Episode 164: How to Use Signals in ABM: From Cold Outreach to Real Engagement with Andrei & Vladimir

[MUSIC] This is the Full Funnel B2B Marketing Podcast brought to you by FullFunnel.io. Let's dive in. [MUSIC] >> Hey everyone and welcome to the new episode of Full Funnel Life. While we are waiting for my co-host and my co-founder of Blood, I would love to share briefly with you what's an our agenda for today. As we promised, we are going to talk about using signals in account-based marketing programs, sharing different examples of how to leverage these signals properly. And to set up the agenda, we want to kind of logically move you from what types of signals we need to track to how to leverage them. So a couple of things that we would love to cover. First of all, why you should prioritize first party signals over sort party signals, because there is a huge obsession we have seen about sort party signals. And I know that I couple of tools that you can basically segment either to sales, or to start a stock or to market and start that promise teams to get access to more than 100 different signals. Obviously sort party signals. Why it's not the best investment for your team if you don't have first party signals. Then we're going to talk about value edit activities that are aligned with the type of the signal and the level of intent that signal demonstrates. Because the most common mistake here is treating every signal as the binding tent, which is absolutely not true. And lastly, why sort party data is only as valuable as your existing account engagement. That being said, I'm again, broadcasting from sorry Spain. Let me know guys where you all join us from in the chat. I saw Alan Adrian. I'm very great to see you again. Thanks a lot for joining us. Hopefully you have a good weather in the UK and let us back type type guys where all join us from. And we can pick it off as always feel free to ask your questions in the chat or bet in the Q&A section. And we're going to cover all of them. Hello, or whatever you prefer. Derek Nashville. Well, you were behind the scenes. But I just made the quick intro about the session. And I think we can immediately move to the part where we're going to discuss the difference between first party signals and so party signals. And then we're going to see if we can see my screen. I will try to see the signals are way more important than the third party signals. I will share my screen and then we basically can have a discussion around it. Let me know guys if you can see if you can see my screen. I will try to pull in the image. Let me know in the chat if you can see the screen. The first party signals are the signals that are coming from the direct and game. This would be the web. Conversations your CLS team. Is having with the bank members. This could be whatever not the the tactic that. I think it's kind of. Got a bad light in the marketing space was downloading the gated content, which is not always a bad idea. The bad. What is actually what is rotten about this is the further processes. But anyhow, content download event sign ups sign ups for your new slept engagement with the content. The first thing you can see is the direct engagement from target accounts from the buying committee members is. Actually the first party signals and on contrary of that, maybe you can share the difference. I will need to pick up another screenshot. What's the difference was the third party signals. Absolutely. So essentially when you look at the first party signals is engagement with your brand. Third party signals is information that you get from other sources, whether that's signal providers, such as. You know, one board, demand base, another so tell you things about. You know, searching tent things like excuse me searching tent. So what are the buyers from that target accounts currently searching. Searching for if they're searching for let's say you're selling some sort of. Let's say you're selling a B M software and your buyers are searching for a B M software for example. So that's a relevant keyword that you're monitoring. And there is suddenly a surge in this searching behavior in in the buyer searching for that keyword. Well, that is a third party signal classical one where you will see the most information about. However, obviously using pure account research. Using public information or some industry websites and industry databases. You can get additional information from company news about and will share more examples. But you know some investments they're making maybe mergers equisitions, whatever will share more examples. Maybe this is a relevant signal for you. So very frequently if you're sending some sort of a char software. For example, that could be a good signal for you if they're hiring. But even again selling a B M software they're hiring a B M. Let's say manager a B M leader. Well, that could also be a signal for you. Changes in management could be another signal. Well, show more examples below. But essentially let's say again somebody has joined the function as a new A B M lead. Let's say three months ago. Well, that could be a signal. If you know that usually a new leader is going to review their tech stack as one of the things that they will do. Right. It becomes interesting to know that money raised checking their annual reports where they announce maybe initiatives where you can see your financial information. A new projects that they're investing in sometimes they will announce that new projects that I won or you let's say initiatives. And let's take an example. I'm selling to manufacturing companies. They are opening a new site manufacturing site. Well, okay, that could be an interesting signal. And also very important is also just interviews of the buyers or their executives where they are sharing some information about the plans priorities challenges, et cetera. And just wanted to take a step back from going into these examples that I shared here of the third party signals. And kind of like just like what is the difference between the first and the third party signals. Why should we care. And by the way, we didn't mention this, but there are also second party signals, which is to say companies such as, for example, G2 will offer you. So G2 is a directory of the different solutions and they also sell in 10 data. So