B2BMX this year was a bit different for me compared to years past. Folloze hosted a speaking session with two of our marquee customers for conference attendees to learn from, and I was given the opportunity to help moderate. We had Carrie Feord — ServiceNow’s Global Head of ABM, Industry Clusters — and Désirée Daniels — Google Cloud’s Global ABM Lead — join us on stage and asked them to share the nuts and bolts of how their teams think about building and delivering “this was built for me” experiences to their target accounts.
As the moderator, I spent over three hours with Carrie and Désirée before the conference to understand the similarities and differences between their ABM programs, all before we put pen to paper to prepare our presentation. Isn’t it crazy that in 2022 ABM is still evolving and we’re still collectively learning from each other on how to execute even better?
In that spirit, here are 5 new things Carrie and Désirée taught me about ABM through the course of our conversations:
Cluster By Industry, Message Against Imperatives
This first takeaway really blew my mind. When Carrie mentioned imperative-based messaging for the first time, I was intrigued. But before I could say a single thing, Désirée jumped in excitedly to echo Carrie’s sentiment and share that Google Cloud took the exact same approach to messaging for target accounts as well. Seeing an unplanned coincidence happen in real life like this was life slapping me in the face and telling me to pay attention.
On stage, Carrie elaborated by saying, “This is what helps distinguish and dispel some of the confusion around ABM. People think if you put a logo on a piece and send it to that account, that’s account-based messaging. But if it’s still all about your product and solution, then it’s not. In my opinion.”
She went on to explain that with imperative-based messaging, “You’re speaking to that account in their words. You’re saying I understand what you need to get done. Here’s how I can help you do that.”
So what is imperative-based messaging? To borrow Carrie’s words, imperative-based messaging is how you answer the question of “what does my account need to get done in 12-18 months and how can we help them get there?” Still don’t get it? Let’s walk through an example that Désirée shared to make sense of how this is different from industry-based messaging.
Let’s say I have a cluster of accounts from the Retail industry. One of the initiatives I’ve identified is digital transformation. However, when I look at my Retail accounts, some are legacy brick-and-mortar, and some have already made the switch to ecommerce and direct to consumer (D2C). For the Retail accounts that are more mature in their digital transformation, well-personalized messaging should reflect this and focus on what else cloud computing can do for their business. But for the legacy Retail accounts that are far less mature, effective messaging in this case should look more like introductory content and make the case for digital transformation initiatives in the first place.
There’s More To Life Than Scale
Both Carrie and Désirée see their ABM teams as a source of marketing innovation, and oftentimes the best ABM ideas eventually spread to other non-ABM teams internally and become a part of a company’s best overall marketing ideas. When I asked Carrie to elaborate more on this, she shared, “Some of the best content and programs — what we feed to the broader ServiceNow marketing org — often comes from 1:1 accounts. Like Folloze, for example.” Interestingly, Carrie didn’t just see the best ideas coming from the ABM team overall, but more specifically from the 1:1 teams and accounts. When it comes to new ideas, ServiceNow clearly takes “how well does it scale” almost entirely out of the equation.
And this mirrors what a lot of the most successful ABM programs do. For whatever reason, the best ABMers I’ve worked with seem to follow this thought process:
- Does it work?
- How do we scale this?
Meanwhile, all the more traditional, non-account-based teams — especially the very lead-focused Demand Gen teams — seem to follow the opposite thought process instead:
- Does it scale?
- How do we make it work?
The point here is simple. How many great ideas died before being tested simply because there wasn’t an obvious answer to “how to scale” on day 1? The answer, according to Carrie and Désirée at least, seems to be “more than any of us is really willing to admit.”
But When You Do Scale, The Right Technology Makes All The Difference
Strange to see the first technology-related takeaway at third on the list? A lot of that is probably because Carrie, Désirée, and I were pretty well aligned on this single point: strategy comes before technology. Or at least, that’s how it should be.
But for every ABM program out there evolving the right way, there comes a point where technology can really make the difference between good and great. Once you’ve figured out what works, and I mean really, and you’ve gotten to a point of producing fairly repeated success, it’s time to use technology to build a much more efficient machine. As Carrie put it, “If you do want to scale, tools are the way you’re going to do that.” And she quickly followed that up by saying, “Folloze is one of the biggest tools to help us scale.” Let’s unpack what she means, and use the Folloze platform as an example.
