ABM: What Ramp, Snowflake, and Hightouch are doing in 2026

Hey, it's me Dave. Our friends over at CustomerIO are sponsors of today's episode. They're a really cool company that helps marketers turn first party data into engaging customer experiences across email, SMS, and push. And they built their platform for marketers who actually care about the craft because marketing is a craft that takes creativity, thought, and taste. Right now everyone thinks they're magically a marketer because they have access to AI. And the result is kind of painful. More robotic emails, more noise, more bleh. AI isn't magic. It's not going to fix bad strategy or write great copy for you magically, but the best teams also aren't ignoring it. They treat AI as infrastructure. When it's built the right way, it actually makes marketing feel more human, not less. And that's what CustomerIO is doing. Their AI handles repetitive work like setup, orchestration, and tasks that should be automated so that you can focus on what actually matters, the craft of marketing, the strategy, the creativity. This is how good marketers are using AI right now, not to replace thinking but to support it. And this landed with you at all. This idea about the craft of marketing. I want you to go and check out CustomerIO. It's customer.io/exit5. Go and check them out. Customer.io/exit5. Hey, it's me Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Consensus, the interactive demo platform. Look, most of your buyers have already decided whether they like you before your sales team ever gets on a call with them. They've asked chat, chats, you be team, and clawed about your product. They found reviews about you online. They've talked to peers who've used your product before. And by the time they hit request a demo on your site, they've often already come to a decision. So you're losing control of the narrative before the first touch point. And now they have to wait three to five days for a demo. Consensus gives you that control back. They help you meet your buyer where they actually are with interactive personalized AI demos that live on your site. When a buyer shows up wanting to poke around on their own terms, you give them what they want. Plus, you get to see exactly who's watching what they clicked on and who the decision-makers are. Stop being a bystander while LM sell or even unsell your product. Category leaders like Atlassian and Autodesk use consensus to turn invisible researchers into high intent leads. Go and check them out at goconsensus.com/exit5. We're listening to the Dave Gerard show. Alright hey everybody, I'm excited to be here. My name is Dave. I'm the founder of exit 5. Twice a month we do these exit 5 live sessions where we bring on subject matter experts to go deep in the topic that matters to you in marketing today. Huge turnout. Super hot topic. Always for some reason a hit for us is when we talk about ABM and today's session is ABM with the start, stop and scale in 2026. We have a group of awesome marketers from high touch, ramp and snowflake hanging out behind the scenes right now. But real quick, if you're listening to this, I just want to make sure that everything's working okay. Audio is okay. So I want you to go in the chat and I'm just curious. Put your name in, where are you writing from and then why did you take an hour out of your day to come hang out with us and learn about ABM? Is there something specific you want to learn? Is your boss pushing you to do the research this area? What do you want to know about ABM? Why are you here? Why are you taking time out of your day to come here? We had an awesome number of responses for this. We had a great prep call yesterday behind the scenes. We're already going and so I'm excited to talk about ABM with everybody today. We'll do questions in the chat. You can put the questions in the Q&A. It's really helpful for me as the moderator here so I can sort them and we can pick them by up votes. Other than that, all these are recorded. We'll send out the recording after. One of the best parts is being active in the chat because everybody here is also a marketer working in B2B marketing. So please ask questions, share what you're doing, help out each other, and I hope we're going to have a great discussion today about ABM. But real quick, before we hop into this, I just want to give a shout out to high touch to the sponsors, presenting sponsors of today's live session. Since you showed up today, I know you care about ABM and I can assume you're probably trying to improve your ABM efforts beyond just picking a list of target accounts and running ads, which I guess that's not how you do ABM. There's a lot that I have to learn today because the team is doing it right now or the ones using data and signals to influence timing, messaging, and personalization across channels. That's also where ABM gets messy fast. It can take an absurd amount of steps to build the right lists, suppress correctly, and ship just a simple campaign. And that's where high touch comes in. High touch is a data and AI platform built for marketing teams that help you activate the data already in your warehouse so you can build ABM audiences, trigger life cycle plays and run smarter segmentation across email, ads, and your CRM without relying on engineering. Heck yeah. And as a bonus, the high touch team put a bunch effort into this. The high touch team created an ABM playbook for you, breaking down how they do ABM internally and you're going to hear from their CMO in a minute, Brian. I think you'll be like, "That guy's pretty smart. I want to learn how they do it." So they'll send that to you after this webinar, Brian's here and we got a great group of people today. Let's kick this off, Alesson. Send the crew out here. We'll do quick intros and we'll get right into the meet, which is everybody wants. Let's go Kasey, Drew, and then Brian. Kasey, intro, who are you? Quick background about your company and the role just to set context for everybody. Absolutely. Hi, I'm Kasey. I work at a Denver. I'm in San Francisco today working out of our HQ at Snowflake. Snowflake is a data warehouse company that layers AI on top of good data. As we all know, if you sick AI on a bunch of bad data, you basically get bad answers faster. So Snowflake is the answer to that. We organize your data well and then we layer the most efficient and top of it. What's really cool about Snowflake is that we're using it internally for our ABM program, meaning today sales reps are going to be able to go into Snowflake Intelligence, which is one of our new launch tools. Sales reps are marketers and say, are my accounts being targeted by ABM today? How's the performance on those accounts? And that's the power of Snowflake is that it brings marketing and sales together, which is basically the foundation of ABM. I've been in data tech for about five years now. I started out at 5.3, which is another data tech company, and ABM and moved to ABM over here. I managed a team of 23 ABM marketers. So we have a very robust ABM program that we're very fortunate to have. And sales line is our number one rule and goal for everything. Really excited to talk to you today. Thanks. Love it. Wait, say what you said, you said you said you said something about first