The Biggest Lie in Account-Based Marketing (And Why Most ABM Campaigns Never Create Pipeline)

(upbeat music) - Hey everybody, welcome, welcome to our workshop today with our special guest Steve here. We're waiting for some folks to trickle in, but we've got a bunch of you pouring in now. Hey, wherever you are, drop in the chat. We'd love to hear where you are joining us from. I know it might be early for some folks if you're on the West Coast. So yeah, go ahead, let us know where you're calling from. San Francisco, very cool. Hey, Kelly, Steve's in Colorado, that's awesome. I'm in the Toronto area. We've got some South Carolina. It looks like amazing. Some two folks from Colorado, that's fun. - Oh yeah, try to cool. - I'm gonna call me up. - Yeah, I know Nicole. - Oh, awesome. Great, I'm super excited for this session. We're gonna dive right in because we've got an amazing presentation with just so much value here from Steve. And I definitely wanna make sure that we get what you guys came for. Came for. All right, guys, so just starting right away, we're gonna go right into the material. We're gonna make sure to leave time to have Q and A at the end. So please, please, please, make sure to use the chat. We love looking through the transcripts after and following along with that with whatever's happening there. So anyways, if you're here, thank you. This is part of our monthly workshop series that we do at Pasado today. Today's session is all about account-based marketing and sharing the real system and some of the magic behind some of the fastest growing SaaS companies presented by us at Pasado. I'm sure many of you are familiar with Pasado, but if you are not, we are a SaaS based marketing analytics company and we have worked with CMOs and VPs of PE back companies to help them understand what's working in their marketing and really prove their impact and understand what's not working. And we've got content here by 12th agency, not Steve, and I wanna turn it over to Steve to give a little bit of some context around his agency. - Yeah, thanks, Carolyn. And hey, everyone, thanks for joining. I'm psyched to dive into the content today. I'm Steve. I've been in marketing for almost 18 years now. I led the ABM in Demangian at Google for several years and that's where a lot of these principles come from. And founded 12th agency in October of 2024 and have been working with at this point, almost 30 different companies developing their ABM foundation strategies and getting into AI and all sorts of fun stuff that we'll talk to today. - Amazing, thanks. And Steve and I, we met maybe, I wanna say probably a year ago and I just think you are really the best in the business when it comes to ABM and we got on a call recently because, you know, we're looking at using you guys for ABM at Pasado. And you just even in that like 10 minute call, I think you had shared, you know, your four tier, like 360 degree, ICP indexing and I was like, oh man, we gotta get you back and share that all with our audience. So thanks, Steve, for being here today and for all of the material that we're gonna cover. So just a quick sort of agenda on what we got here. We're gonna talk a little bit about some of the biggest fails with ABM. We definitely see a lot of them at Pasado. A lot of people spending a lot of money to basically do some like glorified outreach and it's not very effective. So we're gonna cover, you know, why that tends to happen. We are going to look at Steve's signal stack. We've got some really good visualizations there to share with you. We're gonna talk about, you know, just the GTM motion in general, you know, a mix of having a GTM engineer and also a strategist as well and who owns what. And then we're gonna share a full final ABM framework, sort of like an example campaign, campaign play. There's a lot of material in that and we'll make sure to give you all of this after. So if you're here and you want this deck, you're gonna get all of it. All right, so just quickly, I wanna start off with a poll and let me figure out if I can get this going. Okay, so we've got two questions here. Please go ahead and answer them. If you are tuned in, take a sec to do this. So question number one is what is your biggest challenging? Challenge you're facing with ABM right now. This is multiple choice. So just go ahead and drop in whatever is relevant to you right now. If you're on here, come on board, answer the question. Great, seeing some responses come in. This is just great for us to, you know, understand where we should focus, things like that. Execution capacity seems to be number one right now. Great. And then question number two is a short answer. What's your number one question you want answered in today's session, making sure we can come back to that at the end in the last 10 minutes for Q&A. So we'll give it just a couple more minutes. It looks like 50% of the audience has done this so far. Generating real ROI success. Now that seems to be the leading. Yeah, that's a tough one for sure. And if you want to share any more context too in the chat, go ahead and do that, share why you're here today and maybe what you hope to get from this. Okay, guys, I am going to end the poll. If you participated, thank you so very much for doing that. I'll just share the results here quickly so you can see generating real ROI and success. So that seems to be the biggest thing. So we'll do our best to speak to some of these things as much as we can. So great, great, thanks for participating. Okay, so we're going to kick it off and start with a topic of why most ABM programs fail before they even start. So yeah, Steve, why don't you tell us a little bit about what you're seeing in the market. You know, you talk a lot about like, you know, mass outreach with a list and, you know, this notion of high volume personalization. So what are, tell us what you're seeing sort of like in your world with ABM? Yeah, yeah. So I've been looking at it through a few different lenses. One is the data, you know, we see with clients. And I love how you included some of your own data in here. It's going to be great to get into that. And then also just kind of tracking industry data. There's a lot of reports being published around the effectiveness of cold email, email in general ad performance. You can actually track back LinkedIn's ad performance benchmarks over several years. And when you look at that, there's several trends that emerge and it's not good. You know, some of the data I'm looking at shows reply rates of cold email dropping 50% year over year for the past several years, like basically to zero, right? Google ads cost per click. Overall, acquisition costs are skyrocketing, meaning it's like it's harder to acquire people through these digital channels. The same things happening on LinkedIn. I hear very frequently when we start with a program, they'll say, oh, we tried LinkedIn before and our cost per lead was over $1,000. That's insanity. That's just economics there will never work. And I think, you know, if I had to boil it down, sometimes I worry that as marketers and GTM professionals, we're looking for the shortcut. Like we're looking for the easy button. And that's just not how this works, right? Like any success story never was built on one quick hack that they found, right? You look at the fastest growing SaaS companies, the big huge public companies, they don't publish like, oh, we crushed LinkedIn outbound. Like that's why we got to a billion dollars, right? It's not that. It's like in the