why is that the quote unquote second party is just to say that, okay, you might have your own listing on G2. And you know, you might get signals about accounts visiting your listing visiting competitors, a listing, et cetera, et cetera, just to give you a full picture. So first party, second party and third party. What is the problem with only looking at the third party signals, which is what a lot of companies will do. And the problem is that this third party signals, usually this information is available to everyone. Well, first of all, everybody, all your competitors, maybe direct competitors, but also other companies who are selling to the same buyers might be looking at similar signals, not all the same. Well, use these signals and basically anybody who let's say has an account in the Mondays or other providers, A/B and providers like that will be looking in those signals and will be reaching out based on those signals. And unfortunately, the way that the majority of people will be reaching out will be, hey, I saw you raised, can we have a meeting about. my product, right? And when the buyer receives a lot of outreach messages like that, again, it doesn't really change much from the usual way that buyers receive outreach. So, again, many of the similar messages and they start to ignore this, right? And the first party signals are your own and they indicate brand awareness usually and indicate potentially also some interest, right? And are unique to you, right? So, your competitors don't have those. So, I think that two key points are the your competitors don't have access to your first party signals and they can be stronger because one thing is somebody searching for some information about your category versus somebody visiting your website, checking out high intent pages, etc. It's just they are already checking you out and considering to include you, whether they will include you in the consideration set, the signal is much stronger. So, that's the overview of the different levels of signal. Would you like to add something to that or move on? Yes, I would just love to summarize everything and maybe make a first point on the level region first party and third party signals, right? If you look at leastically then on third party, everything what we have just discussed means in practical that third party signals could be used as initial account qualification criteria when you select accounts raised money hiring for specific positions purchased a specific technology, whatever, right? That could be used as initial account qualification. Next, these signals don't tell you anything about the current stage of the buyer journey. As was spoke, there is a false assumption that every signal means the buyer in intent. It's absolutely not true. They just tell you that this account could be a good fit for you, right? But it doesn't mean that the account has an active project that you can basically sell to. And the second level of third party signals is basically using them as timely outreach for the connected and engaged accounts, right? When you have an existing relationship with these accounts, that could be that could be an additional value. While the first party in term demonstrates your stronger intent and indeed this is the signals that you can use to separate let's say ICP feed accounts to ICP feed engaged accounts, right? You define the engagement threshold which in natural means that you can call these accounts when they're aware. They know about you, your product, etc. And that means that these companies are likely to engage with your ABM message and with your ABM playbooks, right? They are likely to engage with either sales outreach, or marketing collateral that you put. So this is the key. Now, we mentioned that the signals don't necessarily mean the buyer in intent. Maybe we have a very strong opinion here because from my perspective, the only way to define or basically the only point in 10 that I know is when your prospect tells you, send me an invoice, please. This is the only point in 10 that I know, but maybe everybody has a difference to take on this. Anyhow, jokes aside, if these signals don't mean the buyer in intent, what do they mean? And how can we build the playbooks aside from the already infamous ICO? I actually, it's so funny because quite often I see posts about different outreach and engagement tactics and link it in and almost every script starts with ICO. If you'll go to Clay or other tools that will enable you to write kind of semi-personalized emails based on the collected input, you'll see that the first input AI will give you, I saw you, right? And then we were kidding about this, I said, okay, probably you have pretty good eyes, right? If you spotted this, but jokes aside, this became kind of, this became a new cliche. So everybody literally uses this in the outreach. And what's happening right now is like years ago we saw the decline in outbound replies and the performance of like fully automated mouse outbound based on these insights, right? That I'm not saying that outbound doesn't work, but let's say generic outbound doesn't work. And what's making it even worse is that these buyers, when they're receiving more and more the same types of messages, what was said, they are likely to ignore it at all. So in the second part, basically, what we want to discuss is given you a few examples on how to understand the level of intent, they signals demonstrate a couple of playbooks and then how to build a holistic playbook for marketing and sales. So let's switch to that part. I will share maybe the overview of the dashboard with the signals and you can. Yeah, so a big problem is a lot of companies is that there exists an account blindness. And that is to say there is information about the accounts is siloed in different systems. It's not integrated. So you may have, let's say your account, you mentioned like first part of the signals, they have followed the webinar. And I've seen cases where this even just doesn't even come to Hubsbot or whatever marketing system you're using. It just remains in the Zoom, whatever registration database. Obviously, you want to have that information next to the account. Very frequently, we might have like based on how a lot of these tools work, especially like Marquero and Hubsbot, etc. They will collect