time, long time behind the scenes made me feel good. Can you say that here, Dale? Oh my gosh, absolutely. I said, long time listener, first time caller. This is a huge deal for me, Dave. I've followed you on LinkedIn for a long time. I read your post yesterday about burnout and AI, and I was like, I completely resonate. I think that we're in this flex period with AI. That is, it's almost like the internet. It's kind of like this whiplash thing where we're over rotating and then companies are competing and then there's going to be some winners. But basically we have to jump on the train and get messy with it, which is what we're doing tonight. So really admire you and ex if I've worked. That was awesome to hear you say that. And the last minute audible, what a gift. Hillary, Hillary had the flu. She called in KC, KC HoHom runs a team of 23 ABM marketers. And here we are. Druse in the mix today. Druse director of growth and data science at ramp live from New York. Drew, welcome. Welcome to the show. Thank you, Dave. Also thrilled to be here. Also big snowflake and high touch user. So excited to be here with Brian and Casey. I run these sort of data science function for go to market at ramp. And in case you don't know about ramp, we sell finance automation software across corporate cards, expense management, bill pay, procurement and accounting. And it's all in one platform. Dens my CEO. Guy should have a ramp tattoo like down his ribs or something like the biggest fan. I love you here. I got some beef though. We reached out. Now I'm trying to get him a brand deal with ramp and they were like, we could send you a hat. Talk to me after I think we can. Yeah, that's ramp and our go to market motion case. That's helpful context. We're both hybrid product led in sales led and about 30% of our business comes through self-serve and 70% is like through sales. Yeah, that's ramp. Awesome. And Brian, Brian, I've known through connecting over the space. Brian was a random man gen at Intercom. I was at a company called Drift and had him on my podcast and kind of continue to follow his work. Super sharp guy. Like what you're doing at high touch. Did I just do your bio for you or do you want to say something? Well, it's pleasure to be here. So high touch helps you work straight and run awesome IBM programs and we're honored to be a ramp customer as well. But also we support a lot of the cool stuff. Drew's going to share with you and a lot of the cool things Casey's going to talk about. So all right. So I told you I was going to ask you the first question I was going to ask you was what you're going to stop. But I actually forgot that the first thing that I wanted to ask you all, just a level set for everybody here today. Can we try to define a B M and I don't really care about the LinkedIn like you definition of it. I want to hear how you each talk about it as a go-to-market strategy inside of the company. Casey, you mentioned the number one thing that matters to you all is sales alignment. And so maybe I'll let you kick it off. Like how do you talk about, hey, here's why we do a B M or here's how A B M works at our company. Yeah. Thank you for like bringing it back to first principles. You know, A B M is nevertheless a change is at every company. Here, we talk about it as bringing sales strategy to life through marketing channels. So we don't start with the marketing part. We start with the sales part, meaning like these are the sales target account sales does not think in terms of the marketplace. I think in terms of accounts they want to go after. And we basically double down on those accounts with our marketing spend and our personalization to make sure that every single sales metric is elevated on the accounts that they care about the most. Obviously, the whole database, the whole tam is important. We want to generate high level demand in all those places. But what we really need is the director at this customer account to give us the time of day so that we can get into this new line of business. And A B M can go procure that contact, nurture that contact, deliver it to sales, outbound, all of the other. of those things are what sales cares about the most. So bringing sales strategy to life for your marketing channels. - Brian, you mentioned this before backstage, but you said you have data on this of the accounts who got ABM from you and didn't. That would be an amazing way to show this to the board or to the CEO, whoever, right? - Yeah, yeah. So the way that we think about it is efficacy of ABM is always very challenging to demonstrate. It feels like it's the right thing to do, but it's not always obvious. So the way we think about it is we essentially, similar to what KC does is like we really work very hard to pick the right accounts and figure out that territory that we're gonna pursue with our sales friends. But then actually, even though they're dream accounts, we don't do ABM for a bunch of them. And we essentially have a treatment group and a control group amongst these amazing targets that we wanna pursue. And what we have found is that the accounts that are in the treatment group, the ones receiving the digital programs, receiving the joint sales motions that we're executing, they'll convert from unengaged to a stage one opportunity with us at about 32% higher rate than the general population. And then even further down funnel of those that convert to stage one, about 38% of those will convert to as to at a higher rate than stage one. So you're seeing this really powerful, like double-dip effect, where even among the universe of great accounts that you're more likely to win anyway, they're more likely to enter sales process with you and they're more likely to qualify to buy with you. That's what stage one stage treatment for us. It's are they engaged with the seller and are they qualified in an up? - That's what's so great about ABM. By the way, just from an outsider standpoint, I'm not doing this. Just a podcast host and a thought leader, but it feels like you can actually show the efficacy of marketing and you're not looking at like, did they click on this ad and did they buy? But did they listen to the podcast and did they immediately become an NQL after the podcast? It's like, you're able to look at the bigger picture. That was initially what drew me to Hillary's stuff at Snowflake and obviously Casey, you're a part of that. I'm Brian, I want to just circle back to something you said, which is funny, Matt on my team sent me this in the chat and I wrote this down. You said, we work really hard to pick accounts. Well, how does that actually play out? How do you do that? - It's actually pretty much like a CRO level activity here because we really want to be pursuing the people that we can sell to effectively. And you see this all the time like in non ABM shops where you're selling to everybody and the conversion rates are just out of garbage on many accounts. It's just 'cause they're not the right people to buy. The way a high touch works is it runs on top of a data warehouse. If you don't have one, we have no business talking to you. And that's why Snowflake is a great partner to us. And so as an example, so if you don't have Snowflake, what exactly am I gonna sell you? So those should not be in the