trenches over and over. And so I think that part I've been kind of digging into is like, why are we so obsessed with this shortcut, right? The thing that actually works is, you know, what we'll talk about of like putting in the work and understanding your ICP, developing really unique buying experiences and focusing on signals all along the way, ultimately to create, you know, a market of one for each account. But, you know, there's a few nuances in there, but I think in general, like, we're just, we're trying to cheat the system and the system can't be cheated. - Yeah, that definitely resonates. And I think too, I think part of what causes that from my vantage point, you know, seeing like the board, pressure and all of that is just companies really wanting a shortcut to pipeline growth and revenue. And obviously in marketing, so many of the metrics that were measured against are really narrow for one. They're not really like common sense or real life either. And then part of that too is just a lack of understanding at the executive level on how the buying journey happens. And we don't have data to either, like communicate that story either, right? And so I think it is very narrow and short-sighted, but it's like a symptom of a bigger issue just around how we're tracked, how we're measured, how we're expected to operate. So, you know, when you put those two things together, it kind of creates, you know, like a storm of just bad sort of behavior, right? - Yeah, that's a great point too. Like, when you're, if your leadership is off track and they're understanding of how this stuff works, right? It's just fortunately or unfortunately requires to go to market team to be, you know, to level up and have that evidence to go and have those conversations with leadership. And, you know, probably assume that, you know, leadership saw LinkedIn posts somewhere that talked about some hack or trick that generated 40 million in pipeline because of some, you know, cloud code personalization work, workflow and like those things don't work in my opinion, but if that's what your leadership is reading, you know, you can't just say that doesn't work, right? Oh, yeah, for sure. For sure. Okay. Yeah, definitely. So this market of one principle, you had alluded to that before and I know we were talking about it. Can you explain what that is for the audience? Oh, the market of one. Yeah. So this is something in ABM before it was even called ABM, right? They're going on 10 years now and there's a company called its ITSMA. They're kind of like the OG, like the Gartner, the Forester of ABM. And when they first started putting some definitions and frameworks around this stuff, they called it. They defined it as treating each customer as a market of one. That was the definition. It's very simple, but I personally love it because philosophically, it should inform everything you do across ABM, right? You can ask yourself, is me uploading this list into cloud code to create personalized sequences, treating each account like a market of one? No, it's not, right? And so it's a good, you know, barometer for how you want to manage the program. Yeah, that's great. I think it's a really good analogy and I think too oftentimes, at least from what we see from our point of view, is just such a disconnect between marketing and sales. And especially when you have that disconnect, there's definitely not a market of one happening. There's marketing, marketing doing a bunch of stuff in their world and then maybe sales over here. And then, you know, that's what really creates a lot of bloat, I think, and a lot of inefficiency. So I love that concept of market of one because the most successful organizations are the ones that just operate with that philosophy. You know, it's not marketing or sales or marketing versus sales or who gets the credit. It's just what, who are we going after? And how are we going to do that intentionally and like actually using some common sense? Yeah, common sense. Yeah, I think that's maybe a good, like, North Star for today's session. Like, let's use common sense. Okay. So I wanted to share a little bit of some data from Pesetto. So this is coming from our sort of customer portfolio and just, you know, piggybacking off what you're talking about, which is this notion that ABM has really just become, you know, glorified, cold outreach, unfortunately, for a lot of companies. And so what they end up doing is basically like personalized outbound at scale. And from what we see, it is always the single biggest source of GTM bloat and ABM programs. And unfortunately, for a lot of companies, they don't even know what's happening. And so the average, sorry, a little bit of a typo there. The average cold outreach, outreach conversion to pipeline across our customer portfolio is 1% or less. That means for all of the people and accounts that teams go and actively try and work. I they have identified them. They call them. They do whatever it takes to get on, you know, on a phone call with them to, you know, book an opportunity less than 1% of those ever turned into anything. And so you can, you know, you can imagine just how inefficient that really is in practice in terms of the money it costs organizations and just how impractical it is when it, when it really comes to your strategy. And so we're going to get into this, but effective demand creation. Well, those leads convert oftentimes 3 to 10, 10% better. That's a data point from our own customer data. And so what we're showing here is really the conversion from basically contact work, worked to opportunity created here on the top. You see basically top core trial performance, which is, you know, anywhere between, you know, like 6 to 8% of what people are working, turning into pipeline. And then on the bottom, this is what we took typically is see as bottom core trial performance, which is like 2% or under really inefficient. But the difference between these two examples here is volume and strategy. So this, this company on the top here, a large company, but they are very specific about who they work, how they work them, how they go to market, how do they, you know, how do they, who are they even reaching out to. And this company down here on the bottom is pure volume. It's like we're going to pay just SDRs because they're cheap. We're going to pay BDRs because they're cheap. And we're going to get them to call as many people as possible. So you can definitely see sort of the different two different, you know, types of ABM plays happening here in this example. So I wanted to show this visual from Steve here. I maybe see if you can explain what this dual funnel approach is and this idea of signal convergence. Can you explain this? Yeah. Yeah. So this was a framework I came up with probably within the last year because, you know, what I noticed happening is the traditional account based marketing, you know, foundational principles were changing with AI. And if you think about, you know, even two, three years ago, right, account based marketing was really truly, we have a list of accounts. We're going to target those accounts with ads, with emails, with, you know, full funnel marketing activities. The marketing teams were focused on the accounts only and it left a huge grace space for the contacts. Like what about the contacts at the end of the day, we are putting human beings on a phone call together to discuss, you know, potentially working together. And so I felt that there was this need to bridge the gaps there between account and in