these engagements, signals or these activities that your buyers have engaged with as contact level information and will not bring it under your account. You definitely want to see all of that information merged into one view. So like 360 view of the account if you will. Right, so where you are actually able to see all of this information because if you see one piece of information, let's say there is a search in ABM, there's looking for ABM solutions, for example. There is one piece of the puzzle. If you don't know anything else about that account, you can start making your assumptions and your assumptions are likely, you know, there is always a chance of making your own assumption there. But if you also know that, okay, there is a search in that search. Oh, by the way, they are looking to hire somebody or they have just recently hired somebody to lead their ABM initiative. Oh, and they're also checking out our, let's say, EBM case studies. Now the picture becomes maybe what, let's say, this happens to our brand. So we see that a target account is engaging with us. It's visited maybe some of our webinars. About ABM or is reading our case studies. We know that there is a search. Maybe they're looking for ABM software and we have the information. And we have, like I said, maybe a new person has joined to lead the ABM initiative. Now, piecing all these, and piecing some information together, now we might start to reason, hey, you know what, they definitely want to invest, it seems like they want to invest in ABM. And maybe they are considering alternatives. Maybe they are considering working with an agency or consulting company versus investing in software and doing in in-house. This could be one way to look at it. If you only had the information about that ABM software search, you would have made a different conclusion. So obviously you don't want to miss this information, which happens in a lot of companies. I remember once I was working with a client and we were looking at the target account and this target account was disqualified. But the reason we looked at them and checked them out was that we saw that a leader, CTO, was visiting a webinar about the topic from a competitor. We saw it on LinkedIn because you can see like who is visiting their events, who is registering for the events of on the relevant topics. So this was like, like one signal, if you will. Then we checked out that account, and we saw two more signals. Well, first of all, we saw that this was an account that had a closed lost deal. So we had a conversation with that account like a year ago, approximately something like that, maybe less than a year ago. This conversation went nowhere, they decided to mark that deal as closed lost. So nobody was looking at that account in other words. Like, oh, we know they're not looking. But when you combine that with the signal of that city of visiting Webinar, and then looking also a first party signal such as visits to the website, which is what we did. We discovered that actually several people from that company were checking out our product pages. Now, when you combine all these pieces of information together, you can see that at the time that we spoke to them, it wasn't the right time. It was too early in the process. But now there is this surge of intent, thirds of interest, they're even checking us. So we actually even have that previous relationship with somebody in that account. But because of this, exactly because of this account blindness, we didn't see a volume. Our clients wouldn't see that. We only saw it because we were basically looking at it. All right, so how do you avoid this blindness? It can be as simple as depending on whether you have access to solutions such as demand base, which you see here on the screen, where you can create a really holistic dashboard with different information. Maybe Andre, because it's a little bit difficult for me to-- Yeah, I know. I can navigate everybody. The key points, and thanks a lot for bringing this, we just use demand base as an example, because they have-- but this is where it's not sponsored at episode. Let's put it like this. So this is the only solution that we saw find the market that gives a holistic overview, because here is the problem. Most of the signals, they are sitting in different systems on different platforms, right? And quite often, they're in the cells, nodes, maybe even in the spreadsheets, et cetera. We try and we're not-- our company is not ideal here as well. So currently, we have then who I suppose in the chat, who is helping us out trying to set up the system to capture this from all different places. In our case, we have simplified process of collecting and aggregating this insights. But again, we have a small company, right? For all companies that we don't have an ambition to become a unicorn, right? But coming back to all technology companies, obviously, there is the revenue pressure and there are always sales targets. And that means that the teams, they must create these holistic dashboards. If we look at it, what is the most important? Obviously, this dashboard should include the basic information I will try to scroll it. The basic information about the company, right? And why this company is a good fit. Next overview of the former graphics criteria, right? Why this company is even qualified? And this kind of made the third party signals like hiring, raising money, whatever, right? Information that tells you that this account is the perfect fit. Also, it's good to keep somewhere and note about when these records were created, right, just to keep the freshness of this. Next, what's important is to have an overview on the contact level, because I think sometimes what companies are missing, they are either tracking signals on the account level or on the personal level. But in natural, what we know when these signals are happening on the contact level and especially if teams are used to use HubSpot, for example, they just mark these contacts as MCULs. They are not matching the signals to their account signals, right? Then the teams are missing the whole story. What's next? The first party intense, the website visits, right? What pages they were visiting, when they were visiting these pages, right? For how long they spend this time, et cetera. Next, intent keywords. It's