list. It's a very simple example, but there's many other indicators as well. And so we're constantly as part of territory planning, working as a genuinely as a CRO level topic. Which account are we gonna send seller A, B, or C to pursue and why? And then once they're in the list, I'm gonna talk more about this if it's interesting. All these business processes and workflows get kicked off 'cause if you're in the list, we want you. And we're gonna all know Holt's bar, we're gonna pursue you. If you're not in the list, God bless you. If you wanna buy something, knock on the front door, maybe we'll sell you, maybe we won't. - When you say it's a CRO level activity, is the CRO actually like looking at that company, going to the website, checking it out personally? Or is it like, oh, there's some, you know, you've showed me this spreadsheet that says they have this many employees, they're using Snowflake and so we're good. - No, I see it was not manually, I do it again. But like, so no, we have a lot of pre-work that happens at a data science level, at an account enrichment level and a research level to equip us with how we're gonna prioritize. And so the waiting of what we're gonna prioritize and the strategy we're gonna prioritize. And then the final sign off of who makes the cut. - Okay, true, does this blend into your world a little bit? - Yeah, it's super similar to how we do things. I mean, I think the key thing for us is it's really a partnership between data science and sales. The first cut is like a data science model of who's a good fit, who's high intent for RAM. That list then goes to sales leadership and they're gonna whittle down and like figure out how to parse out the accounts. But the key piece is like, it's a really dynamic process that the list changes throughout the year. So the people who know the accounts best are the sales people working them. So a lot of times they'll work one, they'll be like, "Hey, like this account, they've got a three-year contract with AMX, we can't sell them." So we've put them on the list for like three years from now, take them off, they get the next highest rate. Company goes to them. And you keep updating it, but at the end of the day, it's like we're really supporting sales here and I think it's important to look at it that way 'cause they just know these accounts better than anyone else. - Casey's smirking as you said that. What's your learning there? - I say this all the time, we can come up with a data science model that says this account is the best too. Book a meeting or buy Snowflake Max. And then we go to the sales rep and they say, "I actually golfed with this CEO yesterday, it's like I put in a sales force task for my golfing session, but they're not gonna buy for another two years." They were like, "Okay, we obviously trust you." And that there's no amount of intent that company can show that will outweigh the fact that the sales rep knows the account intimately. - So it's this constant evolution, it's constantly moving. It's not like here are the hundred accounts and we're just gonna market them. I mean, it makes so much sense. Think about how much money you're spend on marketing to MX when they have a three year contract with another company. Like, all right, great, let's take those funds and apply them elsewhere. Okay, first one on my list is the stop list. We promised we were gonna do stop start scale. So let's go around and I wanted to hear, just pick one. What's one traditional ABM best practice or a specific tactic that you've officially killed in 2026 or decided you're not gonna invest in anymore? We talked about this a little bit on our prep call. Maybe something that you used to do in ABM to book meetings you're not doing it anymore. Feel free to take the mic over on that one. - Okay, I'm taking the mic again. Just so I don't smirk in the background and get called out. - No, it's good, I'm just showing you a world class host and I want you to do that. - You are, you are. Okay, great. Actually, Brian mentioned this a little bit earlier. I think we've fallen into the trap of targeting too many accounts and sales loves ABM because we are talking to them every day. We're telling them exactly what's happening in each account and then they want more and their appetite increases. And we are sales people like on our ABM team. Half of my team is former sales people. We want to please, we want to do whatever sales wants. And so we will add too many accounts and each of my team members now has an account limit so that we're not going to 200 accounts. One person cannot know 200 accounts intimately. That's not ABM anymore. That's kind of targeted demand gen but it doesn't scale in the way we're doing it today. So we're limiting that list and making sure it's, like Brian said, the CRO aligned or like if anyone went to that account list, they would say, yeah, obviously that is a target account. - How many can, do you have a sweet spot number? How many can if it's not 200, what's the right? I'm Dave Sales Guy. How many accounts can I handle? - It depends on the size and the type of account. So we have two teams that support customer accounts. One team support majors accounts which that's the Disney's of the world, the capital ones. They can handle maybe 20 accounts and that's pushing it each person because you want to know everything about those accounts. You want to have one to one campaign going for everyone of those accounts. On the total opposite side, we have our prospect team that only does non-customers and they, we say they're supporting like 40 reps each. We got a limited to like two or three ABM accounts per rep. So that is about 120, 150 per ABM. - Nice, to help hold Greg, Brian. - I was just gonna say for us, the maximum we let an AE hold is 20. And to cases point, there can be some folks that have one but the absolute maximum we let them are 20. We just don't believe that a human being, even with a actuals can do a good job. - From working 20 regardless of size, which. - Is that 20 for the year, 20 at a time? - 20 at a time. - And there is flex, but there's friction on switching out new ones. You can't just randomly like go through and change them in and out in and out but 20 at a time with the flexibility through like decision chain to make changes. - I'm gonna have my stop. - We're stopping paid social ads for like ABM brand awareness. And this kind of fits with what Casey's talking about. We're like, when you're doing ABM very top of funnel like this, it can quickly just morph into like targeted demand gen and we found it's not super effective. And additionally like, I think everyone on your nose is like digital is getting more and more saturated with how easy it is to pump ads out in digital. So we're super focused on going back to in person and physical. - Wow, that's interesting. So ABM, if I can paraphrase there, you all are kind of saying, ABM is actually not targeted demand gen. What you're showing ads to select group of companies that's demand gen. - I agree and I disagree and it means actually drew to compare notes. I guess we can do it live for everyone here if we want to. - If you guys go over there, why don't you take this offline and compare notes. Oh, do it now. - Part of that experimentation project I described to you where we