Why the Next Era of ABM Targets the Person, Not the Account (with Casey Patterson, Snowflake)

Hey, it's Dave. So zoom webinars and events has made our recent exit five live sessions way more pro lately. But don't just take my word for it. Check this out. This is what Kelly B said. She said, I compare all other webinars now against exit five. I love that. And look, in a world of AI Slop, we just want to make something that's actually worth going to. It's not easy to get an hour out of your day. I'm just the on air talent, though. So I'm going to kick it over to Marissa and Maria. This is our exit five live production team, our content team here at exit five, since they're the ones actually making this all happen. Marissa. I've been doing B2B content a long time. I know. It's hard to hold attention for more than 30 seconds. Let alone a whole webinar, but zoom webinars helps recently. We've had nearly 2000 registrants over 500 live and hundreds of hours of watch time on our sessions. Maria, what would you say is driving that it all starts with prep. We do up to seven hours per session, choosing a topic, prep calls, building the run of show and so much more. We zoom webinars and events, everything's in one place. Distration, emails, polls and analytics. So it's simple to run that cycle every two weeks. At showtime, I handed back to Marissa in Zoom's production studio. With Zoom's production studio, I can set the scenes in advance. So on the big day, I just send them live with speakers and content already in place. Lean transitions, crystal clear audio and video. I feel like I'm running a big game back there. So this is why our webinars have been crushing it lately. Look, they just said we're spending seven hours per session on this and don't just take our word for it. The first hand, we run these every other Friday. It's called exit five live, now powered by Zoom webinars and events. So come and check us out. See this whole thing live. And if you want to learn more about using Zoom at your company, check out zoom.com/exit5. That's zoom.com/exit5. Hey, it's me Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Convertive, a B2B marketing agency that helps enterprise teams build an AI-powered go-to-market strategy. Q4 is the time of year when having a great agency partner matters more than ever. If you're shopping for a new agency, Convertive is worth looking into. They work with marketing and operations leaders to help grow revenue across the business and AEO. One of the things I know you're thinking about right now is one of their specialties. Trusted by companies like DocuSign, DataBank and Constructor, Convertive builds on the search and marketing work you're already doing and helps optimize your site. So more of your buyers find you and turn it into pipeline. Right now they're offering exit five listeners a free AI search review. They'll run the questions your buyers are actually asking through your Google and AI tools. Show you how you stack up against competitors and tell you what's worth fixing. If you're looking for a refresh of your AEO strategy in 2027, this AI search review with Convertive is a great place to start. Check it out. It's Convertive.com/exit5 that's Convertive.com/exit5 and you can also see the link in the show notes. You're listening to the Dave Gerard show. Hey, it's Dasha. The episode that you're about to listen to was reported live in Stover Monde at exit five's drive event and I sat down with account based marketer Casey Patterson. She is the director of North American account based marketing at a company called Snowflake. Snowflake is a huge company and Casey has spent almost four years working there purely on account based marketing. So when I think of someone who knows the ins and outs of account based marketing and has a large budget to work with and run a lot of creative plays, Casey is the first person that comes to mind. She actually had a sold out workshop at drive where she talked about agentic ABM. So we touch on that in this episode and then I just talk about what worked for her in 2026 and when she's betting on in 2027. If you're listening or watching and you're wondering what the heck is going on, we recorded it outside and it was the windiest day probably of my life and so you might hear us fighting for our lives against the wind. I hope you enjoyed the episode. I sure enjoyed sitting down with Casey, she is one of my favorite people that I met at drive this year. Enjoy. I'm here with Casey from Snowflake. Hi, Dasha. Hi. Great. We met yesterday. Yes. We locked eyes. You did a presentation yesterday. And we fell in love. Yeah. For anyone listening, if you were watching someone present on stage and you were not looking at them directly and nodding along and smiling, start doing that. Don't be blank faced. Smile. Yeah. Burbly or inverbly communicate that they're doing a good job. Is that how I made you feel? Yes. Great. And that's why we locked eyes and fell in love. And now we're here. And now we're here. And now we're here. Have you been to drive before? No. It was my first time. The energy is insane. I've never been to a market conference like this. And the stow is just my favorite place. I want to come back here or move here. It's the cutest little town. It's so fun. What made you want to sign up for drive? I got signed up because I followed Dave for a while. I was on the podcast and then I saw it come up. And I was actually asked to speak and did