sell to people who know like and trust you, right? And that's that's why I would advise that as well as a piece of the puzzle. So three types of tools, which would run you, like I said, below 500 a month, you can do a perfect pilot, and maybe the whole first year of ABM, you won't need to then later on, you can add tools that will help you, you know, add new intent data sources, you know, like, for example, G2 or, you know, this kind of directories or maybe even tools like like six cents. Eventually, you can add maybe also some tools that will help you with automation, right, metadata or other tools that will help you scale and automate the effort. But, you know, at the end, if you don't have a process, if you don't know, if you haven't done it initially, maybe even manually and using the limited amount of tools, you won't, you won't know what's working, what's not working. And what will happen is what they say, right, a tool full with a tool is still a full, right, so what comes in comes out doesn't matter what the tool is. Before we continue this episode, I want to tell you about one of today's sponsors, hockey stack, hockey stack is a marketing solution that lets you collect and connect your marketing product revenue and saves data to really understand what drives revenue. And from that, you can easily answer important business related questions, such as what sales playbooks are bringing the most customers, what is our demo win rate and ACBE from paid ad campaigns, and how much expansion revenue is driven by the customer success team. And you do this by simply adding one line of code to your website and product, it couldn't be more simple to start understanding your data and revenue already tomorrow. So check them out at hockeystat.com and now back to the episode. And I think that's very true. It's like, and now we kind of have then we have a baseline what we need before we've talked about the kind of tools that you would probably need and what you don't need. How do you then from that from those accounts selected this side, what are the actual activities we need to do. So one of the points that companies need consider right when it comes to execution of playbooks that first of all, aside from the tools right you asked about tools that quite often you can generate revenue without even having tools right you can do expansion campaigns and just upsell to existing customers. Is it really matter where the revenue comes from from your accounts or from existing clients right you are still growing the business so this the lowest hanging fruit, but lots of bit of the companies are get an obsessed with regeneration was generated more and more opportunities that's one of the most biggest mistakes that was in next one is when you build a count list quite often companies and we know lots of companies that are not doing appropriate market. They are not doing the man generation campaign so they won't have any intent or engagement insights right so in this case and another thing, lots of companies are not selling to accounts that are active on social right not everybody selling to marketors to market sales that companies etc so what if you are selling to engineers from manufacturing companies they are not even having social accounts right. So one of the things that you need to look at is industry associations and communities with whom you need to partner and why I'm sharing this because depending on your ICP and your market right playbooks might be right. What everybody needs to forget is about templated one size fits all playbooks right hey upload accounts to six cents and let's target everybody with display ads right that doesn't exist now generally speaking what playbook stands for playbook is a specific campaign that includes next actions how are we going to connect engage and warm up specific companies right next. How are we going to collect the insights about potential needs and goals of these companies and how can we fulfill these needs with our product right what is an added value that we can provide to these companies next what how are we going to activate these accounts basically generate and sell some opportunities. So this when we answer these questions we create a good playbook so this playbook just to give you an idea we believe in one to one manual collaboration with these companies right so it's not digital activity and then you might have we usually categorize all this let's say warm up activities we put them into four buckets. So one of them is social engagement that that is good if your accounts are active on link it in Twitter, Facebook, Reddit whatever right you name this social platform so you can do continuous engagement with the buying committee you can do the social selling et cetera next it's all sorts of events you can do one to one event right well let's say you. You print accounts to one on one workshops let's say imagine that we are doing this workshop for a company explaining how to go up market and this workshop is. Purely aligned to your market to your ICP the sales and marketing structure right so it's fully personalized it could be one to many and example one to many this was one not that was actually our first campaign at full final IO so we partnered with another accelerator in Belgium which was called scale up wonders and we asked them. To collect insights about the needs and goals of their scale ups so most of them share it that's one of the let's say biggest challenges was growing outside the domestic market so what we did was what we prepared a program how to grow outside your domestic market without making significant shifts in your organization or raising money and raising your marketing budget. So in total we had around if I'm correct wealth of a team company signed signed up for that event and maybe 18 people in total attend them right because our multiple team