According to Désirée, the ABM team at Google Cloud “evaluated a bunch of tools, but Folloze felt like it was built for ABM. With Folloze, the amount of customization we needed could become entirely self-service.” Why was her team looking at tools in the first place? They had learned through trial and error that 1:1 experiences, in the form of web pages and emails, were necessary to break through the noise for her Retail accounts. Unfortunately for her, she also felt “the amount of customization we needed for every touch was way too cumbersome and not scalable for us to do in Marketing Automation.”
Carrie mirrored that sentiment, saying, “Marketing Automation is not the right tool for very specific messaging. Everything we do in Folloze, we map back to Marketing Automation anyways.” After all, imagine trying to use Marketo to write 48 different emails and 20 different landing pages, all so that you could begin engaging an audience that numbers no more than 200 people. Seems pretty silly, right?
In either case, both Carrie and Désirée took the time to understand what worked in the first place. Only then did they begin exploring technologies that would help them scale the programs that were already succeeding.
Success In ABM Will Feel Serendipitous
One thing that became very apparent to me in speaking with Carrie and Désirée is that success in ABM will often feel serendipitous. Attribution software can’t measure everything, and when ABM is done right, it often feels like everything is just… smoother.
Case in point, Carrie shared a story of how the ServiceNow team opened an opportunity with a key stakeholder in the U.S. military. Her team had published and shared a whitepaper on SAPR (Sexual Assault Prevention & Response) using the customized webpages they’d built to share content with different branches of the Department of Defense. Although the SAPR document wasn’t specific to any one branch of the military, it was considered relevant to some of the known initiatives within Carrie’s target PubSec segments.
At roughly the same time, ServiceNow’s Government Relations team reached out to an Undersecretary within the Armed Forces who happened to review the SAPR whitepaper on one of those custom-built web pages. When ServiceNow approached them for a meeting, they specifically requested to learn more about SAPR and how ServiceNow could help.
The “aha!” moment in Carrie’s story is clear, and it shows that ABM within a larger organization is often far more cross-functional than any outsiders may realize. The work that Carrie’s team did seeded the idea that ServiceNow was well-aligned to the SAPR initiative within the DoD and created a pathway for a completely different sales team internally to start a new thread within a key target account.
Success in ABM may not always be easy, but it’s always fairly simple at the end of the day if you’re doing it right. Your ABM journey should be littered with eurekas and aha moments just like these.
To Our Buyers, It’s All 1:1
This final takeaway was a good gut-check for me to remember that at the end of the day, ABM’s mandate is to be far more buyer-centric than marketing programs of the past. And to that end, it was interesting to hear both Carrie and Désirée share the importance of creating bespoke 1:1 destinations for their target accounts at some point in the buyer’s journey. And don’t forget, these are two ABM leaders who are primarily focused on 1:few clustering and segmentation.
In Désirée’s own experience, clustering wasn’t enough. As she put it, “It wasn’t until we fine-tuned our program and delivered a more bespoke experience to these accounts that we saw real results.” This reminded me that the ultimate benchmark of ABM done right is when our buyers feel that the experiences they’re being given feel “built for them.” Even if everything happening under the hood occurs in segments and clusters and involves debates between the merits of 1:many versus 1:1, what we eventually show to our buyers should feel personalized in the sense that it speaks to them the way they need to be spoken to. According to their problems and pain points and translated into the “language” they speak in their day to day.
B2BMX this year was fun — shaking hands again after two years, drinking too many cups of hotel-provided coffee, dusting off my favorite sports coat — and I’m glad I went. But my personal highlight was working with Carrie and Désirée. It’s pretty crazy how much I learned just from listening to the two of them talk to each other. You’d be hard pressed to find more effective ABMers than these two, and if you’re learning anything from me, you’re really learning it from them.
If the two of you are reading this, thanks one last time. I had a blast working with the two of y’all. To everyone else following along, stay tuned for the full recording from our team in the next few days!