a session yesterday, which was fantastic. So I wanted to come just to feel the energy of what's happening and marketing right now. Not only did you do a session, your session was one to sell out within what like the first 30 minutes. Let's talk about what you do at snowflake and then you'll talk about what session you did. Okay. Great. Yeah. So I run North American ABM at snowflake. I have about 20 folks on my team who each line up to a destructive sales and do custom marketing for that sales team. I love my team so much. They're amazing. And they're part of the reason I'm here. I'm so thankful for them. And then the session I did yesterday was about agentic ABM, what's coming next in terms of ABM and really in marketing in general because of AI. Why do you think your session sold out so fast? What do you think is happening in marketing that made a bunch of marketers look at the list of like 20 or so sessions and pick agentic ABM? Yeah. So I think that my session was particularly interesting because a lot of marketers right now are very excited, but also very unsure about what's happening next with AI, understandably, any transformation comes with unknown risks and unknown rewards. So ABM is kind of this new way of, I would say, marketing in general, but I think there's a step beyond that. But snowflake is taking now where we're not only looking at the account, but we're looking at it individual. And we have enough processing power now to look at everything around it individual, what makes them tick their LinkedIn presence, where they like to vacation, what they do in their spare time and give them a marketing experience that's tailored just for them. So that's kind of that next era beyond CRM, beyond ABM, now we're going into individualization. And that's what I talked about yesterday. And snowflake is actually enabling that through our tool itself. So it's really exciting time to be both a consumer of snowflake as someone who works there and works in the tool, but also a seller of, I think, the next generation of where marketing is going. That's awesome. Obviously at a conference, so I've been asked about a dozen times, like, when am I taking away to my own team and your session really resonated. I think I work at an early stage startup and we have Claude and we have access to like basically unlimited AI tools and we're sitting on top of all this data. And I thought, okay, like we're leveraging it, but not like you shared some really great examples of you probably know enough about the individual at the account that you're trying to get into to send them like a really tailored personalized gift. And at our team, like we've tried gifting in the past, but it was pre-AI era and it was when gifting meant you would pick some sort of gift, maybe make it on theme and then send the exact same thing to, I don't know, a handful of people and then hope that your team could book a meeting from that gift. But I think what you're doing at snowflake where it's like personalized for that unique person. What was the stat you shared? It takes your team from idea to like delivery how long from an intent spiking at an account to delivery of a gift we had one in 40s. Like that's crazy. That would be impossible before AI. So as much as we get to like hate on AI and AI Slop, there are things that it unlocks that are really cool. It really does. And that's the part that's exciting to me. There's a lot of like you said, Slopaganda AI Slop, Slopaganda is a new one that I learned. Slopaganda. You also taught me a cool new term, tokenomics. Tokenomics? Yes. Regulating your tokens throughout your different tools to make sure that the tool, the AI tool that is best used for whatever you're trying to get it to do is the one that's being used rather than just one AI tool for everything. But yeah, it's been such a great conference. And I think I've learned, I actually went to just a budgeting session yesterday. So it wasn't about AI or like anything new, it was just how to budget when your channel mixes uncertain, when you don't know what's going to happen in the next year, what getting buy-in for that budget looks like, creating ideas and buy-in from Kristi at AirOps and it was like excellent. So it's not only just what are we doing next in the future, it's like there's some basic things that we're learning here too that I, as a leader, need to be up on the latest ways to do things, latest thoughts around how to get people internally to buy into what you're doing. So it's just been a great, well-rounded conference and I'm so thankful for everything that Exit 5 has done. I love it. What are you taking away from the budgeting session? So Kristi talked about Bob Sob, which is fear of being seen as behind in marketing. So it's kind of, what are your competitors doing that you're not doing? What channels are companies similar to yours in that you're not in? And then saying, if we're going to be up on what is not behind in the age of marketing, if we're just doing email blast everyone, we are missing out, we are behind and the fear of being behind is definitely a motivator for innovation and then for also teams who are innovating to get more budget or resources. Cool. Yeah. Let's meet. We are in September, which is kind of like the new year. Yeah. For you, for me, at least like September always feels more new year-esque than new year, new year. Yes. So as you reflect on the last, I don't know, school year, we're along at a school. Yeah. But the last school year, what is a win for you, your team in 2026? Yeah. So thank you for your time with this question in advance. 