Account Based Go-To-Market

Elevate customer experiences through Account-Based Experience (ABX) strategies, delivering a personalized network of touchpoints that cultivate unwavering loyalty and fuel sustained business growth.

Priyanka: Cool. I think we are live. All right. Yeah. Before we get started, if anybody can help me tell that if we are audible, we are loud, clear, and there's no problem with that video. 

Greg: Sounds good. Oh, I can hear you. I don't know if that means anything. I 

Priyanka: can hear you too. Yeah, like I was saying two minutes before, I just want to make sure that we are live and the last live Natalie was with me and we were talking to each other for 15 minutes.

And I just don't want to do that. So yeah, I think getting a lot of audible and I think there are a lot of people who are listening to us. I'm excited. So cool. Hello everyone. Thanks for joining in. Today I have a very special guest with me, Devo. He's almost an ABM demand gen and. Plus he's also extremely passionate about what he does. Rarely see people who are actually passionate about their job. But it's nice to have him and I'll just give a little bit of backstory to how we ended up on this line. A year ago, I think it was a year ago when I texted you, or Yeah I just shot a call, DMM on LinkedIn.

I didn't get the demo , but you're on this live , so I considered that. 

Greg: Absolutely. And the sales process right? Is, A long one for a lot of stuff. A lot of touch points, things like that and stuff like this makes it all better. So we have a demo next week, so there we go.

Priyanka: Yes, we have to set that up, but yeah, thanks for joining in. First of all I hope thanks for having me. Yeah, this this is an insightful session for everybody. We are going to have a lot of fun, a lot of laughter. And yeah, I didn't plan a lot of things for this live because I wanted it to be free flowing and no no, like such.

Rigid talking points. So we'll start with everything about ABM, how intent data comes into play. And a term that Greg has introduced, which is ABX. We'll jump into that later. And towards the end, we'll take all the questions which you have for Greg about ABM demand and sales marketing, anything.

So yeah, Hey, make 

Greg: them hard. Anything, make them hard. Anything. I'll let's see if I can answer anything. So let's go. 

Priyanka: Let's go. Let's go. Yeah I wrote in today's post with Bernie's meme, ABM, is extremely overused, right? But What does that mean to you, ABM, as a marketer who has been in the space for a while?

Greg: Yeah just to go back to one of the things you said, ABM has become such a buzzword these days for companies, and it is, like you said, overused so much. When a company says, oh, we're going to launch this new initiative, it's going to generate so much pipe, and people ask, what is it?

And they say, oh, it's ABM. It's like that's it's not a silver bullet, right? You had there's so much that goes behind it. And so what it really means to me because everybody has their own, Definition of really what this actually means what does things like that? It really just means good marketing in my opinion.

It simply just means good marketing Full stop. You could say it also means, sales and marketing are aligned on a key set of goals around accounts. But that's really it. And then it's just a matter of, making sure you have buy in. And everybody is working towards a common goal.

Priyanka: Correct. Correct. I think generally at least as far as I know in B2B sales and marketing for a long time have been seen in silos. That's another problem that we try to solve at Factors as well. And we are huge cheerleaders of ABM. And we also try that our product solves for it.

It's good to see there's a global consensus on, what ABM actually tries to do. That's good. And whenever we think about ABM, right? In intent data comes into play. So how, what do you think about in intent data? What's your opinion on it? And how does that help in setting up ABM for a firm?

Greg: Yeah. Typically when you think about ABM, the next thing you think about like you just said, is intent data, right? And it they go they're starting to go more hand in hand. And one is more powerful when you have the other one. And so ABM or intent data can really fuel a lot of your, Account based marketing programs.

I'm not gonna get today into the technical side of how, intent data works because there's a whole list, whether it's first party, third party, intent, whole things like that. But for Today, what we can just say is, intent data really are just, it just means that there's positive signals that are happening around either a persona or a person or an account that means you should go after them.

And where this comes into play and makes it so powerful is not only when the marketing team is using that to drive decisions, whether it's, figuring out what campaign they should launch or, how they should structure a certain plan to go after an account where it really comes into play is when sales starts to adopt and leverage intent data on their own.

And when you have this kind of combination of, marketing is using intent for, their use case and you have sales fully ramped and adopted and have access to, some kind of intent for that, it really makes it more powerful and. Some of the use cases that I've seen work really well for intent data on the sales side is imagine if a seller is going into a demo or if they're going into they're just going into an event, they're taking to a baseball game or whatever.