optional. I'm not a big fan of tracking this, but that being said, in some projects, we have seen that when companies were searching for specific keywords, that's meant that these companies are actually in market and they have an urgent need. So sometimes it makes sense to track this as well. Companies use all the relevant information that you need to track, which means that it helps you to accumulate the knowledge about their accounts. The technology, if that's needed, and then you have the challenges, trends, et cetera, you can create multiple tabs based on what's needed for you. Ultimately, you can potentially replicate that dashboard and has in HubSpot. And what we personally like to do we create just a simple account node, which we ask both marketing and sales to keep regular update, right, alongside some static fields, right? But that's the key. The point is that you need to set up one unified place where you'll be sourcing only the most important signals. You don't need to track all 100 potential sort of quite your signals. Just define a few of them that are important for you. And then set up the systems that will help you to populate it. Yeah, I know I'm sorry, but that's my. These are the screenshots for the tool is demand-based. The platform is demand-based. So we just made the screenshots of different players but in nutshell, this is kind of the long screen of that you need to scroll. I'm just trying to show that this are kind of the key pages. The engagement on the account level, page views, right, the engagement from the author, the buying committee structure, top and 10 keywords, use, industry, and then kind of all of the overviews. So this is an example, maybe often ideal dashboard that accumulates everything, but again, we're pretty conscious about that demand-based is an enterprise platform and for many companies, it's hard to get the budget to purchase these platforms, right? So then you need to make a few workarounds and based on this dashboard, what I'm sharing is that what makes sense for you is just to define the key points, the key signals that you want to collect and define what should be your central. Basically, what should be your center of truth, right? Where all these signals are stored and qualified, that's the key. And then the demand-based marketing that you share it in the chat, exactly. So when you have this in the place and when these insights are constantly updated, then the teams can make the timely decisions on how to use it, right? Because if you have just a signal outside of the context, you can miss the market, or you can reach out to the wrong people, et cetera. And this is what most companies do at scale, right? But that's going opposite to account-based marketing needs using the example that what has shared. Now, I think if. Yeah, also feel free, they have experience with dealfront. Maybe let's quickly pick up that question. They have experience with dealfront signal tool called Target, I think I'm looking into this days. I mean, we use inside dealfront, we use lead feeder for the intent data. This is our tool, right? But call Target, I have no idea where we didn't use it to be honest. Again, I think that from the technology perspective, the market now is evolved and you have. Even if you look, for example, at Common Room, Common Room promises you to get access to 100 plus signals, right? But the question that you need to ask as a team, do we have capacity to track all of the signals and engage and create basically value-edit engagement based on them? That's the problem. A lot of teams will often see that a lot of teams are struggling to make sense of, like, let's say, seven, eight signals to be honest. And it's a big challenge to combine them and make a holistic overview but what was sharing in the example, right? So even a streamlining this would be a huge success. My best recommendation would be just defining maybe four to five core first-party signals and then three to five third-party signals and then start thinking in terms of systems. What's dashboard and where this, let's say, dashboard or source of information should we have, right? Should it live in the Google in the spreadsheet, right? Should it live in accounts core card in HubSpot or in Salesforce or somewhere else? I think this is the most critical question that you need to answer as a team. And then how to make sure that both marketing and sales are saving the critical insights they are collecting because we mentioned already that the most essential first-party signals are the conditions that sales are having with the target accounts. And quite often this information is just living in the heads of sales reps, unfortunately. So that's the key. That's the key. Now, the second part of today's presentation would be how to make sense of these signals, right? So I think what we can do is just share this, I can probably zoom in. Yeah, it's a picture, I think. No, no, no, it's not. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, it's a picture. Should be good for everybody right now. So I think you can go ahead. Yeah, what I just wanted to say is what we would love to share with you guys is how to make sense of these signals. And first of all, how to understand what is the level of intent, the signal demonstrates, and what could be the right actions for both marketing and sales. That's the key. Sorry, given your mic back, what? Yeah, thank you. So basically, if you look at this table without looking at the details for the moment, there's like three things to observe first. Like the first thing is what Andrey mentioned. There is different levels of intent. We all know that when you have a gated content download and when you send that MQL to sales, we all know by now that this doesn't work. So why doesn't it work because there is a mismatch between the level of intent and your activity and your action, your next step, right? And so in other words, the first thing we need to do is we need to align the level of intent with the activity, with the action that we are taking or asking the buyer to take. So that's what you see here in the buying intent column. We see low, medium, et cetera. The second thing I'd like you to observe is that this is actually kind of a documented playbook. You have specific actions that need to be taken depending on the signal. So