Episode 172: How to target accounts in 2026 with Andrei & Vladimir

[MUSIC] This is the Full Funnel B2B Marketing Podcast brought to you by FullFunnel.io. Let's dive in. >> Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Full Funnel Life. Today is kind of a special topic we have been discussing for quite a time. We are going to talk about how to target the accounts, right? And we are not going to dive into, like, let's say, specific tactics, but we want to share from the mental principle that we firmly believe you guys should try next year. We have seen a constant success with this approach, with the cluster-based targeting. Last, not only in the last, but let's say in the past episodes, and also on how to plan pilot ABM program, we're briefly touched upon the cluster targeting. But I think what we have never explained in the tail end, we have constantly received these questions. What is an actual framework? How can I do this step-by-step? So this is our goal for today's episodes. We want to explain the difference between the cluster targeting and traditional industry targeting, how you can select the right cluster. And then what is the necessary framework for your programs? And it doesn't matter if it's a account-based marketing program, or it's the management program. If it's any cross-functional activity that you want to do together with sales, the framework would be still the same, because it gives you good insights what channels to pick up, what bar persona to focus on. What should be a message and all about? What should be a content all about? That's the goal for today's episode. As always, you are very welcome to type your questions in the chat. And let us know guys where you all join us from. Type in the chat please, your city or county, curious to see who has joined us so far. We had more than 100 people signed up for today's episode, where I again, brought custom from Sanyant Warm Spain. And let us know where all join us from. And while you are typing, let's quickly remind the story about the cluster market when we started basically the cluster approach. If you have been following us, or sometime maybe you have been in the slide. We've been showing this constantly as unfortunately, only once had a good analysis from the client, where they were focusing on vertical approach. This was the story about the company that was selling to different financial institutions and they had this vertical approach banks financial services. And what else I forgot all the industries, but to make it short, let's say in this case, some error, they picked up the banks, right, the bad industry. They selected the biggest banks and the problem didn't really work. So obviously they reported on MQLs, but you know the story when you connect the dots and in six months there were only two sales accepted opportunities and zero closed one. And the biggest problem, because it's kind of the typical setup, right, we're always thinking terms of industries we want to do industry marketing and then when we select and we make a list of accounts, the biggest problem though is that if you are selling to enterprises, not even enter prices, if you are selling to midsize companies, accounts in the same vertical might have multiple lines of business and hence multiple use cases. And also this is more and this more enterprise specific example, if you have different blind community groups, they all will have different use cases, right, in this case, if you pick up an account, you have no idea what should be your message and all about, right. So we have actually two approaches here, how to deal with this the first one is and this is the most typical approach, we try to create something universal something generalized right. And second one and you know the story, we help companies like yours, for example, we help, we help the biggest banks with X, Y and Z, what do you like to have a demo, right, this is more generalized approach. Or the second one which nobody has really resources to do is to plan super personalized approach for different blind community groups and create super personalized content, which is in some way one to one a. Right, that's why every program that we that's let's say was executed for specific vertical and maybe just one once this this wasn't a niche vertical right so there were multiple use cases multiple lines of business, all this programs typically failed so. From that perspective when we were analyzing this constantly we were thinking was what what would be the better approach how a B M could be executed in a more meaningful way so it will yield better results right, how can we change this class basically this traditional vertical approach and this is how we came up to the cluster approach so passing might be what. Everyone and I remember this example I think it's a very good example because a lot of companies may be thinking of financial industry, financial service industry, it is an industry that we can target but of course once you start scratching the surface you start understanding that there you know there's a big difference between retail banks between let's say. Obviously like if you're also including insurance companies maybe wealth and private banking etc etc right so imagine and it wasn't really the case but imagine you would selling something like a CRM you know something that is used by the sales teams and you have you have kind of a generic messaging. Oh we'll help you close more deals right well first of all if you're selling to the financial service industry they're not really closing deals they don't talk about deals they don't even like necessarily have sales people at least they don't call themselves people actually depending on the different vertical within. The financial service industry they might call them different they might call them investment advisors or they might call them just agents in maybe retail banking right second they will have very different use cases and very different reasons why they might buy from you especially if you're selling a product that is kind of like. I took the example of CRM maybe this is very broad but even like something that is more specific will very frequently especially with larger accounts will have different use cases so for example if you think about financial service industries and think about banks for example and even like zooming on let's say wealth management or investment management kind of banks well what do we have their different kind of use case well maybe one of the use cases. Is on boarding how do they onboard new clients maybe that's more relevant for the retail banks or maybe another one is how do you make sure like if you have a large turnover of your advisors what happens like they earn the most money on a few clients they have they have they don't need to have a lot of clients they have to have really good clients and you have to keep them and sell them more financial products right so. How do you win as a as a bank there is by keeping your clients for a long time how do you keep your clients by knowing enough about them by having all the different sources of information integrated now we start talking about a very specific use case okay so when we define a use case we can start defining also a cluster so let's zoom into cluster. Cluster targeting versus vertical targeting in the cluster as I said it is a set of accounts set of companies that feature ICP but have a shared use case or shared set of challenges to take our own example we could have different kinds of companies maybe be to be manufacturing companies maybe be to be such companies. These are companies that we could serve be to be service