'Cause now I have an analogy or a metaphor to say. - Oh, heck yeah. - So I grew up in California. And for my whole life in California, there was this fear of the big one. And the big one, California, if you don't know, sits on the San Andreas fault, which is a meeting of two tectonic plates. And the big one, quote unquote, is when these two tectonic plates are gonna shift and create a very life-changing or earth-changing earthquake, that would be very bad for many people. And that was something that was always on my mind, oh, the fear of the big one, that's gonna really shift and change California forever. And so whenever a small earthquake happened in California, that does not affect lives, maybe affects property or buildings, but is small enough to not be, you know, life altering, geologists are very happy about it, because it is not the big one. It's releasing a little bit of tension from the two tectonic plates moving. - Does that delay the on kind of delays? - Delay is or prevents, I'm not sure. But there's always a relief. It's like a tension has been lifted. - Yeah. - These two tectonic plates. So something that I'm really proud of with my team is that we've done those little dissolving and little earthquakes for ourselves to disrupt what we've been doing this whole year. Every week, like we're not waiting for the big one, where someone comes and says, what are you doing with AI? Like every day my team has been disrupting how we do things or changing or building something new to make sure that tension is released gradually, rather than having a big, you know, shake up in a year that really changes everything that we're doing. So I like to keep the disruption going because it actually helps keep consistency going so that we're never behind enough where a big one happens in a huge shift, you know, really changes everything that we're doing. So I'm very proud of that for my team. - Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Optimizely. If you want to know what AI agents can actually do for a marketing team, Optimizely is where I'd point you to right now for a real example. Last month, we ran an X to 5 live session where a bunch of our members showed off their best AI agent use cases and McKeill, director of AI Innovation at Optimizely, actually won the whole session. He showed us how he used Optimizely's AI agent platform to run an ABM campaign that gave 2000 accounts their own landing pages built from signals like job postings, press releases, and leadership changes. That's like the holy grail of ABM, by the way. Optimizely's agent platform is built specifically for you, the B2B marketer. You can build your own agents like McKeill did or pull from a directory of 50 plus pre-built ones made just for marketing use cases all in one place. They also just launched virtual teammates. These are digital members of the team that learn over time and can join meetings, complete tasks, support campaigns, and keep your website optimized. If you're being asked to look into AI agents right now, Optimizely should be at the top of your list. Go and see how they can help you reclaim your time and build cool stuff just like McKeill did. Check them out at optimizely.com/exit5. That's optimizely.com/exit5. Hey, Steve, today's episode is brought to you by compound growth marketing. They're a full funnel, demand gen agency that I've personally hired twice. Yep, before I was just a thought leader, I was a real marketer and CGM was one of the best agencies that I worked with. They help high growth software companies show up earlier in the buying journey where potential customers are forming opinions about which product to use. They've helped an enterprise cybersecurity company grow pipeline 168% year over year with full funnel media and an HR tech company grow 48% through paid search. And they can do the same for you. They offer a combination of full funnel paid advertising strategy and execution, AEO and a dedicated go-to-market engineering team. Everything CGM does gets tracked, measured, and improved over time. That means more pipeline for you. And this works because they were started by an actual former VP of marketing who really gets this space that you work in in B2B. So visit compoundgrowthmarketing.com/exit5 to see how they can help you meet your 2027 revenue goals. That's compoundgrowthmarketing.com/exit5. That's a great metaphor, a stunning metaphor, if I may. What steps did you take to set up an environment where you can do that? I feel like there was this moment in AI where like if you were using Chat GBT and had set up some projects like you were making it as a marketer and you could say like yeah, like I dabble. And then there was almost like overnight this shift where cloud came out and then it was, if you're not in cloud code, like you are immediately behind and why don't you have 28 agents running your business? Exactly. And then I really needed to throw myself into AI so that I could teach my team cloud code. What did that look like for you to be able to say, okay, like I want everyone on my team? And you were on a big team. Like your team is significantly bigger than mine. How do you bring so many people along on the AI journey? I mean, you're 100% right. I think it starts with you. You can't ask people to do things that you don't