I think this is probably missing in 90% of companies, is just a very simple documented playbook. When A happens, when somebody downloads a piece of content, when somebody is engaged with content on social, when somebody, let's say, there is a new management, there is a management change, so a new leader is hired, for example. What should happen? So there is a very useful exercise that you can always do is list all these signals, have a meeting, to get away with sales, go through them, and ask yourself, what is the actual demand here? Are they are looking for a solution? Are they just interested in your content and they're interested to learn? And what is that? Is that low, medium, high demand? We don't need to complicate it. And then think about what is appropriate. And the third thing that stands out here is that you will see two columns on the right-hand side, the marketing actions and sales actions. So you will see that there is a number of things that marketing can do versus sales can do. And they should work in concert. And the only way this can happen is, again, if you have, obviously, you need to be a lion of the same target accounts and qualification criteria. You need to have also the shared agreement of the signals that you're tracking. And basically, this kind of playbook, the agreement on who it needs to do what. But also, you need to have somebody who is in charge of tracking those signals. Even if those signals come into the same, even if you have this ideal dashboard, somebody still needs to basically go there and say, hey, we are seeing this new signal coming in. We know that this is what needs to be done. And so we either have, let's say, a weekly pipeline review meetings, which is what we love to have with our sales and marketing things when we work within an IBM pilot and helping companies implement A/B/M programs. But in another way, basically, sharing, hey, this is the signal. These are the activities that marketing or specific person should do. And these are the activities the sales person do. So let's look at some of the examples. So I'll share a couple and maybe-- I'll share a couple. Absolutely. So I'll pick one here at the beginning, the second line. It's a first-party signal. So let's say somebody has downloaded a research. So what we know at this point is that this is essentially when somebody downloads content, they have demand for content and the buying intent is low. And what should marketing do in this case? Well, let's first make sure that this account, or the person in this case, because it's contact-based information, but the account for this person works at, is actually qualified. Do they meet our target segment, ICP criteria? And OK, we had different podcasts where we zoomed into this criteria, but essentially, what you want to make sure is that you're only targeting accounts that you have a reasonable chance of winning, retaining over a long time. And the way that you can track those signals-- sorry, the way that you can research whether they meet those qualifications in criteria, I think under mentioned this already earlier today, you can use some of those third-party signals to do that. But essentially, you're checking, do they actually fit our ICP criteria? Then what else can we do? We can actually take our-- because remember, it's low intent. Our goal is to nurture that account, to basically create opportunities for sales to engage, start conversations, and start profiling that account. So to start nurturing that account, we can add into our re-targeting lists. We can make sure that they start receiving both, let's say, thought leadership content, expertise content, but also maybe a social-proof case studies, maybe even some kind of problem solution kind of product marketing ads, as well if that's what you're running. And maybe you're going to enroll them in your-- maybe you have some sort of nurture sequence that is designed for that specific job role that you have identified at buyer who is engaged and that use case. What should the sales do? So basically, marketing what they're doing first, helping qualify second, including in ongoing nurturing sequences, whether that's through ads and re-targeting, whether that's through email. What should now sales do? Sales is basically the goal of sales is to start building relationships with those buyers and start asking them profiling questions. What do we mean by profiling questions? What we mean is trying to get that inside information about the challenge priorities and needs of that a target account so that we can basically qualify, do they actually have an active need? And what are those challenges priorities of that target account? Because only then you can really personalize your pitch and your outreach beyond your first name, your role. I saw that you are in that role and things, silly things like that. Oh, I saw that you downloaded this piece of content. Can we have a meeting with our own brand? Anyhow. I saw it again. So we both breathe air. Yeah, exactly. So what should they do? They should enrich the buyers. So basically they should understand who their buyer is, what their role is in the target account, who, what their KPIs, our goals are based on the research. They should also research the account, start understanding. Are they displaying some other signals? Can we essentially find out something more based on just desk research? And I started to understand what could be starting to maybe hypothesize what could be the challenges of that target account. They can connect to the buyer. Now remember, we want to align our action with the level of intent. So in this case, they downloaded a piece of content. Well, very aligned action could be paid. So the piece of content, you downloaded a piece of content, asked for the feedback about it, right? You can connect an ask for feedback. That's much more aligned than pitching. And then as the conversation starts progressing, they can start asking the profiling questions, as I said, about challenges, about-- their priorities, et cetera. And potentially also, depending on how that conversation is going, whether they're finding something through their account research or through their conversation, another example activity could be to suggest other relevant resources, case studies, content hubs, or potentially even a consultation