companies etc across these different verticals we can have a use case develop account based marketing strategy so for various reasons they may decide to develop account based marketing strategy because they want to go to enterprise because they have kind of let's say moving from product let growth to more enterprise sales. They kind of tap out on how much they can grow from product let growth etc they will also have shared challenges very frequently they'll marketing and sales will operate in. silos, where they have misaligned goals, maybe also not targeting the same ICT. They will have a lack of clarity to which market segments and accounts they should prioritize and go after, and they will not usually not have a structured framework in place to target those high value accounts. It's a little bit meta because we're actually talking exactly about some solutions during this presentation, but we could apply this like I said to different industries, let's say we focus on the enterprise B2D SaaS market with original teams. Now this is becoming a very niche cluster that we can start to basically identify accounts. So one, this help us to identify accounts that are in that cluster. First of all, we can go after enterprise B2D SaaS, who have regional teams, where we can go on an academic and find out if they have teams, sales and marketing teams in multiple regions. We can obviously check that on their website as well. We can also go and check, for example, you know, enterprise B2D SaaS. So we can see whether, for example, they have hired recently an ABM leader, an ABM manager. That might tell us that they're implementing ABM's technology. Maybe we see on the website that they're kind of used to selling to SMB, but now they want to focus on enterprise accounts, etc. etc. So one, that allows us to define, put criteria, how do we go after those accounts. And second, in the most important one, it allows us to basically align our content and messaging with those accounts in a one to few. So have relevant messaging for that whole cluster of accounts. So if I look at on this diagram, for those who are watching us, you can see the difference between the traditional segment based and use case based marketing or account based marketing. What we see basically on the typical segment based or vertical based, like they said, we could select like a financial service industry B2B SaaS companies, whatever, we would then say, you know what, we are a good fit for a company of this size, with this tech stack, etc., etc. But then the problem that we would run into is that they will have different use cases. So how do I make sure that my content, my messaging, when I'm trying to market to those accounts from that segment is relevant? Well, I either have to go for some sort of common denominator across these different use cases. So be more general, generic, right, broad, you know, go back to the product or the service that I'm selling. While when we go after the use cases, which is given the right hand side, we can basically say, hey, you know what, we see the same use case, I give an example in preventing ABM strategy across the different segments, across different verticals. We have, as I mentioned, we can now identify those accounts that belong to the cluster, like I was giving the examples of, you know, hiring an ABM manager, moving to enterprise, maybe in the last one years they hired, last year they hired an enterprise sales leader. We see maybe on their company website, maybe we see more like enter focusing on enterprise logos and things like that. And then we can talk about these specific challenges because as you have seen here, companies that we know from our experience that are developing come with market strategy all have these share challenges. Now, when you create content about those challenges, it becomes a relevant very relevant for all of them. So I think this is the core difference between the two. So to summarize, why cluster based? Because with the same type of content messaging, you can enter through the entire cluster of ICP accounts, regardless of the industry, in some cases, like the university, in regards to the tier, because usually the way we would, let's say, buy the book ABM would say that you need to create different programs for tier one accounts, tier two accounts, tier three accounts. Here we can actually have relevant messaging for tier one, tier two accounts, normally in tier three, we are not going to run ABM for tier three. And as I said, this messaging and content are going to be relevant, they're going to resonate, we're going to be able to track their attention, engage them, start more conversation. And very importantly, and you will see how we can focus on accounts that have a higher probability of becoming a sales qualified opportunity, let's say, in the next quarter. You will share exactly how we do this. So these are the reasons how, and since we started implementing cluster based marketing, I'll mention that we have seen success in various industries. I gave example of it to be SaaS and financial service industries, but we have here trading managers or custom managers who are importing from their suppliers. We have, what was this, associations and learning, selling learning programs to the associations. We have, again, another corporate learning program being sold to consumer goods companies all over the place in terms of the industries and different use cases. We have seen similar success. So you can see this case that we share, usually just very quickly here, growing the marketing contribution from 35 to 60 percent, booking, 10 discovery calls, and we couldn't communicate, I believe, the pipeline here, 22 ultra enterprise deals out of whom we had two close ones for a software engineer. So very soon this is quite a lot of success with this approach. So with that, kind of framing what the cluster versus segment is, why we should consider it, why we should consider running that in 2026. Let's dive into the step-by-step framework on how to select the target cluster accounts and also how to define a program. What we want to do next is to give you a structured step-by-step process that you can replicate with the examples. Again, if Samsung won't be clear or you will have any follow-up questions, feel free to type them in the chat and we'll make sure to cover them. So where do we start? The first step that we need to take is to export our deals and categorize them by use cases. That was a question I received from Christina. Christina Zhukovay, so about how can we use AI in this process, right? And you can actually use it in this first step. A couple of things. So what we did, you can see on the slide, our export and our categorization, which Vlad pre-lamply did. The only one thing that we kind of did for the base episode instead of not instead, but we basically removed the column with the company's names. But then you can see the region, you can see the industry of that specific company. And what we did first, we exported all the notes that we had from our inquiry form, the firm that companies submit on the website. And maybe in our case, it was a little bit easier just because most of our pipeline, not most, but let's say 99% of our pipeline is inbound. So we always have this. And then we always record our discovery calls. So we had the transcripts of these calls. And we extracted the business challenges that were mentioned, right? If you're thinking about using AI, right? So obviously, this is the first easy step. You can set up a prompt to extract the challenges that were shared. And one more, maybe also where you can use AI, what would be helpful here, is