know how to do. So yeah, exactly. And so you need to be challenging and disrupting yourself, which is definitely something that in tech you just can't not do. But I think the resistance to AI won't create action. Like you have to just say, I understand that there are risks and things associated with AI, things I don't know, but I have to at least try. So it starts with you 100%. And then Snowflake did set up an AI accelerator program where different AI adopters on different teams got together within marketing every week to talk about how are we accelerating adoption within the entire Snowflake marketing team? And then what projects are we going to kind of flesh out and escalate to leadership to say, this deserves time with dedicated engineers and members of the data team. We want to get managerial buy-in, get C-suite buy-in to get these projects done. So we did those two groups really early. We started early last year making those two groups happen and ensuring that not only do we have bottom-up transformation, everyone is using different tools and innovation, but also top-down transformation to say, how do we replace this whole system across multiple teams that will really impact how we do things forever? What are some examples of the projects that you brought to the team? And they were like, heck yeah, let's put a dev on this. We'll give it like a life of its own. - Yes, one of them was, it's not super flashy, but it's a database washing machine. So basically we have, you know, our database, and you have your database that it expires by like 25% every year marketing data. - Right. - Because like people leave companies like phone number, that kind of thing? - Yes, exactly. - Change emails, you know, yeah, leaving companies was definitely a huge one. Or just, you know, the data is like, it's students, it's consultants, it's all those things, it's all those exclusionless. And so we needed kind of a washing machine for our accounts. - I love that term. - Yeah, it was so fun. Jeremy, who is on our marketing ops team, came up with that term. Basically we put in all our contacts and it sorts them into like, this one just needs an email, like, and we're good. So let's go purchase an email through one of our data management tools. And then now it's been washed and cleaned and this one. And this one needs four pieces of information and it needs to be made marketable, where it's not marketable today. So this one requires a little bit of a deeper wash, you know, delegates cycle, whatever it is. And then let's go purchase those contacts. And then it also sorts it by, you know, seniority and buying groups within the account. So we're not just spending money on, let's get all of our contacts up today. It's more like which of the most significant contacts, what is the AI recommendation for how we should update them? And then we can go purchase that amendment to those contacts to make sure that they're complete. This is so cool. And not just because it has a cool metaphor, but like I hate laundry. Laundry is the worst tour. Don't fight me on this. But this is, I can get behind this table on. - What about dishwashing? - You're fine. - I mean, I have a dishwasher, loading a dishwasher. You don't have a dishwasher? - I do have a dishwasher. - Yeah. - I don't know for some reason. What about taking out the trash? - That's a blue task. We have in my household a blue task and pink tasks. Fortunately for me recycling and trash is a blue task. So my husband takes care of it. - Amazing. - But laundry, we each do our own laundry. And so like folding it is the worst part for me. Is your husband good at laundry? My husband is so good at laundry. - My husband throws everything in the washing machine together and doesn't sort colors. It says that that's like fake news. In the only time you need to sort colors is when you just purchase something for the first time, the colors will bleed. - So that's me. - But you're a Luke, you're my husband who's like, I get a thing in it. I'm gonna make sure that it's wash properly. - Yeah. - We have complimentary husband. - complimentary husband. - Our husband maybe. - What's like another example? Do you have another example of a project they got by him? - Yeah. - Or a project that didn't get by him that you were excited about. - Ooh, haven't had one of those personally yet. I think another one was how we communicate with sales. So our field marketing team is incredible. And I've been really lucky to be involved in all these projects, even though they're not my remit necessarily in this AI accelerator. But our field marketing team, they run so many amazing events across the country all the time big and small. So our field marketing team was making sure our sales team knew which events to invite all their people to. Are you hosting your own events? Or these are like, yeah, yeah. Field marketing team does events alongside sales, like either at a specific account, like a snow day is what we call it, or larger scale events, but or dinners around town in specific locations and our field marketing team is amazing. So sales can now just go into our internal tool, which is called Snowhouse, Snowflake on Snowflake and say, you know, I have this person at this account and I want to invite him to an event in their area which one should I choose? And it just prompts and recommends. And then says like, do you want to send this? And then they can just send it through this tool. - Sending is