members what we did next is we set up one on one debriefing sessions where we were explaining the concept sharing ideas how exactly this company can implement this framework and suggest that our help right that's an example of playbook. As the next step we were breaking up so that was a part of activation and then they were personalized proposals for every for each of the companies that demonstrated right so that's that's another example then you have social content collaboration and that content collaboration can come up in multiple forms let's say one of the easiest forms is. So you invite your target guests to interview them and that's the easiest way to build relationship with people to connect and also get additional insights about what's happening at these companies right where they're going obviously before this you need to do a counter search and collect some insights so you can validate it later but generally speaking you can. You can leverage this interview as also an opportunity to discover more and then if you see that you can help you can come up with personalized we never call it peach right or proposal just personalized solutions right so your name that you guys are dealing with this and that we said down with our team and came up with some ideas and then you can do whatever with sometimes we do direct mail campaign so we send this with. Direct mail swap with relevant gift and add in to our code that leads to content hub where they can see real time case studies of implement of the same solution references and all of the things right sometimes it could be the same one on one debriefing right and that's another point sometimes it could be market research where you involve multiple companies right until game the. Inside about market and that's extremely powerful especially if you don't if you don't have market in let's say in depth market knowledge you can gain you can basically fulfill the legs in your. Knowledge you can invite you can survey accounts you can invite them for the interviews and you can talk about the industry challenges problems bottlenecks etc priorities this companies have and the same way you see right when you see that the specific. Means that your product could really fulfill you come up with personalized ideas right so i'm just sharing this this is the way obviously the point what what what you need to have in your playbook as well right. Rolls and responsibilities as you see obviously both marketing and sales should be involved right and quite often we know that marketers are not willing to practically participate they believe so connecting with accounts is just the role of sales people but I believe that if you want to have real collaboration and support from sales. Some teams should be doing this so marketers can reach out to the same account but the difference buying committee groups right to champions to influencers maybe not reaching out to decision makers they could reach out to their marketing peers and get additional insights about the company's hierarchy especially if you are selling to big enterprise companies let's say company with 20,000. Employees right it's really hard to understand who is your target decision decision maker so this 20k employees company is just a full market for you every department might be a buyer right it's just like accounts inside one account and then marketers can help right doing this appropriate engagement because ultimately it doesn't really matter where the opportunity comes from right if we connected to our marketing peers. And then let's say fill our market or made an intro to I don't know VP of something VP of IT right and then we transfer it to sales that's that's the point right or if we wanted to do this workshop and they booked this workshop and invited the team so that's that's the goal we don't we don't really care but when marketers are helping with this then sales are usually willing to. Push more right and help more with implementing these campaigns so summarizing everything you need to have a cadence of specific so you need to decide a play right where you'll have the warm up and activation parts you need to have a detailed list of tasks and responsibilities who will be in charge of what what is the responsibility of marketing what is the responsibility of sales right you need to have a clear timeline especially for pilot campaign. Right the goal of pilot campaign is getting market feedback first I'm not saying opportunities opportunities as an ideal outcome but I'm saying about market feedback because if we are doing pilot campaign we are making hypothesis right it's just an experiment we have never done it before so we are making hypothesis about IC peer about accounts that we have selected about the playbook that we applied right so. Even if we done ABM in the past still is just hypothesis that we need to validate and if we are satisfied with the results of that campaign then we can document that present the playbooks to the rest of the team and start scaling account based marketing right saying okay let's do it to more accounts to new verticals to new markets etc this. And it depends on depends on your marketing and general your marketing and sales processes right so timeline tasks metrics leading indicators are especially important because if you have long sales cycle right ABM is not a magic one that will immediately fill in your pipeline with opportunities right so you need to be realistic if your sales cycle length is one year right and you do the campaign doesn't mean that you immediately. It gets the insights but you can track good leading indicators and like accounts engaged right accounts that are applying accounts that's participated in warm up play so you validated the needs maybe these accounts are not buying right now not because even if you know they have needs right that your product