If they're meeting an account, they can listen to some of the signals, they can go in and they can look at some of the Intent that spiking and then potentially shape the conversation around, what they're seeing that might be setting traps for, competitive stuff. Or it could be if certain trends around your business is, spiking other than other than, other things, they can really take that.

Information and then run with it. And so we've ramped our sales team here. Everybody really loves the intent data signals. I'm constantly blowing up our sales team saying, Hey, did you see this around, X account they're spiking on this and, I, we bugged them all the time just to make sure they're seeing those signals but it works really well.

And they really love that additional data. And what makes it even better is when you have a team that is really data oriented. They really appreciate that and it just shows the value and it just makes marketing that value added partner which we really are in New York. We're there to help sales close deals.

Priyanka: That's good. That's good. I think aligning sales and marketing. That's the first agenda of any ABM program, any ABM marketer and as it should be. How do you at Devo really do this aligning sales and marketing? I know you touched upon it a little bit, but if you can get into a little bit of technicalities, it will be helpful.

Greg: Yeah, absolutely. So at Devo, what we do is, and I've learned this at past companies where this is held miserably, where, you run ABM in a silo and, you throw an ABM campaign at the wall and you're like, why didn't that produce any results? And it all comes back to the misalignment that's happening.

And so you can create the best, it might've been, you can create the best ABM campaign in the world, with awesome tactics, awesomeness. But if you don't have sales bought into this whole system, it's not going to be as. It's not going to work as well as if, they were bought in.

And so that alignment is really the first step to any success for your ABM, campaigns. And so the way that we do that here is we have it part of the onboarding process. So when, somebody comes in, say they're, a new RS, a new sales rep A. E. R. S. M. Whoever. We walked them through what are, A.

B. M. Go to market motion looks like how it's what it's, what its landscape is across, whether it's where their patches, whether it's globally, wherever. And we make sure that it's part of the training and part of the onboarding. And I'll have multiple sessions with the reps.

Some other people on my team will have multiple rep, multiple sessions with the rep. Yeah. Just to understand the data that they have at their fingertips that they can use. And so by starting that process on, maybe it's not day one, but it's day three, it's already built in and it's already integrated into their just general workflow, their general cadences that they do weekly.

And it just sets them up for success. And so that's like the first thing that we do that is probably one of the easiest things you could do, right? It's just incorporate any kind of onboarding materials around, your AVM motions whether it's, talking about how you can use intent data what marketing is doing right now from like a targeted account perspective.

But the second piece too is you can do all that and be great. But then you got to worry about is is I learned this from from Steve Richard. He's was the, or is the co founder of exec vision from a while ago. What he, one of the concepts that he had was called the forgetting curve. And it's not, it's a big concept.

What it basically means is you really need to reinforce what you're saying multiple times, over the course of. Multiple weeks in order for something to really stick. And after we have all of these different onboarding sessions, we make it... a priority to really just check in and be part of the sales team on a weekly basis.

And so some of the reps here I have weekly calls just to review, what's going on in their accounts. Like they're, they come to me saying, did I miss anything? Is there anything going on that, I missed? And it's really that like constant cadence between sales and marketing, whether it's a conversation, whether it's a slack message, it doesn't really matter, how that communication happens, but it's key that it does right.

And when that starts to happen everybody gets more in lines and. What's really important about those kind of ongoing conversations once they're ramped and once everybody understands, the value is the back channel that you create, right? And once you get that back channel set up, your campaigns are going to run even smoother.

And so what I mean by that is. Let's say, you're running an account, a campaign against 100 accounts. And you're talking with sales, you've optimized it, right? You know exactly what your message is. You know exactly who to target. Three weeks into the campaign, sales might come back to you and say, you know what?

We just learned this piece of intel around these five accounts. What can we do to change that? And by, adjusting that and dropping that you're going to be able to move some of your ad dollars to the more accounts that have a higher propensity to buy. And instilling it or like setting up that back channel is also critical.

And so all of these things that, I just mentioned are like really key for that, alignment in that success moving forward. 

