Jenny Coupe: Personalization for ABM

Sourabh:
Hey everyone. Thank you for joining me. If you've been to one of our Leads Pipeline sessions before with experts like Jenny, Koop, then there are no intros. We respect your time, we respect your time. We're going to go straight into our first question, but I'm a big fan, so I have to say, Hey, Jenny, how are you?

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Jenny:
Hey there, great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

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Sourabh:
Oh my gosh. I mean, your resume. Wow. Talk about a dream list of roles, and especially for today's topic, right? ABM and the really hard part, personalization for ABM. How do we get personal because we sell B-to-B products that are really complex, right?

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Jenny:
Mm-hmm.

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Sourabh:
Okay, so first question before we get into campaigns content is if we could just back up data Jenny, what kind of data do we need if we're running personalized campaigns to our ABM targets?

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Jenny:
Yeah, I think the real magic of ABM is kind of when you intersect those key fit and intent data to actually deliver the most relevant message to your prospect. And so I think by starting with that, it helps you understand the right message at the right time, depending on, again, where they are in their journey. That's going to be really important. We'll talk about that, but I think without understanding what's happening to your buyer throughout that journey, it's really difficult to be able to deliver the right message in the most relevant way.

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Sourabh:
So I'm going to take this to an enterprise level digression for just a minute. Not everybody that's joining us today sells to enterprise some of huge success in mid-size. But on the enterprise side, when we talk about fit, we've got a little bit of a complication. We've got our core products, we've got our core focus, but we've got overlap. The same buyer, the same buyers could be buying more than one product. So do we lead with what's most important to the company? Do we lead what's best for the customer? How have you seen this work in your own experience?

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Jenny:
Yeah, yeah. I like to adopt this acronym fire, which stands for fit, intent, recency, and engagement. And so this is really what culminates into what you would consider to be an ideal customer profile. So fit is just one piece of it. Obviously you've got to start there. If you don't have a fit, then you might be dead in the water, but obviously need is going to be paramount. There's no need. Then you can have the best sort of tool in your toolbox, but you're not going to go anywhere. And so understanding how your customers fit into this sort of paradigm is really important.

And I think you can easily do that by looking at your existing customers to understand, Hey, who's buying our product? And how do you reverse engineer that to say, Hey, it looks like people are buying our product that are coming from this industry with this kind of profile. They tend to look at these web pages, they tend to download this type of content, they tend to engage in this way, and you can obviously look at that on your website, but you can also look at that off your site. And so understanding, again, the visibility there, and that's all driven by data, that's going to help you really target your messaging in a way that allows you to again be most relevant.

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Sourabh:
I love this. And before I know we promised we'll talk about ABM specifically. I have one more question. I'm going to sneak in because we got it and I think it's a good one. If you could step back for a moment and then the rest of our questions will all be about ABN audience, please get your questions in. This goes really fast, 25 minutes will be over. So intent data, Jenny, it's evolved tremendously over the last 10, 15 years, and now unfortunately it's become a bit of a buzzword, which I think is unfortunate because it's really useful. How do you think about the use of intent data for ABM campaigns when you've got these accounts that we really can't afford to lose?

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Jenny:
‍Yeah, I think when you think about account-based marketing, you want to think about that differently than your classic lead-based marketing. And so intent data is going to be more of a sort of contact-based information, whereas when it comes to intent data for ABM, you're going to want to look at that across the account. And what you're going to find is you're going to have to look at things both what I call bottoms up and top down. And so what you might find, for example, is that how you're messaging to the user is very different than how you're messaging to the buyer, and therefore the intent of their engagement will be different.

And so you can use things like, I'll just throw out one that we're using now called G2, which is a great platform for looking at intent data because again, what you'll find is that that's going to vary depending on where they are in their buyer's journey. And so their intent may be early in their buyer's journey, it's going to be all about understanding awareness. Who are you? Do you even have anything that I care about that can solve my pain points? But if you look at intent data, maybe later in the buying journey, that's more about where they're maybe evaluating you against somebody else and they're looking at things like customer case studies or other data that will allow you to understand, hey, their intent now based upon what they're doing is they are ready to make a decision and they're now evaluating actively who they want to choose.