to create a definition of use case. Again, different companies might define it differently. In our case, how we think about use cases, this is specific jobs to be done of a specific buyer persona, right? Something that they want to do to achieve specific results. So the clear process, right? That could be described as a goal, right? To develop a count-based marketing strategy, example. So then we basically created the short versions because we didn't put the long titles of of this. use cases. For our in our case, so we just put for example, ABM strategy or revamp and go to refining, go to market strategy or alignment, whatever, right? But obviously this are the, let's say, abbreviations of longer use cases. And then we made a structure at least of all this, let's say, business challenges that the companies mentioned. The next step what we did is just we mapped all the deals that we had again, that could be different approaches. What we did, we exported only the qualified deals. We didn't want to spend time on let's say inputs from the companies that we either disqualified for whatever reason, lack of resources, lack of budget, right, could be multiple reasons. So they're coming from different verticals. Some companies prefer to extract this data about all the deals that have a holistic, let's say, overview. So it's up to you to decide. So now, in my case, we just extracted for only qualified deals for the last, if I'm not mistaken, in last 18 months, right? But it could be, it's been a while since I made it, but I usually look at between 12 and 24 months, that's correct. So I think the key to defining timeline is your cell cycle length, right? If it's above 12 months, definitely, it would make sense to extract the data for at least last 18 to 24 months, just to have a good outline. So I think it's born also just depending on the amount of deals that you have in some cases, you might not have that in me. And also whether there was something significant that happened in the market that changed, like back in the day when there was COVID or something in the industry that changed, that can impact the dynamics and kind of impact the conclusions. Yes. So what we did, then we manually mapped out these deals to use cases, but again, this is where you can use AI, just to accelerate this process, right? Why do we want to do this? Because we want to accumulate these data and then make a good holistic analysis of how well we assess specific clusters, right? By clusters we mean how well we are closed for specific use cases, which we are going to present next. So do you break it down, what? Absolutely. This is relatively simple. When you look at this table, what you see is aggregation, each line is the aggregate of all the deals that match that use case. So maybe I should have said this differently. So if I look at all the deals that belong to use case one, I extract the average deal size and your contract value, average lifetime value, win rate, sales like cycle length, these are kind of the sales velocity metrics that tell you in terms of how quickly you can grow right when you in that segment, and segment we did in this case is a cluster. And then the number of case studies. And then the reason why we use the number of case studies, and we say always like successful case studies, we have basically good reference clients. In a lot of industries and a lot of clusters, it's really important to have good reference clients, it's almost impossible and some cases to even sell without that. And of course it gives you it gives you the case studies that you can use in your marketing, it gives you also much better insight. You have more data, especially if you're a larger company, you don't have the opportunity to interview your clients, having those case studies is going to help as well. So in this case, how do you actually decide which cluster to focus on? You could decide, you know what? For example, like the first line where I put the orange was the lowest value, where I put the green was the highest value. So if you just look purely on the deal size, we could say, you know what, this first line is the lowest deal size, the last line is the biggest one. So you might say, you know what, let's focus on the biggest one. Actually, of course we need to look at the different metrics, the biggest one, the last line here with fourth line. But we see there is that, yes, these are the biggest deals, but they don't seem to stay as long. So for example, if I compare in the last line, I see that the lifetime value compared to the actual deal size is only just double, so two years versus for example line three, where we have almost five years. So we know the discustomers stay longer, but also even more importantly, we see that we can win, that the win rate is better, which is also very important, especially when you look at the last line, we see that these are big deals, but their sales cycle length is very long. Their win rates are closed, we know they're not going to be easy to close. So if you want to start a program, maybe not a good idea because we are not going to be able to demonstrate any visible results to the organization, it's going to be difficult for us to also get the buying to continue this program in the future, if this is something, for example, that you're just starting with. But also one more thing I want you to say about this, it also depends on your goal, right? So let's say that your goal is to, yeah, for example, let's say the organization has come to the conclusion looking at this revenue numbers that this segment number three here, the one that where they stay the longest is for the company really where we make the most profit, and if you want to grow sustainable growth, we need to focus on this segment, right? Or on segments where we have like highest retention, well, obviously we are going to focus on this one. But maybe on the other hand, there is an external pressure from the board or from the investors that you need to show traction within the next year, or you won't get the next funding round. Well, if that is the goal, then you need to look at, for example, maybe the second line, where maybe the deal size is not that big, but the sales cycle is much shorter. So you should never just kind of blindly compare those numbers, you always need to take into the account the actual goal of the company, whether the highest business priorities and align your selection of the use case to that. But I think if you get to this step and create such a table and have a discussion together with your sales team, with the clarity on the goal, it will be, first of all, it will be a great discussion, you will learn a lot from that, and you'll be able to jointly select the target accounts, and that's already a really good first stack in alignment between sales and marketing. So what do you do next? Once you have selected one target cluster. The next step is actually doing the deal analysis. I think what else what's nailed down I would love to emphasize on it. You shouldn't do that cluster analysis exercise alone, always do it with your leadership, or at least with the sales team, right? So the selection of account won't be just one team decision, it would be a joint decision, right? Because from that perspective, you can start running the deal analysis and preparing the program. Why before preparing any tactics we want to do this deal analysis? Because we want to understand the patterns of our best accounts that will help us to develop account qualification criteria, right? So what we are going to do here, when we selected the cluster, right? And for now, you already categorized all the deals, all