had a control and not control is we also had a digital only group. And in such a tiny audience of only 20 accounts, we just went like crazy and super saturated and we did see lift relative to control. I have some evidence that would say that you can use paid social display, pretty good effect. But the one thing I did want to mention on the call here is that the creative fatigue is happens so fast that's in nuts. We only have 20 accounts with only 10 people inside of each that you care about. And you're buying every impression LinkedIn and Facebook will give you for those people. They see the ad like 300 times like that. - You just grow to hate the company. - Yeah, the opposite. - So we actually need to and we, part of our program is minimum every two or three weeks all the creative changes. But has to. So anyway, that and then, but to add to your point, where I agree and have data that very much aligns to what you're saying through is the way we think about it is once you're through that initial introducing phase. And there's a little bit of a relationship between the company and the target. There's some indications of behavioral engagement and stuff. That starts to move what we call kind of like into mid funnel. And in there, by far the highest efficacy thing is stuff that's not on the internet. - It's talking them in real life. - Let's dive into that. So you're gonna do digital. You may or may not do digital run display to your target accounts or whatever. There definitely seems to be this conversion of like everybody's doing more stuff. Dinners, events, not online. Can we talk about specifically at high touch ramp and snowflake? Like what are you all doing there then? What's working? What plays are you running right now? I'd love to unpack some of that, please. - I mean, I would go back to what we said about this being sort of sales lead. The best in person events we've seen are the ones where the sales person comes up with the idea. And sometimes they're like hyper-specific dinners around like a specific pain point, a specific industry that on the marketing side we probably wouldn't have thought of. There's like a lot closer to it. And they'll have an idea of like a bunch of accounts they want to get in the room, we'll help them get a few more in the room, set up the event. But those are the things that actually tend to work really well for us. What else? For us, there's a few things. Data enrichment on specific accounts is really important. So if for instance, we're selling into a new line of business and sales doesn't have any contacts or any valuable contacts in the line of business, we need to go find those contacts, nurture them, and that's where the digital comes in. We can get them to engage or at least get some awareness from those people. We can research them. We can figure out what the SDR says to them on that email app bound. We can figure out what we should send them as a gift that gets some brand affinity straight to their desk. And then after that gift, we can work with our field marketing team to say, let's get them in a room with similar customers at a dinner in their area and get them to talk to each other. Maybe there's no like rep is there. Maybe there's no like rep isn't there. And we're just having customers talk to customers and say, what's going well and what's not for us. But I agree with Drew that all needs to be in alignment with sales. And sales needs to be able to say, I know what line of business I want to go after next. Or I know which account I wanted to go after next so that we can then spend all those very detailed resources on that whole journey. I want to keep talking about in-person stuff but there's a ton of questions in the chat that are relevant. So just to go back to the ads real quick, James said, there's a bunch of upvotes on it. How are you building advertising audiences for such small groups, Brian, that's probably for you? So I don't mean to plug our software in snowflake but I have to plug our software in snowflake because this is how we do it, like genuinely. So we high touch is the ability to essentially group contacts that have been enriched that we loaded into our snowflake into account groups. So it kind of natively understands the notion of account in a way that most technologies do not. And so you essentially tell high touch for this group show them this vertical type of ad. Now we can't do like one-to-one ad groups or one-to-five-person ad groups because just privacy laws prohibit that. But we are able to say, all these accounts are in this vertical show all of them this creative or all these accounts have this problem set, show them this creative and so on. And so we essentially have three different kinds of ad creative that everyone in some way fits into at any given time and we're hammering them and hitting that like max impression limit that the platforms will give us at any given time. We also have a product called Max Booster we use which essentially can enrich all the incremental identifiers that we don't have and can't legal occur onto the record so that when we go out into the world to try and find these B2B people in consumer channels, we actually can find them on Facebook, on TikTok, whatever and show them ads. - Nice. How would you have done this without high touch just to give the opposite side of this? Is this, I don't have experiences as possible? Drew, you're nodding along? - It's manual. We're on snowflake and high touch. And I don't think we could really do it at scale without those tools. We do have six cents as well. But my bunch of questions actually, let's talk about so a bunch of six cents and demand-based questions. What tech are you using? Only six cents and demand-based collection of tools that saw Ramp has an internal revenue tool. Do you believe in tools like six cents and demand-based? Feel like this is a big part of your ABM or do you see these as noise as well? I know you all have opinions there, so go for it. - Yeah, I mean, six cents we have, I would say it has its place. It's pretty good at plugging into like ad platforms and uploading audiences. And they have a really nice sort of UI for marketers to like design, trigger-based conditional logic for ABM campaign. So we like that piece of it, but high touch is much more flexible in terms of what it can plug into. So for even with like a mature data sort of org, like what Ramp has, it's really useful to be able to like build whatever you want in snowflake and then use high touch to get those outputs into any sort of platform you want. So like as an example for gifting, we use a platform called Goody that's not supported by six cents, but high touch can like easily pipe data into Goody and like trigger ads. - Goody. Casey, what do you all use for GIF? Somebody asked earlier and I meant to ask. - Yeah, we use reached us for gifting. We've gone through many platforms, but we also have select kind of the spoke gifting partners that are more tailored. Basically not a warehouse full of swag, but instead like how do we create a specific experience for this one executive or these things? - If you're a Fortune 100 CFO or CIO, you get a custom curated piece of high end art. - Right, you do not get a $25 gift card to book a meeting. - Oh, that's not what big experience we