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Sourabh:
And I mean, this is just the perfect segue, thank you. Right? Because I know most of what we're doing and even what you're working on is SaaS and it's SaaS marketing, and it's so much easier to buy theoretically because you're still buying for your group, for your company, there's so many other approvals before a product actually starts getting used and you invoice your first invoice to that customer. So I'm going to just take that right into our ABM questions if that's okay?

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Jenny:
Yeah, sounds good.

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Sourabh:
So the first one I'd like to take on here is it's sort of a hybrid question. How do we use intent data to customize content across various channels to the same buyer?

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Jenny:
‍Yeah, I think, couple examples would be depending on the type of business you have. So for example, an active campaign, most of our customers start using a trial. And within that trial experience, we are serving up different calls to action. We are serving up different types of content. And so we're constantly understanding within that trial experience what they care about and what problems they're trying to solve. And based upon that, we have automation that actually helps us tailor that to what they're doing within the product. And so that's important in terms of understanding ultimately what they're trying to do.

Also within the product itself, you can use tools like Pendo, which tell you, Hey, within the product it looks like this particular person that's either a customer or in a trial experience is trying to click on certain things or do certain things. And in some cases, they can do those things. You can track that. You can automate or trigger something that allows you to understand maybe what they're trying to solve for. But you can also do clever things like you can gray out certain things that maybe aren't available but still track the intent. If they try to go take certain actions that may not be something they can do today, you can still understand again what they're trying to do. And that's all culminating into what is their ultimate intent.

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Sourabh:
I love it. I'm going to make this one question even harder. You can take it, right?

Yeah. So yeah, exactly. Let's go into the dark area. Everyone talks about dark social, but that's just one channel. When you're selling something, even once you've opened up the trial, the client stepped in, but you might have a business that's heavy on managed service. So even if they can try it, they're not going to have much success or ROI until they really start using it with your team.

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Jenny:
Yup.

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Sourabh:
So as you're working through that deal, I mean we're purely in sales land in this question as we're working through that deal, there's not that much of a barrier in ABM between marketing and sales. I mean, sales enablement is a good part of what we do in ABM, right? Yeah. Should marketing be creating all of the content or co-creating all of the content through the SDR, the BDR, the AE, the sales engineer? Or is there a point where it's like, yo, we only have so many people, the rest of this is sales. What has worked best in your experience?

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Jenny:
Yeah, again, I'll give you my typical lawyer answer that it depends. However, my experience tells me that when ABM has done well, marketing is the tip of the spear, but that also means that you are aligned with sales out of the gate on what it means from everything from an ideal customer profile to what is the sort of intention by stage for that evolution of that deal. And so for example, I would say that the most successful experiences I've had is where you're actually sitting at the table with sales and saying, Hey, if we are targeting X number of accounts through ABM with these programs, each track if you will, the way we look at this with active campaign is we look at use cases, everything boils down to a dozen use cases. And so within those use cases, you should look at those use cases at the top of the funnel, which is going to be marketing lit all the way through to your pipeline stages and ultimately your deal.

And so what you'd want to make sure is that if you're talking about how awesome apples are with campaign A, everything that's happening throughout that funnel fits both marketing-led all the way into your sales stages are consistent with apples are red, and here's why that's important to you. And so I would argue that you do want to get hand in hand with them on what does that content look like by stage? In fact, I've even gotten as prescriptive with sales in the past, but we are literally saying if something is in stage one or stage two or stage three and it's coming through this source, this source or this source, this is what you want to say. And these are the pieces of content that you want to deliver, and this is your next key CTA that you should offer.

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Sourabh:
And I think that's a key differentiator, especially as buyers ourselves, you experience this, everyone on this webinar experienced this and I experienced it where when we don't get that, when someone's trying to sell us an enterprise level tool, in this case for us for marketing, and it's not personalized and it's not down a certain track and use cases irrelevant. I mean you really have two options. Well, I guess you have three if you're really polite. The first is unsubscribe, however I do that, please stop. The second is ignore. You just let them do it, but you hope they just teeter out. And then the third is what like I said, is you actually just let them know, I have no interest whatsoever. You need to stop emailing me. So I bring this up because when you're working hand in hand, when we have a sales representative working the deal and getting into multiple buyers and building those relationships, it's not like we switch the marketing off. Respect them.

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Jenny:
And the third leg of that stool to your point is every good CRM is going to identify that particular person. Hey, is this a buyer? Is this a decision maker? Is this an influencer? And if you're not triangulating that along with the stage and the content and aligning that with some intent, the intent of a buyer is very different than the intent of maybe an influencer, for example. And if you don't understand that, then you're going to have a very irrelevant conversation and you're not going to be able to really map that throughout the entire pipeline and throughout the actual deal cycle.