the accounts by the use cases by the by the clusters, right? Our next step is extraction top five biggest deals and top five fastest deals. If you don't have that much data extract as many as you have, right? So don't just follow blindly the five deals rule. And what might be helpful as well is looking at five lost deals for that specific use case. What we want to do here, what we typically do during the deal analysis, we extract the company's vertical, their specific challenges, right? That they mentioned for this use case. Then what is our revenue, what is our sales cycle? And what region this company is located? Because if you are selling globally, you can see the patterns, right? And what regions you actually generate and the biggest deals, that's helpful for the teams that are not just focused on the local market, right? Next, to what business units or business unit result to? That's important because again, if one account, let's say that story about the banks that we share it, right? Bank has multiple alliance of business. To what specific client of business, this is what we mean by business unit, we actually solved, right? That helps us already narrow down our focus. Then what would be helpful is running a really depth analysis about who was involved in all communication with your team, right? Who attended the meetings? Who was in the mail threads? Who signed the deal? Who attended different meetings? Maybe also the people who did attend the meetings, but you have heard that they were asking questions, right? So called influencers or blockers. Our goal is identifying the roles and titles of our champions and our decision makers. Quite often we hear from the companies we know who we are selling to, but then this is the exact story, then why the companies are struggling to find the real buyers when they are building their account maps, right? Because if you say we are selling to the piece of IT or CTOs, for example, and then you open, it's a funny anecdote. I remember once I asked a account executive, he said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, we nailed down our buying group." So I've never targeted Oracle. I asked that person, "Can you please show me how you select who is actually you're going to engage with?" So he said, "For sure, here, share a screen, found Oracle on LinkedIn, then selected seniority, VP and above, and IT department." And then we ended up with maybe like 200 people. So I asked, "And then what? How are we going to engage with all this 200 people?" And he said, "Oh, well, you know, so I will just quickly scheme that list and find who is relevant here." That's not a good approach, right? So what we want to do here is that we want to extract the exact titles of these people. Why? Because then we can do analysis of their profiles and we can see the patterns, right? Maybe they have specific keywords in their titles. Maybe they mention specific initiatives, skills, etc. That helps us to understand who is our primary buyer persona, and then we can make a decision. I will go into target our champions. I will go into focus on the decision makers because two approaches could work, but for example, we always recommend to start with the champions. Next, what is our level of relationship? Why? Because we want to use this company as an our co-market and initiatives. Next, what trigger the buyer journey? If you have this information, it would be good to put it. Next, what are main marketing and sales touch points? If you have something like enter, enter, analytics software like hockey, stack, trim data, you can extract multiple touch points, right? If you don't have this, look at your CRM, look at marketing automation, look at different software that captures that engagement and put this insights. Because then that would be an answer to your question, what would be the best channels? Again, we have had multiple use cases where we were working with companies whose buyers are not active on social. So running ads on LinkedIn, for example, trying to do any engagement on LinkedIn would be absolutely useless, right? But by default, everybody is thinking about LinkedIn. So it's essential to extract this touch points because based on them, you can replicate your program. You can, let's say, put these channels as your core focus channels. And then a couple of other things, why did they pick up your product? What's differentiated you? What resonated with them? This is something that you should add to your message and to your also account-based content strategy. And lastly, what were the critical questions that they were asking during the sales process, during the buying process, if you will? Right? These questions are also important to address with your different content assets. When you have this analysis in place, it becomes much easier to define the channels, define the primary bar persona and create actionable account qualification criteria that anybody at your company can apply and qualify an account. So very briefly, we have spoken about this multiple times. What you want to do is like, Andre, just described looking at these deals. Remember, we are looking at the cluster of accounts, the chair, this use case, the chair, these challenges. And we are looking at the top five deals to extract the common patterns. So the first thing we want to do is obviously we're going to look at kind of from graphic criteria. Everybody's doing that. We know done also the buying committee members under your just explain also how to do that based again on this deal analysis. But we also look at the specific characteristics from those accounts that make them a good fit that we have seen. Maybe these characteristics are linked to that use case. So for example, I mentioned this use case about high turnover of investment advisors. Well, this is a criterion that we can find out on LinkedIn. We can go and check out that financial institution that investment bank on LinkedIn. We can see actually in the sales navigator, if they have a high turnover of their agents, or their advisors. And I mentioned another one where I said, you know, we to be SaaS companies with regional teams, another criterion that we could add here. So I'm now talking about very specific criteria that tell you that they have that use case, their good fit. We call this like they belong to the cluster ICB, right, a real customer profile. We usually look at if one doing the deal analysis, we look at the top five deals. But actually, if you have an export of all the deals from the use case, one thing you can do very quickly is look at kind of the top 20% of the accounts that generate it, 80% of the revenue approximately. Obviously, it's never going to be the exact signs there. And then maybe the bottom 80% if you have such a spread that generated 20% and then the median ones. This would be a very easy way for you to define these three tiers, tier one, tier two and tier three. And then check what is actually common, what are the patterns within those and define tiers like that. One final thing, which is very important, is looking also at the lost deals. So looking at the largest lost deals typically and understanding why they lose them. And can we derive some criteria that we can use in the future to dequalify or de-prioritize those accounts. And example might be that you know what, we have never been successful in closing a deal when they had a CFO that just joined a quarter ago because they were just busy with understanding, preparing the strategy they were not buying yet. Taking that as a random example here, I think it was actually from one of our clients. We never sell to companies where their ACV is less