with an internal SME, like somebody who has expertise, let's say, you've spoken about-- let's say they downloaded a piece of content about, let's say getting the bind for ABM, and you reached out to them, you asked them about what they thought about that piece of content. And maybe you started a conversation about the topic, which was getting the bind. Oh, well, is this something that you're looking to get a bind or start looking to start at say an ABM program? And let's say they say, yeah, yeah, we are indeed like considering revamping our ABM program. And we need to get the bind from our whatever VP, or just a sales team, whatever. And so at that moment, the salesperson could either share more resources or suggest a consultation with somebody who has the expertise, somebody who can share with them how to get the bind, or who can help them build a business case for the bind, or whatever other appropriate activity, or other appropriate advice there is to give. So as you can see, you can actually do a lot, even with the gate it comes in download in this case. If it's relevant, if it's good quality, all these other things. But again, it is aligned with that level of intent. So that was one example. Maybe you can take another one. What I would love to do, because I believe while we were sharing this screen, everybody already could read the examples here and then understand the sense. What I would love to do is quickly bring the point that Barry made, and then would love to run one practical example. So what Barry said, which is absolutely true, is that what a lot of companies are doing, that they use these different platforms that give you the signals and just encourage SDRs to run the pitch slapping of just generic outbound. And the second problem here, which I believe is important to mention, that with signals, is that the challenge with the signals is that 40% of companies are doing research and showing signals, yet 85% end up in no decision. But I like the way you are dealing with this in your playbook with actions tied to level of demand and intent. I think this is critical, which means you need to understand the bio-region, and you need to make sense of all of it with your sales team. What signal tell you what? And how can you apply it? That's the most critical part. Now what I would love to do before we'll move to Q&A, because we have great questions there. I would love to answer a couple of things, give you maybe a practical example. Ashlyn actually asked a really good question about search intent. Before we'll answer that question, let me give you a practical example. So if Ashlyn hopefully that's OK with you, that you'll be kind of a winner-picking that example. So here is an insight. We know that Ashlyn has signed up for this event and attended this event. And more important, he has a senior position in his organization also. The fact that he asked the question means a lot to us. We can treat it as the first party signal. That being said, being fully transparent, we don't have any official relationship. And now prior conversations. What does that signal means to us? Does it mean that we should transfer it, for example, to somebody from our team, let's pretend the sales team and ask the pitch. Ashlyn, fantastic question. Thanks a lot. My bad, even my bad. I saw you have signed up for full final life. And I saw that you asked that question. By the way, I don't care about your question, but would you like to have 15 minutes call with us to discuss how can we help you with ABM? In natural, this is what most teams are doing. And this is what Barre was saying. But what could be different? What we mentioned here for a look at these playbooks. And now I just want to make sense of it. That's a fantastic opportunity for us to look at his company, do their company search, understand what might be the current state of ABM. And then just having one on one conversation, first of all, saying thanks a lot for that fantastic question and sense a lot for coming. Are you guys currently running an ABM, or plan to run it in Q3, Q4, for example, right? Because based on this, then we can prioritize what should be the next steps. How should we engage with him and his company, right? That's the key. So without understanding that intent, all the rest is useless. Now, imagine it's just the hypothetical scenario because I thought that we don't have a previous relationship. Imagine for a second that, like if we had a holistic dashboard, right, and in that dashboard, we saw that a person who worked, for example, as an FIM, correct you are in Canada, right? But so I'm just thinking about our Canadian clients. Imagine somebody from card data, for example, from certain, joined your company, right? And we have somebody in the buying committee while engaging with you, right? That makes perfect sense to reach out to our contact in the company and understand what's happening there before even sending any type of outreach, right? And making sense of every single user our common connection there. That's the key. Next, should we look at other engagement that has happened and on their account level? Did anybody from Ashland's company sign up for our newsletter for our attended our previous podcasts or webinars, right? All of these things make perfect sense and they give the context. But without it, if we just look only on one or solely on signal, we can make bad steps and bad decisions, right? So that's the key. Just wanted to make sorry for taking years, an example, but hopefully I just wanted to demonstrate how to make sense of everything. And yeah, looking far out of the outreach, we are not going to the finish, but I just wanted to share this example. Let us know, please send the chat if that makes sense and that explains how to look at these signals and how to match them to the level of intent and how to think about the playbooks, just what are a provide a quick feedback. And we can take some questions from Ozir. I'm sorry if I'm not pronouncing your name correctly. What is a good affordable intent signal tool on the market? And also a similar question from Jamie. There seems to be so many intent data platform, six cents, so mean fine, reach, lead feeder, six cents is the analyst favorite, but lead feeder seems to be highly recommended. What's the best way to select an intent