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Sourabh:
And how to do that is longer than our entire webinar today. Because I mean, it takes years of experience and hopefully training people have mentors like you, they can accelerate, but having that level of, and really being human about it isn't something we can cover in 10 minutes. But I thought there was one thing we could cover that's a little bit, and I know you're going to say depends, but what I'm listening for after that form factors, what types of content have you seen succeed when you're personalizing in ABM? Because you can't personalize everything.

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Jenny:
Yeah. I think again, it's important to make sure that as you think about the difference between your buyers and your influencers and your decision makers, that that conversation is going to look different and it should look different. And that's different in language. That's different in where they're coming from, that's different in the type of content that they care about. You're probably not going to get a buyer in some cases that maybe is the guy that's actually going to use the product. Some cases you might, but probably not. And so I think if you take a broad stroke to this, there's going to be certain content generally that's going to just make more sense for the top of the funnel, which is going to be more around awareness and things like reach. There's going to be content, for example, like eBooks and sort of how-to guides and product updates and maybe just introductory emails that are potentially going to be sort of broadly applicable to most of these folks.

But as you start to move down the funnel, that's when again, if you look at the funnel, that's when you're going to start to think about, hey, now where this person is, they're maybe in the evaluation stage. And so by looking at that next stage of the funnel, you're going to want to start to think about this differently. And again, you're going to not just want to think about it differently by the funnel standard. You're going to want to think about it differently by the profile of the person. And again, leveraging intent data will help you understand what this looks like. And so for example, from an evaluation perspective, you're going to start to introduce things like benchmark reports or free tools.

We have something called recipes that really allow people to get the power of the product without even owning the product yet. So you can actually go into our product and build out things and pressure test this and really understand, would this thing actually work for my business? So you're going to want to understand at that evaluation stage, how do you give them tools and content that help them really sort of pressure test your product?

And then that final stage conversion, this is where they're deciding, they're deciding, Hey, can you actually do what I need and are you better than the competitor? And so that's when you're going to look at things like customer case studies, pricing pages, product information. We take very strategic approach with our pricing because we understand that when we're selling maybe our light product, which is our entry-level product, that buyer's very different than the buyer that's going to come in that might look at our pro plan or our enterprise plan, and therefore they're going to expect different things. They are going to have different pain points, and they're going to care about different parts of what's going to matter to their business.

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‍Sourabh:
Right, and if we think about it really, really tactically, the actual order of priority switches as the use case grows, right? Like you said, the light product, the lower end prices is normally right there along with best fit, but as you start to move up, price starts to drop down because it's irrelevant if you don't have other things that are working for me. And if you do, the ROI on this tool is going to justify price, right?

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Jenny:
Exactly.

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Sourabh:
And so how does that affect messaging as the priority is changing?

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Jenny:
Well, it actually should affect how you market in general. And so your marketing strategy for somebody that may be coming in, it may be that lower entry point who may possibly go in and just decide they wanted to self-serve and purchase. That approach should be different. And how you market to them should be very different. And how you think about marketing to maybe a larger deal or more of an account-based approach, because again, what you're selling and the value of what you're selling is going to be different.

And so I think if you're not sort of taking a step back at the table with sales and saying, Hey, we've probably got, in our case with active campaign, we probably have two revenue streams, the folks that are going to come in and we want to nurture them, but in a very different way than maybe how we might approach more of our pro or enterprise customers. Because again, in these cases it might be one or two people, probably one person that's making that decision. But as you move up the chain, as you know, there's going to be multiple people that are involved. You're going to have folks that have already done a ton of research, they're probably ready to make their decision, and there's probably eight to 10 people in the room that all have a different pain point and a different goal. And so by understanding that, I think that's should dictate how you market and how you go to market.

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Sourabh:
And you just touched on a really, really key differentiator. I'm just going to repeat it because I think you do this all the time. It might seem easy to you, but the difference between inbound market motion and inbound leads where like you said, it's led by the decision makers, they're coming to us or a designate of the decision maker, someone doing research for them versus ABM, which is entirely in outbound motion and entirely, we are hunting. We are going after you and all the buyers in your buying committee to help you understand you've got to get this product because we need you as a customer. So when inbound, you get a lot of rich intent data through their own journey. When we're doing outbound, when we've got sometimes more than a single salesperson working on social channels, working obviously by email and trying to get as much friendly warm touches to move that use case understanding along faster, right?