than 30K. We know that we don't have such a good fit with companies who are selling marketing and sales software or service, people are going to read them in a different way, not in a avian consulting way usually, etc. So with that you have what you're aiming to get here is very clear criteria that you can show and share with somebody and they can follow this and say you know what this deal, excuse me, this account fits or it doesn't fit. So you want to make this criteria very tangible and we always advise to describe exactly how to check each of the criteria when you're looking at an account so that you can decide whether they belong to the ICB or not. But this is going to help you with the fit and the next step will be how to prioritize accounts that have a fit and we mentioned that we want to focus on accounts that have a higher probability of becoming a sales qualified opportunity. So Andre maybe you can explain this briefly. I just wanted to very quickly come back to this slide. If you remember we were presenting what the cluster means, right? And we said here enterprise B2B SARS with regional teams. But what we actually mean by this is exactly what Vlad shared by here, right? Obviously we don't blindly say hey, we're selling to these companies. So the tangible definition of enterprise B2B SARS company in your stride channel teams. It's very important to have a good time. you see here, right? And then anybody in our team can apply this criteria and then qualify accounts or pick up the right accounts for the program. This is also an answer to the question that Jacqueline asked, Jacqueline asked, what do you recommend when the company or sales leaders have targeted accounts already? And they have identified the strategic accounts. Should this be challenged, or can you work with that list? So this is basically an answer to your question, right? First, you co-create this criteria. Again, this shouldn't be an exercise that marketing only doesn't sell or so sales. This is the giant exercise. And so the first step that you suggest, okay, let's qualify your sales list first, right? All accounts actually fit in our, let's say, ICP criteria. That's the first step. And the second one is what Blatt mentioned is the account prioritization. Again, we covered this in a few episodes in the past and we have this newsletter article where we explain the process, I drop the link in the chat. The entire point is when you select all the accounts, there is a different likelihood of creating a opportunity with all of them. Why? Because some of the accounts are already of you, aware of you. Some of the accounts, with some of the accounts you have the relationship, with some of the accounts you might have engaged champions, right? And with these accounts, obviously you have a higher likelihood. And you know the insights that they're in the market. And on contrary, there would be accounts that are completely called. They just fit this account qualification criteria, but you have no idea if they are in the market, who is the buying committee, what might be the needs and priorities, right? So these accounts are called. Should we target all of them? Yes, but we should target them differently with different goals. If accounts are completely called, that we have no idea other in the market, the first thing that we always do is create an awareness, right? That's the primary goal for that list. The second goal to define the engagement threshold. When they hit this engagement threshold, they are moved to the future pipeline list. This is why we started the engagement in the apps account, research by and committee, and the engagement, etc. Two validates, their needs. And when we have the relationship, when we know their needs, we start working on opportunity creation. So this is basically the exercise and replication, or basically not replication, but the output of this goal is creating, again, the simple list where you define tangible criteria, right? So the cluster ICP, this qualification criteria that we have presented here, then the future pipeline list, you define the engagement threshold, what specific behavior an account should demonstrate. So we can call this account as account that is aware of our product. And lastly, active focus, right? So what criteria the account should map? So we move this to the active focus and we start working on fully personalized, let's say, approach to this account to generate sales opportunity. In natural, this is how you are going from defining what is the best cluster to create an intangible criteria for account qualification and prioritization. And we wanted to share with you practical example how you can develop it based on our own example. So let's dive deeper here. Absolutely. So let's just immediately share the example. It's a little bit of a basic slide. So let me guide you through its step by step. What you see here is a program that we launched back in September this year, September and October. And I just want to first, before diving into details and explain the example, just highlight a few key principles. The first principle is that you want to look at the existing activities that you might already have planned, they're relevant for this cluster and connect those, well include them in the program if you can, if they're relevant, and also then actually connect the dots between the different activities between marketing and sales playbooks. I think this is very important. This is missed in most companies. Just had a call with one really good team. They're implementing a lot of very good tactics, ABM tactics. They're quite advanced in what they're doing. They're also having great dashboard. They're using a lot of signals. And one of the opportunities that we identified while speaking together was exactly to connect these different activities. And I'll show some examples. The second one, what you see actually on this slide is the, let's say the content view, the assets view that we produced. We can show the program also in a different way. But you will see also why. Remember this is a cluster program. The rate, one of the main reasons why we defined the cluster was because it allows us to deliver relevant messaging, content messaging to the entire cluster of accounts because they share the same use keys and challenges. So the principle here should be that you're delivering a consistent and relative narrative for those targeted comes from that cluster across the different channels. Let me just dive a little bit into detail in the example of how we did it, how we always actually do it with the clients using the exact same process. So after we went through the process that we have just described is different steps already defined that account cluster where we defined the account qualification, characterization, criteria, we do the deal analysis. What we want to do is we want to sit down with the SME subject matter expert that can be an account executive that can be let pre sale sales engineer, sales architect, strategy manager, whomever has the most knowledge about target account cluster. So for example, in some cases you might have somebody who has actually worked as a target buyer, they had that role in the past that are coming from that industry that would be an ideal person. If not, let's say an account executive with a lot of experience could serve there really well. And what they want to sit with them and you want to break down the cluster, we call it cluster decomposition, basically break down what are the key challenges in that cluster. And in other words, what are the key topics that we want to talk about? And we here always do it in the same