Priyanka: That's correct. And at Factors we work with more than a hundred customers now, and all of them have strong. If not all of them, most of them have strong ABM motions and whatever we have set up within our customer success team and the customer marketing team, we always hear this, like they always tell us that within our common Slack channels, there's always a marketer tagging a BDR.

Hey this is really nice. Did you reach out to them? If they've dropped from the funnel what can we do? What resources can we forward them? And I think that's the best way to get sales on board. If you give them value I don't think there's any need to do a lot of convincing sessions.

The value addition is convincing enough. 

Greg: Absolutely. And once they it's almost I've seen this happen in real life. I've was onboarding a rep. I think it was like six months ago and we were going over our tech stack and showing them the kind of insights that this person could get.

And they were going through this and all of a sudden you could literally see the light bulb go off in his head. Like being like, Oh my God, are you kidding me? We can do this. Yeah. You're saying that you can show me, I can go in and look at this without asking you every day? And, like...

It's those light bulb moments that like, I love to see in reps because then it's like you come across as that value added, partner and you become their partner in crime when it comes to selling, which is, our ideal state. 

Priyanka: That's absolutely true. And it's heartening to see that sort of interconnectedness within teams I think even smaller teams need it the most like startups.

Early stage companies with less than 5 million or 10 million in revenue. This sort of alignment is hugely crucial for revenue at the end of the day that's a lot that matters. 

Greg: Absolutely. And the more that you can focus on that and the more that you can align, like

Your marketing teams around. That revenue, right? And being like, okay, let's move away from, counting leads. Let's move away from all of this stuff. Those are all like really good indicators. And I know we'll get into that in a sec. But those are just really, it makes it so much more powerful when you have a revenue first and a revenue centric marketing team, because then everything else just clicks together.

Yeah, I 

Priyanka: think so I don't remember when was this, but I remember a post by Chris Walker where he says that there's there's no marketing without revenue. And if there's, if you're doing a marketing without revenue, then you're doing something fundamentally wrong and his posts are pretty straightforward.

So that was good learning. 

Greg: Yeah. You could produce, marketing can produce. A thousand leads, and on paper it's okay, great. We produced a thousand leads, but at the end of the day, what's going to really make the business better is, are those leads closing, are they actually, progressing, through deals and if they're not change it, change the strategy, right?

Change the focus because, at the end of the day, that needs to be the focus of, every business. 

Priyanka: That's true. That's true. And again so I was talking to Troy the other day like on the live, he said that sales. Is marketing like it's a type of marketing at the end of the day, we all do the same thing if you see it that way which is true that it is a way of marketing.

And I remember when I started writing on LinkedIn, I wasn't into marketing, like I'm into marketing some six, seven months, but before that at factors, I was doing sales the reason to start. Social selling on LinkedIn, while people might think that, Oh, this is gone. This is a part of social media marketing or content marketing.

At that time it was, we were just piloting a way to generate revenue out of it. It was selling, but in traditional sense, it was marketing for a lot of people. But yeah, that did lead us to generating revenue, but quite later on but it's like SEO. It takes time.

So 

Greg: yeah, you hit on another really like interesting aspect that we could spend another, like two hours talking about this. But like social selling, I think is, is if it already, people haven't already seen it is going to be the most powerful way to sell, right?

Especially when people are remote or, how you're starting these relationships, you thought you're starting to become a really true thought leader around something and making an infusing humor with this. A few really good examples of this are.

Morgan Ingram, I've seen his, his LinkedIn posts around, selling there's Tom Boston at, sales loft where he, is infusing humor with all of this stuff. And even if you are looking at, from a leadership perspective, if you're saying, okay you might just be making like funny memes on, like LinkedIn or things like that, but they're actually, cultivating this sense of community that when people think about like sequences or cadences or, something that they want to relate to, they're always going to go to Tom at sales loft because that's just, yeah.

You know what he does. And so the impact on that is tremendous. And so we don't need to dive into that cause I could talk about that all day. But 

Priyanka: yeah but yeah, that, that actually makes sense. That's for another live maybe to talk about it, but let's dive into the topic. And yesterday while we were like briefing on what we're going to actually talk you said that ABM is the right way to marketing.

It's not like different from traditional marketing. It's just the way marketing should be done, right? Why do you say so? And why has it changed over the years, over the B2B SaaS space? 

Greg: Yeah. So everybody can, I feel like there's a, hopefully this debate between whether you have an ungated piece of content or gated piece of content, right?