what, it's something physical or it's like an email invite, kind of. - Like, yeah, yeah, usually like an email invite or pick up the phone and call them and invite them either one. But it's just a way to easily recommend next steps for an account from a marketing perspective to a sales person. - So cool. - Yeah. - You were from the era of like you've been doing ABM since before AI, right? You said yesterday you were doing it for like five years. - Yeah. - You've been in ABMs, yeah. - What is something that you used to do without AI? Like what is something that you don't want to lose? Now that agentic ABM is here. - The sales connection. I don't think there's ever a time and I don't think we should make AI an excuse for not talking to sales one-on-one and talking about their specific struggles with specific accounts that they want to get into. Marketing and sales have historically been those two, you know, departments that are, Ali is known for and not it's not like but in general kind of blame passing between departments Which is kind of why it was like a spider band meme so literally a spider meme like oh, it's yearly It's oh no, it's your follow-up and it's just not productive like it does not generate pipeline It's not productive so talking to salespeople and being in their conversation making sure we're informed informed on their account strategy I'd never want that to go away and we can definitely do things to make the follow-up better But I never want that personal connection to be lost. Let's talk about 2027 Okay, what is your big bet going into the next year? Yeah, so we are betting big on AI as a whole business We are automating more of our workflows, but then also augmenting how we do a bm So it's not going to be the same same but more it's going to be different and better But with all that automation with all of that change to how we do you know day-to-day activities I want to see what we can do different and better So this year we've experimented with things like account-based billboards How do we put a billboard outside of you know an account in Tulsa, Oklahoma where we're having a field marketing event that day And say hey, we put that up for you as if the billboard was right there And it was like we put this up to make sure that you saw us and and sometimes those activations are you know less expensive than most of our marketing campaigns So what are we doing that's new and then one-to-one and individualization and we've also run And filmed and produced videos with our CMO talking to other CMOs that calls out the company name Calls out exactly their challenges and exactly our current place with that business And we've had a lot of success with those businesses recognizing. Oh, this is CMO to CMO She knows who I am. I'm gonna email her and we're gonna set up a call with the rap that's responsible So we're getting into new lines of business by doing it in different ways than we ever had before Okay, before we blow away Let's Let's wrap this up Casey. You're awesome. Thank you, Josh. That were you. I am in love with you And this is obviously just like a taste of what Casey knows what she's talking about when it comes to abm And you did a podcast with Dave on the x5 show. Yeah, so if you want more of Casey. Yes, you should go listen to that You're awesome. It was a great upset and thank you so much and I attended your session and like yeah, it was awesome. I'm so glad you were there I was there. I'll always be nodding at your sessions Thank you. It's awesome. Okay, that's a wrap. Thank you Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast if you like this episode You know what I'm not even gonna ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't really care about that I have something better for you So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at exit five and you can go and check that out Instead of leaving a rating or review go check it out right now on our website exit five calm Our mission at exit five is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing Then there's no better place to do that than with us at exit five There's nearly five thousand members now in our community people are in there posting every day asking questions about things like marketing planning Ideas inspiration asking questions and getting feedback from your peers building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing You are so you can have a peer group or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest It's a hundred percent free to join for seven days so you can go and check it out risk free And then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become a member for the year Go check it out learn more exit five calm and I will see you over there in the community Hey, it's me Dave today's episode is brought to you by customer IO They're one of our longest running sponsors customer IO helps marketing teams get more impact from every message They send so you can reach the right people with the right message at the right moment What we love about customer IO is that they have a great team of marketers who really care about the craft They just get marketing and understand our audience Molly rosey and the team brings something creative every time that we work together At our exit five event in Austin they handed out cowboy boots in our newsletter They shared an AI prompt cookbook and that drive last month. 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