practical, very practical way. We select one event, we say, hey, you know what, imagine you have an opportunity to do a keynote in front of your prospect and you know they all are perfect it, you know what challenges they have, what should the event be about? And actually we, we in fact, organized that event, this is usually part of a cluster program. So what you hear see here is we did exactly the same thing in September, we noticed that there was a lot of people, that a lot of people on LinkedIn were talking about how difficult it is to prove the marketing attribution to revenue and how difficult like that there was a lack of trust, we saw also from some studies that this has been like popping up at the same time, we saw sorry to say shit on of irrelevant content about AI and everybody is talking about it and it was kind of like a paradox, paradox to notice that people are struggling so much, teams are struggling so much to meaningful contribute to pipeline and revenue to show their contribution and on the other hand, you had all these gurus talking about the promised land of AI and how it will solve all your pipeline problems. That aside, we decided to okay let's that's will be our cluster, companies that are struggling with these challenges and we decided to launch that event how to survive as a B2B CMO and drive enterprise pipeline in the AI era and there that's like as you can see it's very specific, we knew that a lot of marketing leaders were under pressure, the tenors were shortening so how to survive was extremely relevant for them, we knew that they were all struggling with that challenge of enterprise pipeline and we knew that like one of the topics that was on top of everybody's mind that we couldn't ignore was the AI so you see how very specific this message is for that cluster. Now why do we take the event and there are different reasons, one of the reasons is that it allows, it creates a natural deadline a milestone within this program that everybody works towards, so everybody knows that you know we have committed to this event, we have announced it so we need to make sure that it's ready, that the confidence is ready for the event that we have promoting, etc etc etc. It also is a great kind of crescendo of the program where you will see a lot of engagement if you do it right but also because when you ask your SME what are the challenges of these target accounts, you might get different questions, different answers right and different levels, let me put it like that, right? They might actually very frequently start going more and explaining the productility challenges. So basically, how we help them solve the challenges and talking more about the product than talking necessarily about the challenge. But when you say, okay, so we have defined this keynote speech, what should we need to tell the buyers or their prospects who are there tending an event, what should we actually put in the slides, what are the messages that we need to communicate to them, you start having a much more concrete input, right? So we start actually mapping the narrative of that event and that's all you need because imagine you have, okay, we should tell this, we should talk about this challenge, we should can we show a case study, yes, this is a perfect case study where we can show how the solution works. We can show also like, okay, if you're not dealing with the challenge, what happens is a concept, whatever, like so we put all of these, let's say slides or messages or things we want to talk about during the event, each of them can become a separate LinkedIn post, that's exactly what we do. It's very easy, we met that we can get these different LinkedIn posts, so this is again a part of your program, each of these posts, we typically do three types of posts, we do expertise posts, we do content collaboration posts and we do also, or our, our random posts and we do also one-on-one posts. So why? Because if you remember, and they explained that there are three groups of accounts, there are accounts that are unaware of you, we need to create the awareness expertise posts, we have accounts that are aware of you, but you may not be aware of them, you need to get some information from that, well for them, we set up content collaborations so that we can start these conversations and engage them, and we have also accounts which are like more one-to-one, they deserve one-on-one intention from us, for them we create one-on-one content, usually we create account love letters as LinkedIn posts, we create one-on-one content hubs, etc. Now once you have, you're rolling out that content, you have your event, you can further turn that event into, actually we did it in this case, into market research report, and turn that also into personalized solution, completely one-on-one, with gifting, etc. I don't want to go into too much details about the content, but I wanted to mention just one more thing. So I've highlighted here the different pieces of content, but what I didn't say here, which is, that is equally important, if not even more important, there is a reason why we focus on LinkedIn posts or social posts, there is a reason why we focus on events, there is a reason why we have this content collaboration, why? Because this is how you can easily match sales and connect sales and marketing labels, why? Because you have content that allows sales to start more conversations, we have collaborations, you can connect before and after event, you can share, they might have contributed, you can share the posts, you can connect to their college and share the posts that their colleague has contributed to. There's a lot of opportunities that you create like this where sales can leverage also these marketing touch points. I know that we're running out of time, so I want to give Mike to Andre before he needs to leave to maybe just explain the big picture, what are the steps if you want to plan a program like this? Just a quick question to you guys, how did you like this framework? Was it helpful? Any questions left? Let us know in the chat please. And we wanted to give you the practical example, how we kind of turned that cluster analysis, we shared a step-by-step approach, how we came up with the cluster. It wasn't our genius, general decision to come up with this narrative of how to survive as B2B, CMO, this was in depth analysis. All our decisions were backed by data. Then the account selection criteria we will share in this review, so you can see how we mapped it out and then selected the accounts and prioritized them. Our goal was to show how to turn this into an actionable framework and the program that would actually drive good results. So what I would love to share next is two core principles. And in case if you guys would be interested, we have tons of examples. Our full final academy were always mentioned. This is basically a replication of our consultant methodology with multiple examples. We show how we do how we run certain playbooks, how we orchestrate them. Tons of examples, so if this is something that you would like to dive deeper, check the link in the chat full final.io/academy. You can see multiple examples of these planning programs, two important principles. The first one, the cluster program, we never skip the fundamentals. Honestly, we always see that 80% of success lies in the good preparation. So when it comes to preparation, what do we need to do? We need to define pilot team, who will be a part of this program, who is available and what is the realistic time commitment because sometimes companies tell us we want to target hundreds of accounts, but we have sales rep who can spend two