vendor platform? So I would share my personal take, flight and feel free to elaborate on it. First of all, we're always recommend to go and it doesn't matter if you are selecting an onboard and can you tool or you are building a new motion like a common-based marketing. You need to go through three stages, pilot, operationalization and scaling. And whenever you do the pilot, you need to do it without ramping up your budget and to choose the small-scaled program. That means from selecting the new software, you need to start with something that is budget-friendly. Why? Because if you immediately over-invest into expensive platform and you don't have robust processes, you don't have good alignment and cross-functional collaboration with sales, literally what you are doing is just you motivate your CFO to take a gun and stay near your head and ask you during the upcoming months to justify the investment. And you are very likely to deal with the problem that Barry mentioned. Just use all of the signals as the buying intent and do the outbound outreach because you need to justify it. From that perspective, it means that you need to select something that is budget-friendly, our personal recommendation and obviously a partner and a deal front or a lead feeder where using them for years and we did a lot of commodity events in the UK as well. And the platform is robust. They are doing a lot of progress and we might be a little bit biased but they always ask how opinion on how to update the product and their budget-friendly. So from that perspective, I will look at them. But that being said, the most important thing and here is first of all, which tool will feed into your existing processes? Which tool will easily integrate with your existing technology stack? Right? Which tool you can basically adopt really fast? This would be the most important questions that I would prioritize. And only when you have good processes with budget-friendly software, and when you build this playbook, because what you see here on the screenshot, that should be executed live, right? All the playbooks that are mapped out in the Google documents, are Google sheets without live execution make no sense, right? So you need to execute them live, you need to know how they work, and only from that perspective it makes sense to invest into more robust and more sophisticated software that will give you holistic overview. So hopefully that makes sense. Just wanted to drop a very quick two-sense. I think very important to understand that you can actually run that pilot program without an existing intent data tool. We have done it many times. And you will understand what the bottlenecks are in your process, in your system, or well, there are two possible outcomes. Either you will implement it successfully, and you will start to notice that if you had better source of intent data that you could have addressed more accounts or that you could optimize your process. If you invested in a tool that's merges all that, integrates all that information and brings into one dashboard, which is good, which is then the next step and is going to be easier to justify the investment as well. Or you will discover a number of bottlenecks that will need to solve before. And probably it's like a mix of the two, right? So what I mean by that is maybe it's going to be very difficult for you to get engaged in from sales. And regardless of how the well-daired accounts are researched, regardless of identifying the data, etc. Regardless of providing the opportunity, maybe you will have difficulties in engaging them and having them actually participating in the program and having effective results from that, right? So that just one example, there are many different bottlenecks. There are many, many different bottlenecks, I think. We probably mentioned a lot of them in our other episodes. And the other one very practical thing under the mentioned, like what you should be looking in a tool is the data. Because like this, each tool is as good as the data that it has. And some of these tools, not all of them, will give you some sort of free trial or will give you the sample of the data. And I would definitely go and compare those because different tools use different data sources which are good, which might be better in some regions than in your region or might be better for some industries than the industries that you serve vice versa, right? So whenever you have the opportunity, I would always do that. I would always compare the data. We have compared data from different providers and the differences are huge. And in some cases, some of the data is very hard to believe to be honest. So do that as part of due diligence when selecting intent for sure. So yeah, actually the question that I promised Ashlyn answer. And I will just pull two questions. How important is to align in 10 keywords to final stages and measures strengths by keyword crew by final stage? And the second part, given that ABM outreach should be tailored and personal life as specific contacts personas. Is it a good idea to build your keyword list by decision maker persona function of the business? So a couple of things that I have observed and I would love to give you the real example. So imagine if you are selling, whatever, let's say cyber security solution to enterprise organizations. And then you see a visit on your website from company. Let's say Coca-Cola honestly. And obviously you see the IP that is coming, whatever, let's say from Coca-Cola United States. And you can see the specific city. Let's say Houston or maybe just a complicated a little bit New York. Now, how can you identify from whom this search was done? That's the most complicated issue when just relying on intent search when you are selling to enterprises. When you are selling to SMBs, that's not a big problem. And obviously you can highlight it makes perfect sense to focus on the, let's say keywords that might belong to the different final stages. That being said, what I have seen is when you just rely on you know, broader keywords and you sell to enterprises, it's almost this signal gives you almost zero insights, right? Because you have no idea from each department from who exactly this is coming from. So that's the first associated problem. The only thing that how could I use that signal, I