contact. And you call it contact based marketing, whatever you want. There's already acronyms all over this. But the dual funnel basically says, if you have a fully functioning mature ABM program, you're able to accurately track and measure both of these funnels. So what I mean by that, if you look on the left side with, with accounts, you're able to properly identify the accounts that you're going to go target through different parameters and data, you're going to actually go and engage those companies and you're going to do that through multi threading because, you know, again, ABM is good for, you know, high value, complex multi person deals. So you're going to go and do that and you're going to, you're going to focus on measuring how you engage in nurture that account through the sales process. And then at the same time in parallel, we're going to look at which contacts, which actual people are starting to surface within those accounts and showing intent or just showing some sort of behavioral signal that they might be interested. And this is where all the fun tactical stuff happens, right? You can use website de-enonymization, you can use intent data if you're scraping like then, if you're doing things to basically understand behavioral data of contacts at that level, this is where this comes into play. And ultimately, at the, at some point, these things merge, right? Where you've had your accounts showing this progression and some kind of intentionality. And then you have contacts doing the same thing. And the really good teams are, like you said, a team of one, like go to market, marketing and sales are looking at this data together and kind of analyzing what's happened across the account and the contact and then making decisions. So they're looking at, hey, this account has been progressing through the funnel steadily for a few months now. We've seen the Chief Procurement Officer pop up on our radar, the Chief Security Officer, you know, talk to this other person. And then we've seen a bunch of demo requests or we've seen some lower seniority activity. They're looking at that and then determining what the right plan is next. And so that last piece, I think, is the key to running this properly and actually securing pipeline from large enterprise companies. But in order to do that properly, you need some element of this and the data that this would provide to you. I think data is a big piece of that. So I was going to say, what do you think is like, what have you seen be the biggest failure point? Do you see teams like over rotating on one aspect and not the other? Yeah, probably. I think that's a good description, like over rotating on one verse the other or, you know, sometimes I think being too dogmatic about the attribution can get teams into trouble. And like for me, one of the most favorite frameworks that we talk about and implement is what I call account progression framework. And it's really simple. Like it's not that complicated. You take all the accounts in your target universe and then you draw a line in the sand, which is today, you measure all of their historical engagement before today and you measure all of their engagement after today. And then you can baseline and average that out and then track over time. So if you have account A, which, you know, in a prior, prior stage was, you know, maybe engage with some ads and some top of funnel stuff, you can index them as aware. And then as you tracked their progression over the next weeks and months, you should see them move forward, right? From aware to engage to interested, whatever your funnel looks like and however you define it, you can apply it. But at the end of the day, it's momentum, right? It's momentum and progression. And that's ultimately what go to market is responsible for. And you know, we get caught up with all these fancy multi-touch, last touch, incrementality type attribution models, which are great. Once you hit a level of maturity, but if you're kind of sitting there today and you're like, how do I prove marketing is working? My suggestion is focus on progression. Show that marketing can progress accounts forward. And I mean, it's hard to argue with that is what I found. And I think to your point, what you were saying is I think a lot of companies, even the more mature ones tend to want to jump like 20 steps ahead. And oftentimes what we end up doing is like undoing a lot of those things and working it back to basics. reality is what I'm trying to get to is there's no real single source of truth. You've got marketing operating in their marketing, you know, automation platform. And then you've got like the account data and some contact data stored in CRM. And there is no real unified single source of truth where all of the account data really, really lives. And unfortunately, it's hard to really understand what marketing is doing and how they're being effective. If all of that data that really matters is anonymous, because those people don't even have a record in Hub Spot or wherever you're actually doing your marketing. So I see that a lot where marketing is just blind because they know that the contacts might be in Salesforce. But it's almost just like this breaking point between the two platforms where you can't really see what's going on. Yeah, yeah, and you have to I'm sure you find this, but you have to at some point roll the contact level data up to an account level. If you're looking for those account level insights and you want to run a true ABM program. So that can help. And you know, the other thing is I find a lot of marketing teams are afraid or are just not willing to to go into Salesforce. And like, like just do that, you know, don't glorify it. Just do it on your spare time, like get familiar, go click into some lead profiles, look at the campaign history and the activity feed and just like familiarize with how yourself with how like sales is selling to contacts. I think, you know, you usually get some ideas from that right when you when you look at the data and the historical nature behind contacts. Yeah, Hannah and the chat says, well, we're all in hub hub spots. So that makes things easier because we all get that insight. Yeah, definitely. If your map and CRM is all in one system, it, you know, gives you an advantage over others. But there's a lot of companies that we see where the map is in an entirely different ecosystem. So I agree with what you're saying is to just get in there. And, you know, if the sales activity is logged, take a look at what people are saying, how, you know, your reps are talking to your prospects and things like that. So you had mentioned now, we don't have a visual for this, but you had said there's four different signal types that you typically look at to basically create like an ICP profile index. Can you walk through what those are, Steve? Yeah, yeah. So, you know, they're essentially a categorization of what you see here too. So I think these can, these can change or be augmented based on your go to market. But, you know, what you're looking at is first and most easily is like third party data. So this is your stuff from Zoom info, from clay, from common room, with some of those companies are now consolidated. But this is like wherever you're sourcing contacts where you're maybe sourcing intent data into your CRM and into your marketing programs. The second would be first party intent data. So first party is going to be data that that you've created. And this could be like through some custom scraping or some custom