There's that whole argument. And one of them, if you have a gated piece of content, that leads itself more to a lead centric model, which in some cases is okay if it's like a very high value piece of content that, makes sense. But for the most part, where the trend is going with B to B.

You want to create that frictionless process for the buyer. And so why I think this is just good marketing and it's different than traditional marketing in terms of when I think of traditional marketing, I think of, okay, we're, we're, we generated a hundred leads this month.

Everything is gated. That's how we're driving revenue. We're passing, everything over to sales that comes in. That, that shouldn't be, the focus and that shouldn't be the mindset just based on how people are, working in today's world and how they're consuming content people want.

They're really like scared to fill out forms. And so when it comes to ABM and you're putting a lot of money and dollars behind these programs, you want to make that process frictionless. And so what makes this really good marketing is just having things that are ungated around. A target, group of accounts or account or however you split it and you make it frictionless.

You put out everything there that is, ungated. You create noise around this company or group of companies. And the way that you do that could involve, a variety of tactics. You could do you could do a sticker bomb. You could just throw like a bunch of stickers at a company, right? Or you like, I don't know, I'm thinking of like guerrilla tactics, but you can think you could do custom, landing pages, but whatever is on the page has to be.

And then in tandem while you're doing that with the buy in of sales, you have your BDR team going after these accounts. And they're going after these accounts when they start to see these intense signals spiking. And so that way this whole kind of new, it's not necessarily, I don't think it's new, but I think it's the right way how we should be marketing.

It's marketing's role is to create a frictionless process for sales. That way, when sales comes in, they can easily start a conversation knowing that the account has already, seen. The, our company Devo, they've already, engaged with us at some level, we might know exactly what piece of content that they clicked on.

Not from a form fill, but from, other methods that we can derive from and they can steer the conversations that way. And so it's all about, creating the frictionless process for the buyer. Because, these days that's what. 

Priyanka: That's actually really insightful and coincidentally today we released a podcast with Nalin, who's the founder of Storylane.

So what they do is they do interactive demos for B2B SaaS companies. And, oh, by the way, they are really good. Everybody watching this live should definitely check them out. And. And they just break that, while we think it's totally impossible to break that silo where you can get a demo of the product on the website.

So we use Storylane for us. It's already on our website. It's on our landing pages. And it's absolutely amazing on how many leads we get out of it. And even if we don't get that leads, we push it to our sales team and there, and we tell them that, Hey, they have seen our demo and they've gone through the entire demo.

That means they are definitely not like window shopping. They're definitely here to do, to buy something. If not us. Another software like us. That's a great advice. And I think we went into that a bit late, but if you are watching this and if you're listening to these advices, you should definitely check out something like these.

Another example of that, how we did it at factors is. of lives, right? I don't really get who actually looks at my lives. LinkedIn should provide that data, but it doesn't. But yeah, 

Greg: that's weird. Okay. 

Priyanka: Yeah. LinkedIn lives. Yeah. It's really bad, but yeah that. But I still know who do regularly engage with me.

And I know for a fact that one day I hope I can get them to a demo. So this does help in a way like ungated content for the win. So 

Greg: absolutely. And what you said around having a, a demo on, on the website for, especially for factors, for your business is, kind of the ideal situation too, because it's a product that, you can easily walk through and understand. I think where this changes and where this differs is when you have a product like Devo, that is I don't want to say a little more complicated, but it has a little more.

We're one of the biggest cyber security companies in the world. And when we get to that demo stage, we want to make sure that we're we're qualifying the the account first and foremost. But secondly, To get the best kind of, experience for the user, we do want to customize it a little bit to show them, what's actually possible.

And it depends on the product a little bit around, okay. And there's also just debates around, should you do a demo on the first call or should it be a qualification call, all that kind of stuff. But in the sense of 

Priyanka: that's really that fiction repels me. 

Greg: Yeah. And so for something like that, though, that is what you're doing.

You're seeing some of the highest intense signals that you Could provide like if somebody is watching that demo form but maybe they didn't or watching that demo gone through that whole process, but they'd never filled out a form that's one of the highest intense signals I would say that you have on in your entire business.

And so that's a great lead. 

Priyanka: Going on to the next important part where so you talk about ABX, right? I link your post somewhere on this live after it's over, where you talk about marketers leverage ABM to enhance ABS, which leads to ABX. So many 

Greg: acronyms. I know so many acronyms.