want to provide. - We do the same as Casey. In our case, it's sendo so for like the scaled stuff and then we have layered on top that a person can put incremental effort into. And to respond to the six cents demand-based stuff, I'm sure it's valuable in certain situations like what Drew is describing, but I find it to be very, very expensive. And the stack that we use, that Drew also uses, which is the snowflake high touch stack, we find it to be much more powerful than all the costs. - Oh my God, I didn't expect to go off the rails to my questions so quickly, but the questions in the chat are so good. Will you all just each take a look really quickly and see if there's one there that stands out to you that relates to this that we should talk to? Hey, it's me, Dave. This episode is brought to you by our friends at NAC. NAC is a no-code email and landing page creation platform focused on a problem every marketing team runs into. Have you ever had a really good marketing idea, but then it takes forever to actually ship it out the door? It's usually not because your idea is bad, but because the process in the middle is slow. Briefs, more briefs, approvals, reviews, tiny fixes that somehow turn into weeks, and by the time the campaign is finally ready to go out, it barely even looks like what you originally wanted to ship. Yep, that right there, that is the gap that NAC exists to close. NAC isn't no-code email platform built for modern marketing teams. They have AI built into the platform that lets you prompt ideas and instantly generate on brand email assets, so you can create, review, QA and launch your email all in the same place. No jumping between tools or messy handoffs halfway through. After the email goes live, NAC also gives you performance insights and recommendations so you can see what worked and how you can make the next send better. So if execution is the thing slowing your marketing down or you just want one system that takes you from idea to shipped to learning to improving, you should check out NAC, go to knack.com/exit5. That's knak.com/exit5. I feel strongly about Duke's question, how much of a budget do you need to be successful with ABM? Budget is one lever. Sales alignment and executive alignment is another. You can very easily carve out some budget from your digital spend, not add any net new budget and test ABM and say, is this worth it for our company? It might not be because not every company sells to enterprise level accounts. It might not be the right mix for your sales team, but I feel very strongly that you have to start small, test something and like Brian said, we measure everything by a lift metric. So it's very scientific method. You know, there's a control group, there's an ABM group and you can just apply different tactics to those groups and see what measure of lift you get. And I would also encourage you to track down funnel, not just can we get a lift on meetings, booked or opportunities, but like Brian said, are they qualified opportunities? Do they convert? Do they convert at a higher rate? Do they convert at a higher dollar value? I know that's not a perfect answer, Duke. And I would say get as much budget as you can if you have alignment for it, but also just focus on the basics of what are some things you can augment just for your target accounts and then test against non-target accounts. I think the other important point on budget, you need to like, prime the finance team and whatever stakeholders are controlling the budget that you shouldn't really measure these, the same way as traditional marketing campaigns. A lot of times on an MTA basis or other measurement techniques, they're gonna look like they have a terrible ROI. And that should be like, okay, and you should know going in. What's an example of that? What might have terrible engagement, but end up pretty great examples? Like if you do anything on like a paid out platform with ABM, right? On these platforms, the black box, right? You wanna just give it a big audience like cook and optimize to whatever signals you're giving it. But with these ABM campaigns, you're limiting it to these really small audience. So it's going to be very expensive to get impressions on that audience. And if you just look at like your traditional marketing reporting, it's gonna look incredibly inefficient. So you have to look holistically, look what Brian was talking about across like, how are these accounts doing overall? Not how is this like individual campaign on better doing? - Really quick to add on to that. It is simpler math to do a people engaged MQL, Squo, whatever. That is simpler math than ABM. Is a true funnel, everything lines up and it turns into this many squos. That's not what ABM is. ABM is more complicated math, but better experience for your customer and a better return on investment on specific accounts. - I love that. When I worked at Drift the Founder, David Cancel was like, he always would say, that's a company problem. The company wants you to have those steps so we can properly measure and track and like, yep, step one, step two, step three, but that is not how things happen in the real world. And then, you know, then obviously you're talking to someone and it's like, oh yeah, they have a three year contract with X, but three years from now, they're gonna come back and reengage maybe because they saw like a Kevin ramp ad or something like that. It's both the internal systems we want to try to measure it perfectly. It's like, let's UTM everything and see if we can track everything. - The only other thing I'd add is picking good accounts is not free in terms of time, but it's borderline free in terms of money and is the thing you should be doing anyway to ensure yourselves people are constrained their efforts correctly. So if you want to do ABM for effectively zero dollars and start immediately, just pick good accounts. - There's a question about measurement actually. You said, talk about some of the KPIs that have been most useful for sales and I thought of a related one to this where, okay, I hear you, ABM makes a lot of sense. On the flip side, Drew, we talked about, you talked about consumer in the beginning. Consumer, you get that dopamine a little bit quicker, you get the data, you get the feedback much quicker. Here, it's like, we might not know for 12, 18 months if our marketing is effective, but I'm guessing there's signals along the way. How do you all tell the story when you want to show marketing success? us leading up to closing the deal, it's going to take some time. What are the KPIs that matter? I think you don't need to do this to get started, but as you get more mature, you should do the data work to figure out what does it take to convert an enterprise account? How many people do you have to talk to at that account? How many times you have to talk to them and how often? And you can use that as sort of a metric of success to see if your A/B/M program's working. You're not going to have perfect measurement on how those things are going, but you can get a rough idea based on historical data. So we like to talk to a person somewhere around eight times every few months who's in an A/B/M account, or at least hit them with some sort of communication, which is a lot, but we don't see diminishing