hours a week. First mismatch between the team spent with and the desired outcome. We need to create a link cross-functional ABM team, ABM lead, maybe content marketer, one sales development rep, that's it, and one subject matter expert. If needed, you can involve somebody from product as well, a client success. Next step, you run through the analysis that we share with you today. We have seen a couple of times when people come and there is always the loudest person in the room who knows everything and says, "Hey, this is what we need to do. I know it, I've been in that industry for years." We highly recommend not to do this and prepare the good analysis and then make the relevant decisions backed by real data. When you have this analysis in place, you can do cluster selection, you can develop clear account qualification criteria, then this account prioritization criteria, and then you can define the sources for account selection. Where should we look for, for example, identifying the engaged accounts? If we have defined our engagement threshold, companies that signed up for webinars this year, for example, companies that attended our high-end temp pages on the website in the last 90 days. What tools, what software will allow us to find this data? Next, content and messaging. What bloodshed is doing is a detailed cluster challenge decomposition for a specific buyer person and preparing the content and messaging plan. And two, last core components. One is the marketing and sales playbooks. How we are going to warm up these accounts. How we are going to nurture them? Because, I mean, just creating content won't help you. So, apparently you can get inbound opportunities, but this is not the predictable process. You need to have a constant flow of nurturing of account development. And lastly, how can we, what types of one-to-one activities we are going to run to create sales opportunities with these accounts? And what is also important, you need to have constant meetings, planning, review, solving the bottlenecks, changing your, maybe in some cases, changing the activities that you are running. If you are seeing that something really works, you can double down on this. Maybe Samsung is not working. And to identify what's working, not again, avoid gut feeling decisions. Define the leading indicators and the leading indicators and set up the success criteria. But don't aim immediately for everyone's sales opportunities. Because if you have long sales cycles, that's maybe Samsung that is not really relevant. It's a delayed lagging indicator. Look at account engagement. Look at webinars, sign ups. Look at discovery, calls, booked account penetration, account replies, etc. Track this holistically because this will help you to identify what actually generates the results and what you need to double down on. And when you plan this, we share it a couple of times, this playbook, the 6A because of account selection, account segmentation, account research, account awareness, account development and account activation. This is, these are the six components of this marketing and sales playbook, right? This is something that you need to work on together with sales. That being said, we have covered everything that we wanted and it's time to answer your questions. I will leave a lot to cover all of your questions and on my end I would love to send to all guys again for a fantastic engagement, fantastic questions and hope to see all of you next week on the last episode for this. Yeah, have a good rest of the week, cheers. All right, let's just the question of people who raised in life first and I also collected, well, under the help to collect these questions also in the slide of people who, when you were signing up, some of you shared questions. So this was a good one from Christina. She just raised this, how would you apply a cluster-based ARG in strategy for a company that's just launching new products with very few existing deals or reference data? What would be the best strategy to identify clusters and prioritize accounts when historical signals are limited? So I would want to sum immediately that this is just a completely, let's say, a startup in our launching a new product because in some cases you also have an existing company who is launching a new product, a new version of the product or launching in a new market. Just want to separate this too. If you are in a situation where your leadership just wants to launch a new product and say, you know what, you should apply that ABM thing you want us to run to that new product. I would advise you if you can to not do it. Let me explain. We always try, I mean, the best application on ABM is to replicate your best deals and all everything you saw today in terms of how you select the clusters and that's also why Christina raised that question. How you select those clusters? How you define the ICP, the criteria, the selection criteria, all of that is best based on actual data, on actual proof, right? There is a reason why this company is buy from you, especially if you're not a category leader, you have some sort of competitive advantage maybe for that use case, maybe for that specific vertical region or not and you want to understand that and that will help you increase the chance, increase the odds of success, I guess. And okay, I'd still be not saying Christina's question, which is a fair question. Okay, what if you don't have a choice? What if you actually do have to run it for a new product where you don't really have a lot of historical data and reference data. The first thing you want to do is you want to, first of all, what you need to do and this is really important, I think this can save you a lot of trouble, is to adjust the goals. You cannot expect to have the same goals, you cannot expect to have pipeline and revenue quickly from a program that is based on improvement data in a new market or for a new product. It's just not realistic. You know that it will take some iterations before you get your messaging, right? Hopefully you're past the product market, if you're not past the product market, that's a totally, that's even another story. But you will need time to kind of like iterate there and your goal should be engagement and discovery calls with those clients so that your prospects so that you can actually validate those assumptions. I think you should still go through the exact same process, but you will have to make some hypotheses, you will have to make some assumptions, and your goal will be to have to have back and forth conversations with clients and prospects and validate. Also involving somebody from the industry, involving like I said, your subject panorax expert, somebody who is expedient selling into this industry is going to be very helpful as well to make this informed hypothesis and assumptions. Let me know if that answers the question, but I want to move. Israel asked the exact same question. What about if you're in an earlier stage startup where you don't have much data to go after? I think I just answered this. And I want to share at the back of the question, it can be a big risk to run an event and associate content for an ICP due to the resource and potential branding back if nobody shows up. Okay, very practical and very good question. How to ensure your cluster ICP attend? Very, very good question. So we have actually had a similar situation and there are different reasons why people might not show up. I think probably the most important thing is that you can know the most important realization is that if all these prospects are completely cold and you don't have any awareness and you're not known for running