research. It's tool agnostic, but think of it as intent data that that you source like you created, there's some there's some IP to that. The third would be behavioral data and engagement data. So this would be data that your contacts are creating on their own as they progress through the funnel. And this is your website tracking, email opens and clicks, registrations downloads, any action that a prospect can take along your funnel. And then the fourth would be the product data. So if you're software company, if your product led growth company, you're going to have that that behavioral data inside the product. I suppose even if you're a service led organization, you still could have some of that type of data like NPS scores and things like that. But this is think of this as like usage, like how are they actually using whatever it is you sell from a from a qualitative standpoint. And you know, you can you should have a process for like understanding tracking, measuring and activating this data and and decide where it plays a role in your ABM program. Because the caveat to this is with all the data we have access to, you can very quickly become, you know, kind of stunned and stuck of like, well, what do we do with all this and that? And it's like, you know, we have a framework for looking at the data to see essentially like the profitability of that data. And that's, you know, just using those signals mapping them to your entire funnel so that you can see, okay, when, you know, when we anchor off of this data or this group of data, we see, you know, an increase in velocity or we see an increase in deal size and try to tie it back to some sort of revenue metrics. So you have a North star of what data to use and when to use it. Okay, so with all that said, I think I want to jump into into this section here because I want to talk about tooling. Yeah, let's talk about these sort of like signals and the tooling piece and how imperative is the tooling to actually help you deploy it like a successful ABM campaign? Like, what comes first, the chicken or the A, right? Is it the strategy or the tooling? Yeah, yeah, I love the question. One of my favorite quotes and I've forgotten now who told this to me, but it's it's something like, if you buy software without a problem, you now have a problem. So, so I think the strategy has to come first and I think some level of analysis and insight has to come first too, right? Because what's happened in the go to market industry, especially now with all these AI wrapper tools is they're trying to sell you a problem, right? They're they don't know what your problem actually is, they are trying to sell you the problem they think you have. And they're convincing you that you have this problem, which is crazy to me. And so I'm sure you bump into this too, Caroline is like, we'll come in and they're like, Oh, we have this tool. We have that tool. We have this tool with you, we've all these tools. But yet, you're sitting here in the meeting saying that you can't generate pipeline and that sales doesn't trust you and that the quality of leads is poor. And so what did that software actually do? So, so really reckon with that first. And so I think strategy has to come first like, I sort of alluded to this, but like, you should you should have some conviction of what your top work flows are that generate positive sales activity, right? Whether that's meetings or pipeline or revenue, but you have to have that and you have to be able to look at that. Without it, I think you're guessing. And so in my opinion, it can be as simple as, Hey, when we sponsor an event and we take that list, and then we run an email follow up program, and then we invite them to some asset or some leave behind type of interaction. We see a 20% lead to SQL rate, right? And the value of those deals are 1.2x higher than other channels. That's a great insight, like lean into that. And then stack rank all of those. And then I think the, you know, the real value comes when you start to integrate those things together. So when you, you know, how do you integrate your LinkedIn ad program with your webinar program with your event program? So so starting to think about that, but your question about, you know, tooling and signals, I think that you should also, you should evaluate the tooling based on what I just mentioned, like the basically the profitability of those workflows. And then find tooling that will allow you to accelerate or improve those workflows or make them more efficient. Because two things happen. One, you'll get the output you want, which is the increase in performance. And then two, you have a really good ROI story to tell internally. So instead of saying, Hey, you know, we spent five, six figures on this tool, and it's made everyone's lives easier. You can say, Hey, we identified a workflow that had a profitability rate of x, we purchased this tool for why? And it improved that profitability by Z. And that, I mean, every finance leader is going to love that story. And now you have a framework for like how you evaluate software, how you deploy it, where you use it, it just becomes much easier also to and talking to vendors, because you're like, no, no, I know what we need. And you know, what you're saying sounds good, but like we don't need that right now. Would you say that when, you know, a lot of these companies start to, you know, deploy ABM, they know that or they don't, you know, what camp do most people fall in? I think they don't. And it's part of what we kick the conversation off with is like just looking for the shortcut. And I think that's what a lot of software companies do well. I mean, you know, think about it from this perspective, if like if you're a person of one who's evaluating a platform, right, there's an entire marketing team and company of people out there producing thoughts and evidence to try and convince you like you're one brain that you need this, right? And so you're outnumbered. And I think that's why, you know, teams get into some of these long term deals with software providers. And then they quickly find out, oh man, this, like this isn't, this isn't delivering what, what the, what I thought it would and what was sold to me. And I think that's because, you know, strategy again, ABM, we're treating accounts like a market of one. So how could any software platform truly allow you to do that with all of the uniqueness and complexity of your market, your customers, your product? you know, your, the way your business functions, right? Like there's a lot of nuance in that. - Oh, definitely. And here's the other problem is that most companies only track last touch attribution or a single field on the opportunity record, what was the deal source? And that never, like that never 100% of the time does not give you the full story into what the buyer journey actually looked like, especially for low volume, high ACV products. And I'm going to share an example soon, but I can think of one mutual customer that we have in common, Steve, where they're buying cycles are sometimes years. And the journey snapshot I'm going to share has eight people involved in it, has 44 different trackable marketing touch points that we can see. There's probably even more. And that journey from basically first touch to close one is like three or some odd years. It's crazy. And they didn't know that. Most of their journey started with an event that happens years before. And so sometimes when we do things in marketing, like host an event, we assume it's