returns as we go high, so we're not worried about that. Brian, how do you know your boss is CEOs on you, zeros on you, it's coming, it's coming, progress is coming. Moa, when's it coming, Brian, when's it coming? Well, we very consciously call it a company. We adhere a lot to what David Kempsel used to coach you on day, which is that fighting over attribution, there's no bigger waste of time in a B/B company, and so just don't do it. We've explicitly talked about that in our like, CU level, like a line discussion, this is stupid. Many companies have gone down this road, and culturally it's just been so damaging and not helpful, so just don't do it. So that's the first point. And so what that allows us to do is, again, I hate to be so repetitive, but really focus on control groups and treatment groups, progression, and when we think about progression, to be very specific and tactical, we literally have three opportunity awareness stages that are defined in data. And there's six of them. It's like completely unaware. I won't be named the little stages, I forget, but it's like lightly engaged, medium engaged, quite engaged, and this is all a pretty opportunity. And this is visible in the data, and we're doing different treatments for each of those six micro steps before there's even the first optee. Now we have an optee. Now there's more steps, and there's more things that we're doing. Each of these things are prescribed, and they're actually unverifiable. Like you could run a query and see how many accounts from the list we want are in those stages, and how many have moved. And so you can just look at that and say, is this working or not? And I get the last thing, is there's a quality element here, which is are the A's making money? If the A's only have 20 accounts, and they started with only three of them that we're talking to, now there's 10. And of the seven that changed, marketing was in the mix doing stuff. That really helps. And then the last thing, this is a really useful LLM thing that we do, which is we actually run a lot of LLM-based manual attribution stuff. We actually have LLMs every time a deal closes or moves to a certain stage. It actually looks backwards at every bit scrap of data and activity we've had with that account in GONG, in Salesforce, in Slack, everywhere. And then actually writes a little deal story for us, of what caused what and how best we can understand. Now admittedly, the fact that they went to golf is Casey Boogtow is not in there. But most things are. And the LLMs actually do a really good job of developing a deal story and then helping us understand what did what. And we look at those very seriously, much more so than like arguing over last touch attribution for some God for sake in mass, then nobody cares about it. - Well said. A couple questions in the chat. Tasha said, what's your strategy for picking good accounts? Well, we covered that in the beginning of this. So I'm not gonna go back to that, but we'll make sure you get the replay after. Katie said, "If you to start one area in order to sell the value and generate excitement around ABM, would you start in generating a net new or current op progress/velocity?" - Depends on what your company cares about. If you're in a high customer environment that we wanna grow our customers a lot, start with accelerating opportunities or accelerating existing customers. If you're in a startup, you don't have any customers you need to just get net new customers in the door, start with getting those salespeople the opportunities that they need to close. - Anybody have a good pipeline velocity play? What have you actually done? - So it's not too long ago for our highest value accounts here in SF. This is mid funnel. We already know these people. I would actually say one of my stops is you don't do this for people you don't know. Everyone just wants to magically conjure up pipeline, but this won't work if they're not somewhat engaged. Is there's this really fancy restaurant here called Saison? It's like holy crap is it expensive. And we were very nervous to do it because in SF, everyone is just like overwind and overdined. So the attrition rates, our events are ridiculous. But we figured, okay, this is mid funnel. This is people we know. Let's just go all out and book something that we otherwise wouldn't and it worked a charm. And that was really inspiring for us and we've actually replicated that technique out. But I have to really emphasize that had we done that for people that we didn't already know at least somewhat, I don't believe we would work at all. And these were not necessarily paying customers, but I mean we knew them. That's kind of the. I have another one for pipeline velocity and to go back to Drew's point about in person, we did a localized activation where we had a truck park in a city center in the middle of New York where four Finnserv accounts were and we served coffee and we had all the AEs there and we invited everyone down for a coffee break. We had screens, we had demos prepared. Obviously we had to do a lot of coordination to make sure those were the right locations localized all those things. But that is a totally offline activation that we just invited folks to, but it was an account based out of home activation for pipeline velocity. - I'll throw an help there too. We got two suites at the Super Bowl, "Sweet Kent" and obviously too early to say, but very positive responses from account owners so far. And obviously you can't do the Super Bowl now for another year, but there's a lot of events that you can buy at "Sweet Ed." We've done a Beyoncé concert before and we invited a lot of. Yeah, right, see how we got like a ton of interest in it and we invited like women's UFOs and we said you can bring your daughter or son. - Well, that's amazing. - Yeah, so there's a ton of opportunities out there to do in-person events like that. And I think if you get creative, you can sort of find things that other people aren't doing. - What's the low budget version of that that you go into some like open bar in Burlington, Vermont? - You're free in bite. - You joke, but generally speaking, I think people are pretty eager to. Gosh, the internet is just robots talking to robots at this point, so for sure. - For the first time. - I mean, we're building a whole business around this. Like, people wanna hang out and they wanna talk to each other. So I am just being silly, but it is. And I think there's just like a rule of marketing. Everybody's read, you know, Robert Chaldeen's influence and one of the principles was reciprocity and it's why Gifting Vendor started out. It was the premise that like, if I wanna sell something to Casey, I'm gonna send her some really good Lake Champlain's chocolates and there's no ask. But now that she's had those chocolates, there's kind of this unspoken obligation that like she might take a sales call for me and it does work. Right? And if you can execute it at a level where you put it in a little effort and you're not doing it the way everyone else is doing, I think it's an important point for it. - He said, what is the key to key to people engaged after a live sweet event like that? Which is like the right question to be asking. It's partnership with sales again. So they need to be bought