can feel but they might have different priorities there are different initiatives that are going on so they are simply not on buying more right now. But it doesn't mean that one change in six months right so that's that's the point and you need to track it and if you are satisfied with this results then you can move forward. Before we continue this episode I want to tell you about one of today's sponsors and rich do last year every single conversation within tech has been about the macro environment. Companies are looking to be more cost efficient while growing companies are looking to spend their marketing dollars wisely and companies are more and more looking into ABM to solve this. But the ABM can be really really daunting which why I'm so happy to partner with a European company that collects everything you need for successful ABM program under one umbrella. ICP creation intent data audience builder ABM advertising they have it all so happy you're started we're looking to do more ABM in 2023 they are right now offering free ABM diagnostics to set your program up for success. You'll find a link in the description and now back to the episode. That's really really good and I feel like it's it's very much you need a structured approach in that sense to even be able to experiment to be be be sure to disregard of what activities you do it needs to be clear who does what and then you actually track and follow up what what happens and to kind of finish up this episode and tied all together a bit. What would you say or like what are them how do you measure success from such a pilot to say what what could be a leading and lagging lagging indicator you look at. I'd say like they're kind of three things to realize when it comes to measuring success and and metrics. The first thing is that like you said already although the ultimate goal goal is obviously to generate revenue and you need to measure you know how much revenue we have generated you know starting with the pipe qualified pipeline how much converted in revenue. But you also want to measure things like what is the ACV that we have generated because if you're not generating ACV the desire let's say then your average then maybe you are not you know doing it doing it correctly because you should be able to get a higher ACV higher win rate and basically any of the any of those revenue contribute in metrics right. But because like under mention it's not a silver bullet it's not something that you can you know immediately accelerate and just go for a net net you account and close them within the same quarter if your normal sales cycle length is nine months you also need to measure the lagging the leading indicators now the leading indicators will depend as kind of a third point they will depend on the campaign and the goal right. So for example if your goal is to land net new accounts then you you might be measuring things like the number of accounts that I managed to engage the maybe some sort of level of engagement whether that's like account penetration so how many buyers and I engaging what is their level of engagement etc maybe if you are you're you're running some someplace where you book in discovery calls well okay then you know how many discovery calls the book was a conversion rate let's say. Or the percent of the accounts that that I booked the discovery calls with etc etc so this would be for example for a net new but then if you if you take a completely different campaign let's say. We have I don't know expanding existing deals or accelerating existing pipelines okay maybe our you know play our playbook is going to be very different maybe I want to. Now I don't know maybe analyze the existing pipeline define the target vertical where we have the majority you know of the pipeline that we that we believe we can close us sit together with the sales analyze the you know the challenges analyze the you know the reason why they are considering to buy from us analyze the blocking points then create create some content to address these these points maybe for example one of the place that we ran was. Running a webinar like a live case study with one of our existing customers from that target vertical which would allow you to then kind of get the people over the edge answered all of these questions then you know maybe you're working with sales to activate and all of these things well then maybe your you know leading indicators will be obviously how many of the pipeline was able to engage you know what was the close rate when I look at that pipeline compared to the average right what was the ACV et cetera et cetera but maybe also be if you're if I'm running that webinar okay how many accounts that I managed to engage using this this tactic right this this playbook so hey you need the leading indicators because your sales cycle is long the leading indicators will depend on the play that you're running on the goal of the campaign and you need to have different ones for for the for the different different goals and for example also when it's about expansion expansion you also want to measure the lifetime value the growth of the ACV et cetera. Perfect and that's the pilot program now it's really good good walk through I think and really practical in that sense of how you can think about setting up an ABM program for the first time and yeah just to see some indications of success I guess that's also there. Everyone is always looking for revenue of course but maybe that's not the immediate effect of setting up such a campaign but perhaps the long term but thank you so much for for joining us both Andrea and Vladimir what's great to have you. Thank you for listening to this episode of Driving Demand are you ready to learn more and share knowledge with some of the best B2B marketers in the world join our community on drivingdemand.io see you next time.