not performing well if it doesn't bear fruit right away, but it could really be a super integral part of the bigger story. And so I think that's part of your strategy that you're executing with this company, I believe. - Yeah, I mean, you touched on something that's so important is knowledge is power. And knowledge is strategy. So without that knowledge, frankly, me and my team, we're pretty ineffective. We try to find out exactly that insight you just found. Who purchases, who signs up for demos, how long does it take, what channels do they engage with, when do they engage with those channels, how many channels, how many, like you're trying to figure out all of this stuff so that you can gain some knowledge of what the current purchasing experience looks like and then design your entire strategy against that, right? And so that's what's hard with the way I preach ABM and what we do is they're like, oh, give me the framework. You people are always like, give me the framework. And it's like, well, we have some principles and there is a framework for how we operate, but at the end of the day, everything's different. Like every strategy's different, every go-to-market is different. And I think that's, if you're looking to be in the 1% of top performing ABM programs, you have to think about that. If you scraped your strategy off with some LinkedIn influencer post, it's probably not gonna work the way you want it to. - Oh yeah, I always say that every company has their own unique DNA. I never see one strategy. And now this is having looked at dozens of SaaS companies. Like there is no one strategy that works for every company. Every company like each of us here has our own DNA, our own genetic makeup. And the only way to optimize growth and performance is to optimize what your data is telling you. It all starts with data, right? - Yeah, it does. - Back to that. So let's talk about mastering the GTM motion. And I don't wanna spend too much on this 'cause I really want to get into your framework, right? We're talking about frameworks. What is sort of like breakdown the GTM engineer/strategist role and like who owns what? And where do those two functions sort of like fit into the ecosystem of building a full funnel motion? - Yeah, yeah, so this is how I've staffed our teams and what I'm even seeing larger companies that are more mature doing as well is, this can be lean, right? And I think the model is strategy plus technical or even more philosophically like art and science, right? And I think that's, I love that for marketing because marketing is art and science. And so what you wanna think about is that, a role or a layer that has the insight and the knowledge that we're talking about. So they are almost like a conductor across the marketing team. And they're looking at all of this data. They're looking at the funnel. They're looking across channels. They're collaborating and they're deeply entrenched with sales. And they're running the show for like, what are we doing in three months? What are we doing in six months? They're thinking ahead. And then the engineering function, which, I think GTM engineers are great. I've hired an employee, a handful of them, but give them something meaty to work on. Like the stuff we're talking about, just like automating cold out reaches. I wouldn't classify that as a true GTM engineer. Like we're talking about people who are building workflows. They're using engineering principles to develop marketing. And so you have that person who's thinking more technically, like they're going to create a schema for your buyer journey. And they're thinking about all of that data and how this person goes from here to here to here to here to here. They're plotting all of that out. And then helping the strategist with automations and efficiency and improvement so that you can run complexity. I won't say at scale, but much easier than if you were doing this manually. So I think that's where those two roles come into play. And I think marketing teams now are starting to build that way, where you might have one strategic operator and then very technical, very hands-on, knowledgeable folks who are punching the keys on the keyboard. Yeah, definitely. That really aligns with our philosophy around the art and the science, because I think most marketers come up through the art camp, right? It's brand. It's messaging. It's positioning. It's channel strategy. It's all of these things. And now with the rise of AI and all of the complexity that comes with systems integration and workflows and everything like that, there is just no world where you can be good at both things. And so I think-- well, one, I do think that GTM engineers have become totally glorified, right? Where you have somebody who's building lists calling themselves GTM engineers. But I do think it's a super important role if you really find the right type of operator for that function. I don't think you can be successful without it. OK. Let's walk through this one here. Can you explain this visual around strategic resource allocation? Yeah, yeah. And there's a question in here from Steve Sessina. So I'll try to answer that as I talk through this. Awesome. So we-- so actually, I would sort of recommend starting here before you get into the convergence framework. But this should tell you-- after you've started to look at your go-to-market, you start to look at the funnel and some of the data, where do you need to go? And so if the data tells you that, let's say, you're in that top left quartile, you're really good at demand creation. So you're going to have a lot of top of funnel stuff. You're going to have a lot of leads coming through the funnel. You have multiple channels running at the same time. But you're really only seeing performance from an account lens. Then what you're going to do is basically follow the arrows and look towards contact based in the end creation. So tactically, how do you do that? It's like, OK, we need to identify contacts that are coming into our ecosystem. We might need to get more isolated and precise in some of our campaigns and targeting so that we can get that feedback loop of who's engaging. Let's start to bring some of the people at these companies into our ecosystem with webinars, virtual events, other tactics that require people to sign up and share some sort of information. And so philosophically, that's kind of how the framework works. And then you can follow along. So if you're going back to the left, if you are in that account based in demand creation stage, you also need to go down into capture because you're effectively creating a good top of funnel. But then how do you progress those accounts closer to the bottom of the funnel? And this is where retargeting more signal-based activity, maybe even direct mail or like one-to-one, gifting and experiences type stuff, which we're doing a lot of these days. Try to personalize that journey further so that ultimately you kind of want to get to the bottom right. If you want to get to a place where you're able to tie performance and activity to a contact and not just a contact who went on your website, right? But actually came into the funnel. Generated a meeting is in pipeline. Some of the stuff you said you're looking at. Yeah. I just jumped ahead to this image. I'm just bouncing around a little bit. But I think that sort of leads me to what I typically see, which is just like a total over indexing on bottom of funnel, because it's like the easy thing to track. Typically, there's a clear last touch that we can often see. But as we know, when you're focusing on that, you're really only focusing on what's easy to track, where the demand capture happened and not really where the demand sort of creation happened further up. And I think I want to talk a little bit more about sort of like this demand creation approach. Now, I know we're getting into just demand, you know, demand Gen 101. But I don't know. Like it's just this is one of those principles that I think is still so commonly overlooked. We've been talking about this since like 2019. And I think a lot of the market is trying to catch up to this now. But just this reality that 95% of your market is just not in market today. And so you're really playing a long game. And unless you get really lucky, like the vectors of the world where you're going. just like get a grand slam and skyrocket to multiple millions in a year, which is totally the exception. You're needing to plant seeds now for something that might not harvest for 12 to 18 months, sometimes more. So can you give me your perspective on that? Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I have a background in actually storytelling and content marketing. So I was at a content agency for five years and this is what we preached every day. And what we were actually building was media destinations for brands. So like I was responsible for B2B at IBM, HP, Samsung had Google at one point. And these companies understood that two things, one, the advertising economics are garbage. And so instead of spending money on someone else's channel, they said, I'm going to just build the channel. So instead of IBM paying millions a year to advertise on CIO.com, security.com, whatever, they created their own media destination. And we grew those destinations to millions of page views a month. And then they implemented a profile framework so that people had to sign up. And now they gained all of this rich data that was owned. And it was contact level data, right? But me saying that all this took years, right? This took years of investment to doing that so that then eventually they could get into a sales process. And you know, they knew that long game, right? To get a security team to spend eight, nine figures with IBM, they're not going to see a LinkedIn ad and sign up for a demo and convert. Like it takes time. And so that's, you know, one tactic to do that. But I think, you know, again, it's like chasing the shortcut. Sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes you, you know, you kind of catch fire. But for most of us, that's not the case. And so you've got to kind of actively go against that desire to find the shortcut. Definitely. And I think it's setting expectations, I think, with your board. So one of the biggest things I think the smart real smart CMOs are doing is one, getting at the data from successful opportunities that have closed in the past and saying, okay, let's just reproduce what the journey has looked like for these accounts and use data to set expectations with our board. Like, hey, all of these accounts that we have won in the past, their journey, you know, even before they entered our sales funnel was like, you know, two years, maybe it was three months, you know, it's different for every company. But once you actually have that data, right, anecdotes don't work, right? So you can know that. But as soon as you have a quantifiable metric to tell your board, hey, historically, this is how this works. So if we go have, you know, make these investments now, the data would suggest that it's going to take us eight months to a year to actually see the results from this. And I think once you actually have that to anchor against, I know this was a question then in chat is like, you know, how do you set expectations? And I think it really just comes back to having some intelligence to know what that's going to look like other than, you know, just assuming it's going to be this like silver bullet fast, you know, success story that probably won't happen. And Callie just asked a really key question on this too is, once you know what that journey looks like from the data you're talking about, Carolyn, then I think you can try to reverse engineer like how to shortcut it, right? So like one example, we've been running these like super bespoke one to one campaigns where we do really deep research on a contact. We find what their like hobbies are, what their personal interests are like, are they into golf, they're like sports, are they into cooking, yoga, that sort of thing. And then we we craft and curate a experience for them. So like if you're a golfer, we'll go and book you 18 holes with with a cart for you and a friend to go and golf. And and then you can go out to contacts with that message. And that that can work because again, one, you realize like where the gap is in your funnel from the data. And then two, you're not scaling, you're providing something completely unique and personalized. And folks are going to respond to that, right? Like that's going to stand out in the sea of AI slop that they're getting in their inbox today. And now you you do actually get to shortcut the funnel a little bit because you've got high value contacts who are now raising their hand and saying, okay, I see you like that's pretty cool. Like tell me more. It's so funny because you had said something to me recently on our call, which is like to really be successful. You kind of have to do the hard things. Um, you know, anybody can put on a workshop. Like we're doing today. There's a lot of that. Anybody can put on, you know, content online. But it's like, how do you actually cut through the noise and create something super personalized in a world that is just filled with a lot of robotic AI generated garbage. Anybody can produce content. So I think at one, you know, maybe half a decade ago, creating like a, you know, like a real content engine was the advantage. But I don't think it is in the same way anymore. And so I love this notion of like driving towards a moment that's actually like genuinely going to be memorable for the person. Yeah, I just heard the phrase this morning and wrote a LinkedIn post about it actually because I was so motivated about anti-marketing. Um, and how, you know, basically like if you define marketing, right, it's, it's like messaging to the masses and B to C and in B to B. And so anti-marketing is the opposite, which to me is it's one to one. It's personalized. It's, you know, can we get from this definition of treating every account as a, you know, market of one to like, what if we treated every person as a market of one and you, you met them exactly where they are and got to know them and like, you know, the stuff I'm saying is like old school salespeople know this. They're like, yeah, duh. That's just good sales. Like that's how we used to sell seven figure deals like Google Cloud and Amazon and Microsoft, right? And it's like, that's what they do. You create a relationship, you get to know a person. Um, and then, and then yeah, then you're medic and you're spinning all these other frameworks come into play of like how you actually sell, but underneath all that is just people connecting. But don't you think marketers might, you know, that we've had decades of, you know, I would, I would consider like bad decision making. And I think it really comes down to the metrics like mql's like, don't you think if you stripped away the shitty metrics that this industry has been measured against for so long, that might actually change the decisions that we make. Like maybe we wouldn't do all of this mass marketing that doesn't work, but we do it because we got to hit some target, some arbitrary target makes no sense. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what a like profound point of view, I couldn't agree more. I need to like, I want to write that down and like think about that for a weekend because yeah, it's true. Like we're, we're, we're being misguided, right? And I think the inputs come from yes, the marketing terminology, but also sales frameworks like the predictable pipeline framework, right? That whole thing was made popular as in like, hey, I need, you know, this much revenue. So I'm going to work backwards and create the, you know, the numbers that hit that and then I'm going to look at like my pipeline coverage and all this stuff. And so we all now fit within that system and you're, you're kind of forced to, to scale and like make some of these poor decisions. Oh, definitely. Yeah. I've been there myself. Like I've been dropping out. It's really hard to, like just, you know, PSA, it's really hard to, you know, turn a boat around when you don't have, you know, like a band behind you. Like so if you're a CMOs, you know, trying to break through that challenge alone, it's difficult. You got to get a rev-ops buddy. You got to get, you know, a buddy over in sales, like you really have to go at it as a unified GTM engine to, you know, do things differently. But one thing I want to share, I want to get into a few more examples of from some of this. So I'm going to gloss over it. But what I wanted to show here guys, and I hope you can see this, this is a snapshot from one of our customer accounts. Also happens to be one of your customers, Steve. They are a high ACV low volume business operating in a, extremely, I would say, competitive category. But for them, you know, they're running, you know, an account-based motion. They're trying to get as much data and insight around the buyer journey. And so what this is, is a snapshot of one opportunity. It's a closed one opportunity that closed in the first half of 2026. And we traced it back to understand, okay, everybody that's associated with that account, what happened? What happened in that journey? There's eight different people. There's, you know, 44 signals that happened over, you know, three years and eight months. And now while the deal source was RFP, right? Sure, RFP gets the credit or, you know, gets, you know, like the label on the deal, you can really see just how much engagement they have across the full buying cycle with marketing. And the other thing too is, you can see that only 18% here of the engagement actually happened before the opportunity was created so much of that marketing engagement actually happened in the sales cycle. So just a really unique point of view, I think, when you zoom out and you look at the account as a snapshot, the people in the account, you know, what type of account it is, what people are doing, what programs are working, what channels are working, and just one sort of like bird's eye view. So yeah, and I think that's really where account based marketing comes in. So you can see for this, you know, this company so much of that anchors against events and, you know, with their last touch attribution model, they couldn't really see that because nothing really came from events exclusively. It came from, you know, accumulation of things that happened over time. So I just wanted to share the that example. All right. So let's maybe talk about quickly and we'll get into maybe a couple of questions, but maybe some examples of some core strategies and tactics. I think this is just sort of like an example, you know, blueprint. You want to walk through this, Steve? Yeah, yeah. I would say, yeah, we're just trying to give some some ideas here, but you know, think about this. If you get to a place where you have some conviction of what your, you know, buying journey looks like for prospects in, you know, multiple people with within a company because sometimes the journey is different depending on seniority. Then you want to devise your strategy against that. And so like one of the things we do really often, which I think you see in your data too, Carolyn, is you notice that C level or VP level is on the opportunity, but they're not the primary contact and the primary contacts actually like a manager or director who's like signing up for the demos. They're going to the webinars. They're on the website and that sort of thing. And so what will to do is, is design a multi funnel campaign where the C levels receive a completely different message, a different experience, different calls to action, different channels, then the, the more junior folks. And we, and we pull from a lot of these types of tactics, right? So like branded thought leadership on LinkedIn, continues to work for us for targeting those C level folks because it's cheap impressions, it's cheap reach. And we know the tactic is like, we just want to reach in frequency. That's it. And that's what I tell clients. They're like, well, I need to attribute this back to like demo requests. And then like, well, then this is wrong. Like we're not going to use LinkedIn ads to drive demo requests with C level people. Your data says they don't do that. So why would we like manufacture this scenario where we're going to achieve that on LinkedIn? So we're really realistic there. And then as you think about the flow from there, like if you've got an executive to to see your brand, what's the next thing you want them to do or see or engage with? Right? And that's usually something account specific. You want to personalize so that they feel that like, okay, this is someone's actually seeing and hearing me. And then you can lean into your strategic engagement, which is going to be maybe like a dinner, a workshop, a one-to-one experience type of thing. And then you want to apply that same thinking to the other personas in your in your buying committee. And so if you've got the data, you could hypothetically, let's say, like a director level, they sign up for a demo and that's how they get into your inbound funnel. What are they doing all before that? Like are they looking at different pages on the website? Are they engaging with different type pieces of content? And so now you can use those in types to construct the right journey for them. And honestly, like pick and test from from this like short list of activities, you know, like I'm a huge fan of testing, I think with with today, like you can get things into market and get some kind of leading indicator back within two to four weeks of whether that's working or not. And then decide like, okay, is this a profitable leading indicator? If so, let's run it another month and see what happens. If not, like maybe let's shift gears or let's optimize and try to change it. Do you see sometimes when, you know, companies identify their target accounts? Do you feel like sometimes the emphasis is placed more on like the sales reps and the BDRs to reach some versus marketing sort of like being part of that story? Because all this really takes a lot of marketing and it feels more like marketing heavy versus sales execution heavy. Yeah, yeah, and it is. I think that's the truth of how it should be. And so I think what happens is, you know, marketing gets out there and they're like, we're going to do ABM. So they survey the channels, they survey the vendors to figure out how can we target accounts. And you