Priyanka: So tell me about that and the best use cases that you would suggest or you have seen. Over the years. 

Greg: Yeah. Yeah. So a lot of it. The whole general theme around this is trying. I was trying to like, really, explain the how all of the different departments really work together. And marketing creates account based or ABM campaigns, right?

And in tandem Sales is doing their thing through account based selling. So those things are intertwined. And then all of those things that we're doing from the ABM side and then from the sales side we're creating these, account based experiences once we get the customer or prospect to engage.

And it doesn't necessarily mean that we stop once the deal is closed and the deal is one. But afterwards, we're ensuring that The customers are having, positive experiences with us, whether that's on, our community page, whether that's, just having really solid CSM relationships and things like that.

And so that post is like acronym soup, I can tell you. But the whole, like to reiterate, it's account based marketing, leads to account based selling and that. Equals kind of account based experiences, whether it's pre or post sales and that flow. If you just can get into that, mindset and adopt the revenue first kind of centric approach is going to do wonders for you and your sales 

Priyanka: team.

Can you suggest a few use cases that how it would work? Doesn't have to relate to ABX, but generally in, in ABM terms. 

Greg: Like use cases around a solid example for yeah. So one of the things that That we've seen a lot is, we've tried to slice and dice our, our target list of accounts various ways, whether it's by persona, whether it's by industry a bunch of different ways, you can do revenue size, a bunch of that stuff as well.

We have a very tight kind of ICP that we go after. And so one of the things that we're seeing really the most success in is vertical, really taking a vertical first approach, right? And looking at some of the key pain points around certain industries working that into the language in which we speak around, whether it's on the landing page, whether it's on emails, whether it's how we You know disseminate that information at the sales where they can then talk about it.

And we look at it from like a vertical lens. That's one use case that we've seen really well, because when the user then comes to say, they Click on an ad that, relates to them because of, they're part of industry X they see an ad that they're like, Oh, you know what?

That's a pain point that resonates with my with myself and also, my industry. I'm going to click on it. They're going to come to a page that is also geared towards them. And then have an experience that is, more tailored to that person. One of the things that, at, Devo we've wrestled with a little bit is do we want to actually call out that company?

Cause there's a thousand companies that say, that have, I'm just gonna make this up. American Express, and Devo on a landing page, for example, like when you call out a company's name, right? And I think that is a good tactic, but it depends on your audience.

And everything that you've run in ABM comes back to who your audience is. And so for factors for you guys, for example, I think that would be a great, way where you would, call out a name, right? Because, You're selling to marketers who, understand that, okay, it makes I get it.

I do. I know why they're calling me out and it's not, it doesn't come across as creepy, right? Because everybody that, you're selling to your buying committee, understands the value of okay, that's, that's a solid tactic. It's going to catch my attention. But when you move into some other industries like cybersecurity, you have to be pretty careful around, almost like not spooking the customer.

And Yeah. Knowing your audience and knowing how you're going to go about, getting in touch with them and, what some of that outreach looks like is key. And so if you can just figure out a way to break down your audience in a way that makes sense for, your business and what's going to resonate.

That's going to work well, and we've done it with by industries. We've also looked at, some of the competitors and things like that, and how we want to, approach those conversations and all of those things make it very easy for us to translate it into into sales and how they can best also use some of that language to, portray and whether it's, on calls, whether it's in sequences, whatever it may be.

Priyanka: Oh, I think you've got your entire company aligned on this. It looks like account based marketing, account based sales aligned along with copywriting and content as well. 

Greg: And we also have our our customer marketing team leveraging account based motions too.

And what's great is, we've ran customer campaigns that. Are are broken out and thought about in a way that is, ABMs, I'll call it ABM centric, right? You have this ABM mindset where you're saying, okay, let me look at this customer base. We're trying to do X and in order to achieve X, I'm going to break down this customer base with these different segments.

And so by just having that. Mindset first makes you so much more effective because you're not doing the whole, the spray and pray approach where, I want to hit as many people as possible. And especially in the customer world, when you're trying to do upsells or things like that.

You know a lot more about the customer, their install, whatever it may be, it might not be right for them. Knowing your audience again, it's just, really critical and having that, account base mindset from, the start to all the way through the sales cycle, whether it's a pipe progression play, and then all the way through towards, the end when you're, working on upsells.