educational events, you can't expect them to show up. Then it is a huge risk. So I would not do it. I would do it differently. If you do decide to run an event and there is lack of awareness, there is like your basically kind of all accounts that you're going after are cold, there is lack of awareness. You then the only way you can make this work is by making sure that there is a lot of engagement by sales, so not just marketing awareness, but also engagement by sales beforehand. So for example, your salespeople are part of the ABM cluster program. They're reaching out to these started buyers. They're engaging with them, they're sharing content, they're commenting on their posts, they're connecting with them. One thing that I would do for sure, I would do this content collaborations where you are quoting them in your post, so basically asking for their quote asking for their contribution and writing about it, that's creating a better engagement with those, a better awareness. You can use that also to connect to their colleagues, et cetera, et cetera. If you dance efficiently of that and then the same person who has been engaging is inviting them to the event that's going to help a lot. Second point is how the event is positioned. It needs to be relevant. So again, if you are sure this is kind of a top of mind topic of those target accounts. For example, we once ran a program for government contractors after Trump was elected in the United States and we knew that everybody was asking about the impact of these executive orders that he was signing at the time and we knew this was like top of mind topic. We didn't worry about it. That is a little bit relevant. The next, so if you don't have the topic and you have colonial, that's indeed like even a bigger risk. Next one is the speaker and the event itself but also the speaker. Is the speaker somebody, I mean, ideally somebody who is known but at least is it somebody who is credible? The easiest way to get a credible speaker that your prospects who want to hear from is to partner with an existing customer. To really like people like to learn from their peers more than they like to learn from their vendors. Or maybe you have an internal subject matter expert in one of the programs that we quoted at the beginning as a case study. We had like, it was for software engineering teams. We had like a software engineering team leader who was like really sharing his expertise and that was a very popular event. So like having a good speaker matters as well. And then one thing that's very important is how you deliver the event. Like if the event needs to be really educational, it shouldn't be just a product which masking is educational event because how you do that event. Like if these are, if this is how you were doing your all events in the past. Again, the chance of having more audience join is lower because they have had that experience and they will only join if they are actually looking to buy a product which is different thing which is not necessarily what you want to do with this. So hopefully I'm answering that question. I don't deep into it. So Sia is asking how do I get started? I don't have real scale IBM organization. It's all signal led off bound and things are separated from any email on the channels. I mean I mentioned as an example I don't know if that's the case, say, in the organization, but I mentioned this conversation that I had with the team that is running quite an advanced ADM actually in terms of the tactics, but they don't connect this playbook. So I think that introducing some of the tactics, well, first of all, having a good cluster targeting and doing this analysis is going to help you tremendously to have much more relevant content and much more relevant messaging to those accounts. Second, so that's like the first thing, right? Second, you need to, I mean, just doing cold outbound is going to be less effective than if you can warm them up. And if your signals are actually not just signals, third party signals, which everybody has access to and your messages are not "Hey, I saw that you're raising, so let me sell you my product." You know, things like that. We see very often, so we all maybe receive a uniquely irrelevant message because there is some personalization there, but still the message is not connected. So if you can align the code to action and the message with the actual signal and what happened. And secondly, these signals are also first party, that is to say they're based on existing engagement, maybe with your content, maybe with your marketing activities. That's going to be way, way more effective, right? So not each message should ask for a meeting in other words, but it's simply not each activity should have a goal of booking the meeting. As we explained, we want to unaware accounts. We need to create awareness. Those who have awareness, we need to build a relationship and get the insights. Then we can do the personalized one-on-one, which is stronger. These will also include outbounders, or probably outbounders, but ideally you'll be running the program and connecting these different activities on the same accounts, also connecting the outreach with the marketing that's going to help you a lot here. So these are the messages that you asked. There were a few more, sorry, these were the questions that you asked. There were a few more questions that were sharing with us when you were signing up. So I have two minutes. I'll need to pick one. We answered the AI question. I answered this Jacqueline's question about already identified accounts. But we actually visual, okay. Yeah, so I'm actually creating custom compensations at the EM. I'm talking about multiple various target countries. Okay, so basically, I like this one. I know companies are visiting my website, but I don't know who the people are. I mean, I know what page is there visiting. I know that maybe two people from that company are visiting my website. I know how long they're visiting, but I don't know who exactly. I don't know the actual individuals. There are multiple people usually involved. These are big companies, right? So what should I do then? That's actually, that's a great question. So basically, if you remember, the way that we described this is we said you have completely unaware companies and then you have companies who are aware. And so we have different goals. So they're already visiting your website. Maybe you consider this and it's very important that you define this very clearly. Do we consider this to be already an aware company or not? Maybe in your case, it totally makes sense to say, hey, you know what? We should then focus on these companies more. I want to prioritize them all. The other thing that we also said is not just about prioritization, but what you do. So if they're aware, now you need to map the buyers. That's just said it exactly like we don't know who the buyers are. We need to start mapping the buyers. If you don't have any relationship with that account, you need to start building a relationship. If you don't know why they're visiting, this is the next step. So that's why the second step here, it's all about doing the account research, mapping the buyers, starting the engagement, reaching out to them, trying to get the insider information. That's how we structure this program. That's exactly the reason why we structure this program. So you would consider them future pipeline and start doing these activities. That's all the time that I have to answer the question. Thank you so much for great questions, great engagement, another great session and see you in a week. Thank you very much. Take care.