in on this. They should be helping pick the accounts. They should potentially be there. And since I'm a data person, I'll throw this in. Reporting for like accountabilities also key. So it's very easy to build reports and see like, okay, we have this big budget of then. How many accounts have like sales people reached out to after that? They've been talking to them. If not, why not? And that's an easy question to ask. So you can kind of like enforce this stuff as well. - Gosh, if I could hug you all I would. Just the amount of people that don't just take the ball and run with these things is like, God, mad on our team just said, look at Drew and they're just sniped that question right out of the chat. It was great. - Brian, did you have an important thing to say? - I don't know if it's important, but I would just say, we have this concept of like PG pods, like Genpods and there's a field of marketers since showing each one with like a consistent group of they use that they know well. And that really helps to drive that accountability, which is that I expect the field marketers on my team to ensure that if I spend all that money at a nice, even not a super expensive dinner, a simple dinner that the follow up happens and it happens the next morning. I'm not talking eight days later when the data and Richmond or whatever. No, no, no, no. If you have a great date, you don't, well, maybe there are dating rules. I don't date anymore, but you know what I mean? Like, you know, wait a month to check in on the great date you just had. I want to see follow up immediately and the field marketers are really tightly intertwined with the sellers to ensure that that happens right away. - Man, I'm just thinking about how lucky I am to be married because if I went on a date and I would be like, talking to Gemini about how to follow up in the right way with my wife, like here's the context, we went to this restaurant, we held hands, like, what should I, (laughs) all right, this question's from Angie. This is actually this a fun one to play out. Let's pretend like we're not we, let's pretend like you're marketing experts and answer this one. Fascinating to hear about the high end plays, like Super Bowl suites, but for those of us with smaller budgets or deep data pools, where should we be placing our bets? What other ones who tried and true tactics that consistently deliver ROI for lean teams? Each of you are at bigger companies, bigger budgets, you're doing that cool stuff, but like, let's get scrappy, you're at a new company, new market, you want to help them do ABM at a scrappy level, what would you do? - I would do direct mail. - Things direct mail. - Let's talk to each, but write down your thing, write down your thing in your whiteboard and we'll go to each. - True, you go first. So direct mail, how would you identify accounts, what tool would you use, what would the direct mail play be, would you try to book a meeting, I wanna let's just riff on that row. - Let's say I have nothing, I'm starting from zero. I think I'd go talk to sales. I'd figure out who on the sales team, like I picked one sales person who's excited about ABM, wants to work with me. I'd be like, what accounts are you most excited about? And then, guess we'd have to go get addresses. I'd probably use play, go get some addresses. I don't know, that seems like the easiest thing to spin up. And then I'd go, what do we use for direct mail? I get blanking on the vendor, but I'll drop it in the chat. But the vendors are great these days. It's like basically programmatic at this point once you upload a list and you get pretty good tracking on like, if the thing with the liberate, you can book QR codes on it, like personalize the CFL. - Okay, and what would be the offer on it? Like if you're gonna cold direct mail, something to me, what would be the next step from that? - Free AirPods, if you take a demo. - Free AirPods, if you take it to the-- - Before getting out of cheap territory, tell me, but I'd give them some sort of like, well this is my beef with cheap though. It's like anything, you have to spend money to make money. And so if like, let's put some skin in the game, I think 200 bucks for AirPods to book, you know, if you're doing this type of market-- - Right, and I think you're calibrating it with the funnel stage, right? I wouldn't just send them AirPods 'cause they haven't like shown any intent. But if they actually like scan the QR code and they go to a site, a landing page, like that to me feels like enough intent where I'm willing to, like offering them their thoughts that way. - I like it getting some pushback in the chat, which is healthy, but I'm gonna tell you, I'm gonna stand up for you. I'm gonna tell you the reason why I like it. The reason why I like it is just the pattern interrupt. I think if you execute it on this well, I still, mail is like the one thing, my phone, gone to shit, inbox, gone to shit, everything gone to shit. My actual mailbox up there that I get my mail from, if you did something like it was one of those handwritten envelopes and looked like it actually opened it, I would. So at least you'd get my attention. All right, Brian, what's your play? - I kind of default to teach them something and would probably pair that with meeting them in real life. So I'm like a big believer in lunch and learn type offers. And if you pick the right account, you can actually kind of figure out what their biggest pain points are and what their problems are and what you can teach them that relates to that. And you can actually develop an offer that's like borderline free, especially with LLMs and like, this is your time. Can I come to your office? Can I bring you the famous sandwich place from your city or the famous cookies from your city and teach your team over lunch? They have to eat anyway, about this thing. And if it's credible enough, if it's interesting enough, like this technique has been around forever. It's essentially the earliest form of content marketing. And I find that it always kind of works. It works super well if you pair it with something Casey said earlier, which is customer voice. So it's like, okay, let's have a customer teach you and three others this at a dinner or something. People do want to get better at their jobs. People do have to eat. So these are two universals that you can drive offers off of in a very targeted way. The trick is though, it can't just be like generic, come learn about web personalizations. Like, well, that's not interesting. What specifically for that account? Do they need to know to be successful? Casey. I'm back to basics on this. And I would go a one-to-one landing page. Zero dollars if you have a landing page building tool. Get access to it, right? Hey account name, we know you need X. We provide X and then put content on the page. Give it to sales, sales ends to that account. And I think one of the biggest values of ABM is that people feel seen and like they know what they're looking at and the person sending it to them knows them as well. It's not AI generated, it's not an email, it's not something random, it's something that you formulated alongside the sales person to show that account that you care. And like Brian said, educate them. And put at the bottom a CTA that says, hey, get