Just makes the entire line of business just smoother and better and just a better experience for everybody. 

Priyanka: Absolutely. And I think it doesn't have to be even that complex. I think I remember a time where we we were like still earlier than how early we are at practice and we were.

So there was a customer who was dropping off the funnel after the css, after the customer success was involved. They were they did not move after the trial or something. And so what we did is they came through a particular post of a particular yeah. Colleague of mine. And we asked the kli who's actually a marketing person.

To reach out to him via email and then call him and call the customer. And he was like, yeah, I did not find this useful. If you can give me this, I'll definitely rethink my decision. And I think this is also a great example of ABM, right? The success and then sales getting involved in the marketing, getting involved.

It isn't as complex, like you don't need like tools or. 500 other things to do it if you're like at the at your early stage. I'll ask one last question and happy to take question questions from the audience after that. Do type in your questions in the comment box. We'll take it up.

Greg actually posted last week that he loves his job so much. And I don't know from where did that come from? And I actually got to know that on the post itself. So I had to ask him that how do you end up in this and why is marketing your passion and what do you suggest to people who are in this and actually enjoy the process?

Greg: Yeah. Yeah. One of the things that I always think about, I've been in marketing for 15, plus years. And that's where I went to undergrad and grad school for, and so I have, this background. Outside of my professional life, I always really like being, creative, whether it's.

I, make music or whether it's, I used to play a lot around with like clay and I have little like clay things that I'll like, I'll sculpt and stuff like that. And so having that, creativity outside of my professional life has really fueled, where my passion.

Lies in the workplace. And so how that kind of translates. I know some of you are like, how does clay have anything to do with abm? I'll get there it's more around, you know with abm you can be so Creative with whether you're you know coming up with a new tactic for a campaign your post this morning was perfect to run that by with bernie and like thinking about all the abm tactics that you want to You know, You want to start?

But being able to just look at an account coming up with a strategy that might war that you know, might work and then experimenting allows me personally to, express that creativity through. A variety of different ways. And it's having that outlet that I think, I'm lucky enough to be able to translate, that creativity into what I do every day.

That makes me, really excited about, getting into some of these things. And then even outside of that, like the specific tactic front, when you start thinking about creative ways that you can potentially, you know, automate processes or, enhance the sales experience to come across as that, value added partner.

I get so excited when I like think about a new workflow that I could create that would automate, Some intent data signals that could fire off to a rep like I get super pumped about that because I'm like, this is going to provide so much value. I nerd out around this stuff, right?

And so it's, it all comes back to, my, passion just to be, creative and finding creative ways to, solve solutions or coming up with new ideas. And when you're working with a bunch of these accounts, you really need that creativity to really fuel a lot of this stuff. And when I, always try to, say, and think about, with my team or, with whoever in marketing, it's let's, Whatever ideas you have, let's talk about them and try them.

I don't care how outlandish they might sound let's do it. I have a, we have a crazy one really. That's coming up. I don't want to talk about it cause I don't want to give it away, but it's, it is, I'm so excited about this one, but maybe in two months I'll tell you about it. But it's amazing.

And it was an idea that was almost, it was fueled by our BDR team. And what happened was the BDR team came up with this idea presented it to to marketing ourselves. And we were like, I was kicking myself. I was like, how did I not think about this? This is freaking brilliant.

And so we're taking that, we're running with it. And the whole idea around, having in this particular case, having that buy in from, or having that, even that. That that dialogue with your BDR team or your sales team, we're taking their ideas and putting them into action, maybe with some additional spin, but then they, are more vested in the outcome because they're like, wow, this idea, is out there.

We're trying it. Let's see how it works. And by the way, you guys created this, and so it's really cool. And so it's finding those like creative levers that really Fuel my passion, for ABM. 

Priyanka: That's great. That, that, that's really nice to hear. And yeah oh, by the way, if anybody's running out of memes, always check out to Bernie and you'll never run out of me.

They're like so many, and I've been using that same template since I don't know, three years now.

Yeah, it's so good. It's so good. Yeah that's another way how you can incorporate memes 

Greg: into marketing. And on the topic of memes, and then I'll, sorry, I have to say this real quick. Some of the best sellers that I've interacted with that try to sell me on products, I've had full, fully fledged conversations via email that were done all through memes.