would use this signal as a qualification criteria just to select the account. But it gives you no idea if this means the buying intent, etc. And that means that this would be just the first step to qualify the account. And then in our categorization, if you didn't have any engagement with this account, we put it in the cluster ICP, which means that they don't know you and you have no idea if they are in the market. And from that perspective, you need to install the playbooks that will help you to create awareness inside that account, right? That's the key. Now, if you sell to SMB, as I mentioned, that shouldn't be the problem. And if you still want to track, I would only recommend you to focus on the bottom of the final keyword, something that is directly related to your product. And some good combinations that we have seen in the past are the keywords that, for example, include competitor alternative, whatever. Like, let's say, we spoke about demand-based, six-sense, lead-feeder, whatever. You put demand-based alternative, six-sense, alternative, etc. That could be a good signal for you. And, yeah, also your branded search, and maybe, again, your brand as an alternative, some of these companies might be evaluating you, you know, on their own. So that could be a good intent, but that also makes sense to track when you have a lot of accounts in the pipeline. That would be a pretty good signal for you to track. And, yeah, mostly this. So if you focus just on the bottom of the final, that would make sense. Because if you go further, then I mean, I would just use it as an opportunity. It's just one of the account qualification and account source and criteria. Otherwise, you can go nowhere, right? And we did this example once, was one of our clients, where the sales team, they talked with all the strikers. So I said, okay, show me your process. And then the sales rep told, okay, then I would just open this company in sales navigator and I'm, okay, what's next? And I will try, because they sell them to 80 teams. I'm saying, okay, what do you do next? Well, I will just pick up this in your area, obviously they want to sell to the decision makers, right? And I would try to look for the VPNs, basically, they apply all these filters in sales navigator titles with P, director, chief plus, etc. And then we end up with like more than one K potential buyers already narrowed down by the region. And then I'm saying, okay, so what's next? Oh, well, I will just maybe quickly scroll and try to define who might be the good person who might demonstrate that intent. But basically, the truth is, and we all know this, if you make the decisions based on your Godliness, your play and the lottery. That's a bit completely transparent and honest, right? And then lottery, if you're rarely been, I mean, I'm sorry for kidding, but that's the set reality. So I just wanted to share, wanted to bring this as a point, right? Because if you are selling to SMBs, then for you, it would be relatively easy. And if you have pretty niche product, then it would be relatively easy to identify the buying committee and to reach out to the right decision makers. But if you do this for enterprise organizations, then I would just focus on the bottom of the final keyword. All right, I think we have one more question here. Let me share it out from Maria, how do we use these signals when running LinkedIn ads? Basically, we had already shared an example where you have let's say a low buying intent signal. So you're just deciding to include that target account in your list of target accounts essentially, like based on qualification and maybe based on some initial signals. Well, as far as as long as you don't know anything more about that account, you're basically including a list, it makes sense not to over complicate things and simply to include that target account in existing LinkedIn ads that you're running. So if you're running, let's say, thought leadership ads promoting content, makes sense to include that account in those ads. If you're running obviously product marketing ads, other ads that you're running make sense to include that target account as well. If you are kind of further down the funnel and you have very specific, yeah, you have insights about that target account. What kind of insights can you have? Well, what we know is that you typically when you're selling into, especially like larger target accounts, enterprise accounts, et cetera, you will have different use cases. And what I mean by use is different reasons why the customers buy your solution. And it could be related to maybe different buying triggers, et cetera. Maybe it's because there was a recent acquisition and they are now looking to, let's say, integrate the existing, so the two different text tags and you know that in some cases, this is a good buying trigger for you when you actually are able to sell your tool which is kind of like a more integrated solution than what exists in the market. Just one example. And you may have other use cases. So if this is your use case and you have specific ads that show why your solution is a good solution when you have use cases like that and the related challenges of the use case and how you solve them, all that would be also then including that target account in those ads as well. I wouldn't necessarily set up the ads just for that because you need to have a sufficient number of accounts there to be able to even run the ads. But if you're running, I mean at the beginning for sure, I would start just any accounts to the appropriate ad groups to the ads and ad groups, adding them to the target list to target them as well. And that's a very simple way to do it. - Awesome. I think we have covered pretty much that we wanted to cover today. Thanks a lot for your feedback guys. Happy to hear that you found it valuable as that's the goal for this podcast. Next week we are coming back with a new life case study in writing our another client and reflecting on the pilot ABM program. That's was probably the most successful ABM campaign that we have ever done. So state units, that would be a sales rep and marketing director of that company. That would be really cool case study as a selling to the niche audience will make the announcement next Monday and hope to see all M&K tests of the week. Cheers. - Bye.