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Jenny:
Yep.

Sourabh:
What data does sales have that we could leverage in marketing beyond just what we see across the website and stuff?

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Jenny:
Yeah, I mean obviously you can still track all of your customers regardless of what they're doing, but we obviously market to those folks and try to understand where they are with their business. So for example, it's very common for somebody to come in and then either grow their contact list throughout their company growing their business, or perhaps they are looking for additional functionality that you can't get unless you move to the next tier.

And so by understanding where they are and understanding maybe what that next step is for them, we automate a lot of outbound campaigns and emails that help us understand when they're starting to hit that point. And so we will message to them the value of looking at maybe that next tier or the value of things you can do if you expand your contact size for example. And by doing that and understanding, we're tracking all this, we're tracking where they are. Perhaps for example, if a self-serve customer gets 10,000 contacts he can market to, we can see that they're at, oh, they're at 9,800 today. They're starting to hit that ceiling. We probably want to make sure we're all partnering with sales to make sure that they are ready and able and available to actually offer maybe some kind of incentive to increase their scope of their contract or move up to that next tier.

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Sourabh:
And I mean, high performers, you don't have to worry as much. That's how they make their quota quarter after quarter. They have this down to a science, they're hitting that tier. They're really open to anything I can do to save them money as they move into the next one. So I'm actually the good guy right now. So I think it's a good point of marketing should be right there getting the similar trigger of like, well, what could we provide that'll smoothen that transition and maybe even upsell cross-sell, right? Other things.

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Jenny:
Absolutely. On my team, we actually have somebody that runs that. So marketing is actually responsible for a lot of the upsell. We are the tip of the spear there. We are working hand-in-hand with sales and customer success to understand when is the right time to actually re-engage to make sure that we're not doing it too soon or too late.

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Sourabh:
Perfect. Now I'm going, I'm going to switch gears here in just the last five minutes and I know it goes fast, right? So a lot of our enterprise deals, we cannot buy ourselves convince the buyer that they should buy our product. They are a seasoned validated buyer. That's why they have this role. They need a lot of third-party validation. And so we have developed with notable brands and notable names and research institutes, we've developed that content. My question is around personalization. When the content, the value of it is that someone else has certified the ROI or the use case. And so it's real. How do we personalize other people's content that we're using in our journeys?

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Jenny:
Yeah, I mean, we are big fans of leveraging our customers as our voice. And so we have a strong community and we also just have 180,000 customers. And so by understanding how to segment your customer base to understand maybe where you particular groups of customers are, you've got to kind of create these pools of profiles, for lack of better word, so that as you think about, Hey, it looks like that these folks like to buy apples and these folks like to buy oranges. And so by going in and building out a customer profile, and this really starts with kind of reverse engineering your customer base, then that's really the foundation for the personalization. It's the pain point. And by understanding how that triangulates with the particular profile, again, the buyer, the influencer, the decision maker, you should be able to track this throughout your CRM or throughout your marketing automation.

And your website should be also doing the science behind this, whether it's understanding what they're doing while they're on your site, but more importantly retargeting them so that you understand what they're doing off your site. I think by doing that, you can start to get what I call the entire customer journey touch points. And then you can understand, hey, it looks like when this happens and this happens, it results in this.

And so I've got a big mantra where if you don't understand some of the attribution elements, it's very common to get caught into this sort of causation versus correlation. So a lot of marketers come in and go, Hey, it looks like when this happens, this happens. Okay, is that just because that's correlated with that or is that actually causing that? And unless you sort of understand that, you're going to potentially have a lot of false positives on, Hey, it looks like we should actually go after these guys doing this and this is happening. Well, maybe not. And so if you're not sort of understanding the data behind it and the correlation versus the causation, you're going to probably swing and miss.

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Sourabh:
Yeah, and I think just one thing add to... In our own experience that we've seen with some of the most successful clients we're working with is, and I think it's something that it's understated, is cohort analysis is just being able to take cohorts of like, well, these people started around the same time. If this is true, then I should see... And you really start to see, no, that's not the case. The people that ended up buying were doing things differently, but not in the order that I was assuming and cohort analysis who can't do it. But I think as a demand gen marketer, it's one of the things that we keep coming back to is what are your cohorts doing and how are they performing?