a free gift and well, you know, book a meeting. And there you go. There's a little one. You don't have to promote it digitally. You just give it to the SDR, the sales person. And they're your distribution channel for free. What else? Anything stand out in the chat? Anything got a hot take that I should have asked you? Dave, where start stop? Double down. Are we going to do them? I'm so curious. Sure, we talked about stopping something that you all want to start this year. That's in your mix, like exciting new thing you want to go roll this out. Something we're going to start doing this year is using AI to help us get people through these journeys. So high touch does this. I have a slightly optimistic view of AI that I hope will bring a little bit of hope to marketers. If AI can automate and generate the things that today as marketers are doing, we can spend more time on creativity, which is those out of home activations, those messaging pieces that we need a totally different way of thinking about things that AI cannot do for us. AI spits out whatever it's given. Marketers are creatives. Marketers can go change the message here, change the flavor here, get those gifts to those people, have those out of home activations. So we are going to start automating those clicking around tasks and trying to reduce the amount of UIs that we're using to launch just one account based campaign. Nice. Good answer, Brian. I guess all dog food, the idea I was just talking about, we're going really much harder with that lunch and learn motion. We essentially have a bunch of subject matter experts with prepared content about how to use AI for content generation and like effective marketing. And we're going out into the world and we're doing our best to actually visit the HQs of these companies and hand to hand educate them. The reason we're pulling much harder on that lever this year is because we've had really good early signs of that. It's like we're in a moment where there's so much uncertainty about what's happening to all of our jobs as marketers and what's happening to all of our jobs with the in terms of data and stuff that there's an appetite to learn. And there's a real overwhelm when you go into LinkedIn or wherever else. And so you need to be credible, of course, and that's not always easy, but that's one thing where we're at least going to try to double that on this year. It's hard to replicate. Like if we can scale it and do it effectively, our competitors may struggle to do that. You're up one Facebook ad away from booking hundreds of really quality subject matter expert led meetings with your buying audience. So do hard things. This is one of those good life lessons. And that's certainly part of how we think about you. Yeah. Drew, you got anything on your wish list over there at ramp? I do. My team just built a similarity model. I don't want to get too data E in the weeds, but for every prospect, it tells us who are the top customers we currently have who are similar to that prospect. And I think to circle back to all the AI and person stuff, social proofs kind of like been around for a while, I think it matters more now. I think if you can personalize a message with, hey, your competitor or this company that's similar to you, uses ramp and they love it, that goes a long way. And to go back to the high touch point, like we've got this model built now, we've pited into like a billion different places. So we've got it in ad platforms, we've got it, pited onto our website with high touch for personalizing landing pages. And we've got it right in like our CRM tools for sales people. So they're on a call now and pops up and it says, here's like three companies you can use for social proof. Yeah, I've brought the data weeds. Judy, I like that. But yeah, it's been super useful. References to? That's to take this back to just the timeless marketing stuff. It's like show, timeless marketing principle number, you know, with 37, right? Show me who else like me is already having success with this thing. Right. It's not something AI can replicate. You need to actually have those customers to say that. Yeah, and there's a lot of nuance. The nuance is like AI surfaces AMX, but it's like, well, we just played golf with them yesterday and we know that I want to be that guy. That sounds fun. Just playing golf with like these big companies. That's I like my job, but that's, I don't know. Not sounds awful. That sounds awful. Do you want to add to Drew's point, if you've got those models and you're piping them out using high touch, or there's other ways, but I would suggest high touch, you don't actually have to stop with the landing page. Though that like model and the associated insights and the customer references that you've kind of gathered and structured, you can be like generatively constructing nurturing emails. You could be pre-building things for your SDRs to send. Those can be like pre-generated content that then you send out to your direct mail vendor and so on. So you actually get a lot of scalability and reusability from the data work Drew is describing. Like you do that enrichment, you do that association between customer accounts and proof points. And then it's just like the job that becomes what are all the interesting ways I can brainstorm to use this. And with the right technology, it's actually quite easy to push one to many, federated out to everywhere. Might be valuable. Cool. All right. Look, we're going to wrap because lesson number three on webinars is end on a high note. And this has been awesome. I'm getting blown up by my team about the three of you. And like we need to do more stuff together. There's a thousand questions in the chat that we could go deep on. I thought this was great, but we do measure everything. We're just like a UABM folks, we're highly data-driven organization here at X5. So we're just going to roll the ratings poll real quick and just put your ratings here. We asked one through five rate today's session. I thought it was, I'm pretty biased. It was one of the better ones we've done recently, just getting really specific here. I know there's an infinite amount of questions that we could have got to, but I thought you all did a great job. Drew, Casey and Brian, let's give it up for you all. We'll send you all the A/B/M playbook from high touch after. And then also just go connect with each of our speakers on LinkedIn. Everybody's super kind and friendly here as it relates to marketing. I've found that if you send a connection request to one of them and drop a quick message after like, they'll respond, that works. Shout out to you all. This was awesome, really useful stuff. Make me want to do an A/B/M part two because there's so much we could do here. Thanks for giving us in 52 minutes of your time today. I'll give you eight minutes back so you can go, check your email or go talk to Gemini before your next meeting. And we'll see you on the next one. I'm Dave, I'm the host here at X5. I'm out of here, see you all. Thank you. Bye, everybody. Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you liked this episode, you know what? I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at X5. And you can go and check that out. 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