Somebody is trying to sell me on something, right? And it was his name is Sean from lead the pipeline. We've had conversations around. Like topics and we just get it done through memes and it's wild. And when you incorporate that level of like humor and things like that into your own sales, motions or things like that, it just makes the whole experience for both parties, more fun and more, creative.

Take risks. That's what we try to do every day and whether it's on the marketing or sales side or, whether I'm, trying to. Get our BDRs to experiment with something new. And yeah. 

Priyanka: Yeah, I think, again, I sometimes think memes add more value than normal texty stuff.

So I just on Monday, I think I just posted a meme with I'll automate all my sales and marketing workflows and with a guy in the gym just struggling through. I don't know what is that set up and that, that gets 50, 000 impressions. While me writing nerdy post about marketing sales and all of that, they are like at some 2, 000, 3, 000, but something like that just blows up.

People love memes and it is always 

Greg: funny. Yeah. Exactly. It's comes back to the old saying, right? Like a picture, it's a thousand words. And yeah, that was a really funny one too, by the way. And because it resonates, right? It resonates with so many people and so many people can relate to it.

And it's just in a funny way, so it's, 

Priyanka: yeah. Yeah, I think everybody should follow this handle, memes. xls on Twitter. Amazing memes and so relatable. And then also check out Barbie and Oppenheimer memes. That's also like amazing stuff. I love how creative people are. But yeah, I think we have some time to take up questions.

Sri has two questions. He asks that how do you classify intent? And then source them 

Greg: so okay, so we classify. We have 1st and 3rd party intent that we really use. And 1st party intent. We, are obviously for people that don't know, are, signals that are essentially direct actions that.

A company or a person takes with your business. So they could be, website visits or they could be, form submissions things around that nature. And so we classify those as like first party intent. And again for when I'm talking to sales, I am never going to say, Oh, this is first party intent, or this is third party intent, right?

That we don't, that's a, you don't want to get too technical. But that's first party intent and how we use that. And then. Third party intent. What we do is we look at a lot of different signals that are firing across across the web, whether people are, trending or surging around specific topics.

And so we have tools in our tech stack that can say, Oh, this person is trending around topic X or this person is spiking around this competitor. And so when we see those third party kind of intense signals, we, combine them with the first party intent.

Thank you. And then we kind of package, package it up and send it to sales and they can take the best of both worlds and say, okay, this person has come to our website around this specific product, and they're also spiking around this competitor. I'm going to mash those two up and come up with a really good, sequence or, call to, or, outbound message that incorporates the two of them and then based on the targeting and you know that we have set up in our back end chances are whoever they target are going to be the ones that are, surging and spiking around intent because, we all know, like third party intent, it's really hard, it's more directional data than a person data.

So it's, you're, you have a general sense of, what's happening in an account. But chances are if they're spiking around a topic and, and a competitor or a company is, chances are the persona you're going after is going to be, one of the people that, are doing that is doing that research.

Priyanka: Got it. Got it. Yeah. Cool. Next question is from Yogesh where he asks, how do you allocate your budget between one to one, one to few, and one to many? 

Greg: So this is yeah, really interesting. Another hour talking about this. So when I was first introduced to account based marketing a while ago that, those were like the traditional staples of ABM, right?

It's either you're doing one to one, you're doing one to few, or you're doing one to many. We don't have, I can't give you, unfortunately you guys just specific ratio between the breakdown because. This changes a lot and the reason why it changes is because we're so interconnected with sales that we want to be able to have the flexibility to get a one to one campaign up and running within, a day if we see a certain action being taken that, is Maybe they're in a stage three, opportunity and we really want to help them get across the line.

I'm going to allocate dollars towards, a one to one campaign towards that company to help sales to generate it. And so having that ability to be fluid and to really change at the drop of a hat, to really be agile Is really what makes your team really really worthwhile.

And so if you come across and come into this thinking, okay, I need to dedicate, 20 percent to, one to one, 60 percent one to few and et cetera, you might get. Stuck in, in, in a ratio that you don't like in a month. And so I think that should be very fluid in terms of how you are looking at it and how you should be going about your own budget and spending.

And a lot of it should also be like in, what a sales thing, because, as marketers, we have great, intent data. We have great, ways to, think about, all right, what accounts we should be going after. I don't think we should be the only ones that are selecting this.