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Jenny:
And as a marketer, you should expect to know what that is, and the business should expect you to understand that that is the value you should be bringing to the conversation. Where do we start to shine the light? And that leads back to again, having this data and particularly intent data around again, what is actually going on behind the curtain. And that's really your job as a marketer. It was more of an art 10 years ago, but it's really a science now. And if you're not data-driven in how you're approaching these conversations, you're probably going to be wrong.

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Sourabh:
Yeah, no, absolutely. So in the interest of time, I'm going to combine these two questions and it'll make it harder, but let's try. Okay.

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Jenny:
All right.

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Sourabh:
So Use case, you started with use case, let's end with use case, right? So powerful, the pain point, the loss that's generated from that pain point that is dictating their use case for our solution. Now, every buyer and their use case is in a vertical. That's one angle or perspective from which we can start to personalize, but every buyer is also a job rule. They also have an internal function. Yes. I know there's not a clean answer, but which do you think is more important? The buyer type in their org or the vertical that the use case is in?

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Jenny:
Again, it will depend a little on your business. Let me give you an example that might be helpful. So in most cases you'll find that there's enough shared space or shared data between the profile and the market. And so for example, we know at ActiveCampaign that folks that are in the e-commerce vertical tend to have X title and tend to have certain integrations on their site that are trying to solve the pain points that we can help them with. And so I think you'll find that when you do pick a vertical or conversely you do pick a profile or title, you're going to start to see some patterns and the patterns will give you that directional guidance on where to start. It won't be a hundred percent, but my advice is just put a stake in the ground and start.

And so again, if you look at what we did is we know we have a lot of e-commerce customers, so we have three or four different use cases that are focused on e-commerce that do consider different profiles, particularly maybe also the buyer versus the influencer. But we also look at things, for example, who are their key partners. And so for ActiveCampaign, the partners that they use on their website to run their business, particularly for e-commerce, are a critical data point for us to understand what they're trying to do and the problems they're trying to solve. So hey, are they running Zendesk on their site? Hey, do they have maybe Shopify because selling something. So think about your business and what that kind of key data point is that you want to triangulate with because it's probably industry profile and something else. And that's something else will be very unique to your particular market.

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Sourabh:
I love this. I love this. I mean, it just comes to mind right now of one of the hardest buyers people to tackle and so much VC money has chased this, the HR buyer and just the stark difference between the HR buyer at a tech company and the HR buyer at a medical company

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Jenny:
Could be the same.

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Sourabh:
Exactly. Could be the same person [inaudible 00:27:01] their career because great at HR, but totally different. I'll just use the word workspace to what you said, the space in which she's operating to implement her technology, her policies, the risk she needs to minimize in those two very different verticals. Jenny, we could go on, but we can't. We committed to 25 minutes. I'll circle back with questions we couldn't get to, and I think we're going to have to bring you back or at least some of this wisdom.

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Jenny:
Sounds good.

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Sourabh:
That's it. Any closing thoughts for those of us that are personalizing right now, our RABM campaigns, anything you're expecting to see change going into next year?

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Jenny:
I think my first piece of advice, again, would just be to start, because you'll find that where you start is not going to be where you end up. And as this evolves, you'll know that what got you here won't get you there. And so don't assume that you're going to have a strategy that's just going to sort be a set and forget kind of thing. It's not going to happen. And so it's really important to kind of iterate this as you go. And just know that out of the gate you're going to have some misses.

And then second to that, I would say don't expect to come in and bring some sort of playbook that maybe you brought in before, because although there's lessons learned there that are valuable, it's very unlikely that you're just going to be directly transferable to what you're trying to do in your new role at your new business. But I can't stress enough the power of data, everything in my career, at least in the last 10 or 15 years, that is your competitive edge. A strong marketing, operational foundation, strong tech stack, and really understanding how to use data to drive those decisions and to create more relevant marketing.

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Sourabh:
I love it. That is the future. Jenny. You nailed it. So here we are getting real with Jenny Koop, thank you for joining us. We will bring her back when we can, but we'll also get these clips out in the coming weeks. Thank you so much, Jenny.

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Jenny:
Thank you for having me. Have a great day.

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Sourabh:
Bye.

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Jenny:
‍Bye-bye.