get caught in this cycle of running LinkedIn ads. Maybe you're using like Google ads and meta ads with some side sort of contact identification middle layer in between. Then you create custom landing pages that put an account logo when somebody from that company lands on the page, but like all the content is the same. And then you run, you know, maybe a webinar invite or like some mid funnel thing after that. And marketing does that and they're like, we're good. Like we ran account based marketing. They're going to package all that up and they're going to throw it over the fence to sales. And they're going to say this account engaged, it's surging whatever sales go reach out. I mean, to me, that's just a man gen. Like that's just regular demand gen. You're still putting a lot of responsibility on the sales rep to go and create the deal versus you think about like an inbound ABM funnel. You're doing all those things I mentioned, but with a higher level of credibility. And now instead of just throwing it over the fence for sales to call, like they're coming in, like they're signing up for stuff, they're downloading stuff, they're they're coming inbound. And that's, I mean, to me, that's where every marketer wants to be, right? If you're managing a good, strong inbound funnel, your life is so much easier than if you are trying to orchestrate like a heavy sales led outbound funnel. Yeah. Sales is always going to point fingers at you. They're always going to complain about the quality and it's tough. So then from your perspective, who owns like the account tiering strategy? Is that the CRO? Is that the CMO? Is that, you know, the chief, who owns that? Because then I think you can get into like a lot of that finger pointing between sales and marketing. If if there's not real alignment around it, honestly, it's a tough one to answer because I think it's a bit of a, it's a bit of a battle right now because of like sales has access to all of this data. If you're a larger company, sales usually runs the StratOps organization as well, who's like doing all the number crunching on total addressable market, service addressable market and all that stuff. So sales comes armed to marketing and they're like, this is who we need to target. But now marketing has access to all of these tools and data. And if they've evolved and they're tracking, you know, signals the way that we were talking about them now, they have data and there's a little bit of a battle of like, well, whose data do we choose and like which accounts do we pick? So I think, you know, I think what still works and probably need some refinement in the near future is tiering. So, you know, you take all of this data and then you apply some level of like quality and credibility to it and then tear your accounts based on on those data signals. And so you end up with your, you know, like your strategics, your tier one, your tier two, your tier three. And then hopefully agree as a team on that because that can be helpful for marketing then to decide, okay, how are we going to build campaigns and how are we going to deploy ABM across these different account tiers? You can align resources and workflows and everything to that too. Well, I know we only have two minutes left and we've zoomed through everything. So, quick thing is I'm going to send everybody this deck if you've registered so you'll have it. There's more stuff and material in here that we didn't cover. So make sure to go through that. But one thing just on the, you know, the topic of Q&A because I know we don't have a lot of time left, but I just went through the poll responses and there was quite a few questions around if you've got a lean team or if you're a small marketing team and you know you want to do this kind of thing, where should you start? What should you prioritize? So I think we can let that be sort of the final question that we can wrap with. Yeah, if you're a small team, you know, honestly, I would say it like from my own experience, a lot of the ABM I was running was completely manual and just took it piece by piece. You know, tactically, one of my favorite exercises to do is to go into the CRM. Look at, like let's say, you're using an MQL model or whatever you call it, go into the CRM, pretend you're a sales rep and just go through like a few hundred of them and ask yourself, would I call these people right now as they stand in the CRM? And if the answer is no on a handful of them, start to categorize why you wouldn't and then use that insight to go backwards and reverse engineer what you need to improve in your program. And I think starting from some type of like insight exercise like that will help you figure out where to place your time and then honestly just pick pick like whatever the highest opportunity area is in your funnel and then go run a little ABM player like an ABM workflow in that place, get some data, get some results show that it's working, expand to the next one and then use it as a way actually to build your career. Like if you take that approach over and over again, eventually you'll outscale yourself and you'll need to make a request for resources or for budget, you know, to purchase tools, whatever it is. And that's it's a win-win, right? Like your company does well and you get to grow also. That reminds me of the podcast episode we did together maybe like, you know, a year or whatever. I think the episode was titled like the Hidden Power of Your Rejection Data and I feel like this I backed to that. And I'm reminded too of, you know, a company that we work with that had a countering but once they actually looked at their clothes lost by their account tiers, they realized how much pipeline they were creating with like their tier D or E or something like that. And it's just like the the win rate on those was abysmal and I just feel like there's so much to be learned when you look at all of the areas that you're losing and not just what do we go do more of? Yeah, I remember us talking about that. And that's key there, right? Like, otherwise, imagine the teams that just like run that motion for years without knowing that data and you're just wasting money and time. Yeah, for sure. Well, I think this has been a great conversation. I think there's been really good feedback in the chat. So thank you everybody. I know we're at time. So if you've got a, if you got a hop, go do that. We'll be in touch. But Steve, you have a little bit of an offer, right? For people attending, did you want to share what that is and how can you grab it? Yeah, totally. Yeah, anybody's still on. So we're doing these like free signal audits right now. And if you, you know, basically what you just hit me up on LinkedIn or send me an email, just give me five accounts or quite frankly, if you're interested, I can scrape them off your website and figure out the lookalikes. Then we'll go in and we'll find actual people in your, in your buying committee. We'll source those contacts and we'll run a free custom signal report on them. And these are the signals we use for the really bespoke one to one stuff. And so, you know, you'll see like the whole kind of, you know, dossier of this person, how you could potentially go to market with them. So if you're interested, we like doing them. It's fun. So hit me up and we can get one ready for you. So cool. That sounds like an amazing offer, by the way. Awesome. Okay, great. Well, thank you, Steve. And thanks everybody. Hope you enjoyed the session and we'll see you next time. Thanks. All right. Bye guys. Bye.