But I also think sales should not be the only one selecting the accounts. And so when you get that kind of marriage of the two departments, you'll notice that fluidity, it just becomes even more so apparent. 

Priyanka: Got it. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a great answer. Cool. Moving on to the next question we have Jeremy asking, how do you deanonymize those who watch demos?

Okay, is this for the demo 

Greg: interactive demo directed towards you? And I'm curious about this as well. 

Priyanka: One. So what we do it. So at factors we ourselves identify accounts that have engaged on our website. We have partnered with six cents for it. Yeah that's the way how we do it.

Generally we know what accounts come to our website. We also get data from LinkedIn. We also get data from G to, Okay. Intent data. And then we also have our analytics engine to do all of those stuff. So specifically for those interactive demos the product tour page, which is on our website the accounts which come via obviously.

Get that inside factors itself. Again, we only identify accounts and not people. Yeah, that, that's how we do it. And we can also see the scroll time, the scroll percentage, the the time spent on the page. And we also go and look at it through heatmaps, right? Either through Microsoft Clarity or Hotjar, where I see how the person has behaved on the screen and and then we also see if they are so the data that we have in Factors and the heatmaps data, if they are like in sync, and that's how we figure out that.

Yeah, this person has gone through the entire demo, but answering your question like without all this entire story is that we identify accounts through factors itself on the product page. Yeah, that's 

Greg: one of the things too. That's great. That'll add to some of the the whole issue around, how to anonymize certain things.

And there's, there's a lot of tools out there. Like factors that help you with that. But one of the things that also is really important. If you don't have those tools and you're starting out, you can still look at directional data around an account. Because that directional data, even if you don't know who it is.

If you're targeted in your marketing from day one and you're targeting the personas that you want to, the chances are you're going to be interacting or you're going to be pulling in those people that, are most likely the ones that you want. And whether you know the exact person or not, you're still getting really good directional data that you can then action upon.

Priyanka: Yeah, that's that. Yeah, that's a great advice for like smaller startups. And if you don't have that sort of resource with you, yeah, I think last question is again from she if there are more question, we can take one or two more. But for now, this is the last question. So does intent data make sense for early stage startups, like less than 1 million or 1 million revenue?

Greg: Yeah, I would say Absolutely. And it really depends on what kind of platform or what kind of budget that you have from the marketing department. You can get, tools like six cents. We have demand base. You can get some of the, like the big power powerhouse tools. But if you're looking for, other different creative ways, AmazonJobs.

com. A lot of different options that you can, look at intent data. So I've worked with Bambora for years, love love everybody over at Bambora and they have a great free free trial or free ongoing trial that you can, set up your key accounts, your key topics, and they'll send you an an email every week with, it's like a teaser, but it's still really good data around, I think it's 10 accounts that you get.

And if you take advantage of some of these kind of like free options that are out there, you can still take that data and leverage it directly into your sales team. So even though that we still have demand based and leverage, that the intent from demand based, I'm, I still use Bombora on their, on the free trial side.

And yesterday I shot over I think three RSMs. Some of the stuff I was seeing on Bambora on that email subscription, and that's really great free intent data that is coming out. And the more kind of creative ways that you can leverage some of the things that are in market that are, that are free that you can take advantage of, even at a larger company are still going to be, worthwhile because I'm always.

I always have the mindset of, more data, the better, right? And the more that I can triangulate anything, it's just going to make that experience, even, more optimal. 

Priyanka: Got it. Got it. Understood. Yeah. I think that makes sense. And if you're a smaller form from looking for a budget in 10 data platform, I'm going to pitch factors live.

The sales person in me will never die.

I think it was a great conversation, Greg. Thanks for joining. And we thought we landed in 40 minutes max. It's going to be almost an hour. Yeah. And thanks for all the questions. It was great. It was a really engaging session. We can talk about it all day long, but for now, thanks for joining in and hope to see you guys, see you later sometime again in another life when you come up with your creative idea for that.

Greg: Well, Priyanka, thanks so much for having me. This has been great. And I love talking about this stuff. And if anybody has any, questions or want to just talk about best practices or have really cool ideas that you want to bounce off me there feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.

Priyanka: Cool. I think we can sign off now. Bye. Bye everyone. See you on the next LinkedIn live. Thanks.