Kristina Jaramillo: Winning Deals with 1-to-1 ABM Engagement

Sourabh:
I'm going to give everybody just a few seconds to roll in here, Kristina, and for those of you who don't know her, that's your fault. You should absolutely know her. She is an expert in this field. Thank you. This is Kristina Jaramillo joining us today from Personal ABM, and I'm going to get started in just a second. Kristina, I'm going to just give people a minute, well, not a minute, but a few seconds to roll in here. How has your short week been?

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Kristina:
My short week has been very interesting. My kids were off the extra day on Tuesday because they had a teacher workday, so it was interesting.

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Sourabh:
Yes, yes. It has been a very long short week, I'll put it that way.

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Kristina:
Long short week. It's only Thursday.

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Sourabh:
Exactly. Awesome. So I'm going to roll in and I'll remind folks to ask their questions because this goes really, really fast. But let's start with, obviously, in some cases billion-dollar question. ABM has been around for a while and there's a lot of practices and platforms which we'll get into around one-to-many. Some teams have evolved to one-to-few. But Kristina, you're here today to discuss something that most of us are not familiar with. What is one-to-one ABM?

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Kristina:
So one-to-one is really about getting accounts to revenue. It's how are we going to target named accounts, not accounts that fit an ICP or look like this or have certain criteria. It's their named accounts. We know that they are either going through some kind of transformation or they have strategic priorities where our solution or our products or our suite of products can fit into that strategic priority and move them forward. It's personally relevant to that account, not just their persona, not just their industry, not just generic pain points. It's what's happening in that account, what do they care about most and what do their team members care about most to get to their strategic goals as an organization.

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Sourabh:
Now you realize you don't sound like a marketer at all when you're saying this. You sound like a sales expert. That sounds like selling!

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Kristina:
Yeah, I mean, the simplest way to put it is one-to-one is really marketing for selling conversations, so it's marketing for sales. It's very specific. So a lot of sales teams will come to marketing and say, "We're having trouble with X company. We need help." And a lot of companies are not fortunate enough to have that kind of one-on-one help or one-on-one support. And it's really scary because it takes a lot of resources and time and you have to be very focused and strategic about it. So that's where we come in to help people with that one-to-one.

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Sourabh:
Okay. So I get it, and I obviously appreciate it. I've been involved in very large deals throughout my career. But before we go into those details, let's step back for a moment. What isn't working for the one-to-few and the one-to-many and many of the folks attending today have large channel sales organizations or partner marketing organizations. They have funnel focused individuals that are just looking at each stage. Can you share some examples of what wasn't working when clients came to you that they started to apply this one-to-one approach?

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Kristina:
Yeah, let's talk about one-to-one... Well, let's just back it up. Sorry. Let's talk about something, a recent conversation I had. I spoke with a cybersecurity company, I spoke to them last week. They were moving from a transactional sale to more strategic enterprise sale. So this involved a lot of change management internally, but they really were looking or doing this for the goal of increasing their ACV to more than a 100K. And when I talked to them about their ABM program, they discussed that they were targeting better, which is kind of a very generic way of saying it. They were defining their ICP, but accounts were still going dark. And when I took a little deeper dive and further into that conversation, I learned that they're doing product led campaigns. So it's basically they were doing the same thing before, but they're taking ABM or account-based approaches to it.

So the marketing conversation, the sales conversation still not aligned, which is key to ABM, especially one-to-one, they were basically retrofitting their ABM on top of their existing process instead of really changing those go-to market motions, those interactions and experiences that are delivered by sales, marketing, customer, anyone who's in touch with customer or prospects. They needed to change that process instead of trying to retrofit it. That's why it's not working. I actually have another example. I spoke to a CMO of a channel sales and marketing firm, and I asked them about their ABM program and they started rattling off technologies they were using, in their case Sixth Sense. They were like, "Oh, we're even a case study for Sixth Sense." That, "We're getting such great results." But then I dug a little deeper, I peeled back a little layers and I asked more about that program and she said that they were consistently winning deals at 75K and below, but once anything got bigger than that, they were consistently losing to their competitor.

In their case, it was Salesforce. So really what it showed me is they weren't teaching for differentiation and showing competitor-specific gaps and the impacts that those gaps could have on account specific strategic objectives. So where are there gaps in their competitors? Where were there gaps in Salesforce? They were impacting the accounts that were at the 75K or bigger deals. So not just retrofitting ABM in top of your existing program. ABM deals to me, really should be at least 2X higher than non-ABM deals, maybe ones that are just doing demand gen. So those are some quick examples of how people are getting it wrong.

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Sourabh:
Okay. Let me triple-down on that. Okay, not just double-down. There's two different things I need to clarify here. So first of all, amen, right? Our six figure and seven figure deals are a special category. And as you know and I know ,and many of the folks in the audience, especially those with sales experience, not just marketing, when you land a six figure account, within six months you should be landing their competitors. Within 18 months, you should be landing the top 10 in that entire category because there are only so many large customers in a certain field. And once you've won one, it's a chain reaction.

So it leads to significant, significant revenue expansion when you land these larger accounts. So that's the first thing I'm going to ask is you just talked about something that most of us have zero experience with, which is alignment on deals and deal progression outside of sales and marketing. You talked about customer success, onboarding, the product team. Kristina, most of us don't have enough alignment between sales and marketing. We're still working on that. How do you get resources from other teams for these strategic deals? How are your clients doing that?

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Kristina:
They are already on board with account-based. They're just figuring out how they need to best do it. And when people work with us, we typically like to work with the customers they already have, the ones that are their best fit. They're getting the best results, they're the best financial fit for the company, so the lowest cost to serve on top of that. And we figure out what's working for them. If there's a way to expand, if there's a way to retain and get into different organizations because we already know what's working with them, but we now can make it personally relevant to them. So we do typically work with customer success teams or people that work side by side with them.

I know it's hard to do. If you're not getting traction with the sales side, you might want to try a customer success. They're always going to want help for retention and expansion, especially since everyone now is asking or being asked to do more with less. So it's a hard alignment, but if you're not getting help with sales or you're not getting alignment with sales, try customer success if your organization has that. And usually the bigger organizations do because they are a little bit more open, I've seen in the past.

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Sourabh:
And how exactly are you getting that champion? Do they cherry-pick people that have already worked on prior deals or working with the ideal customers or do they have to go find somebody and then they identify them for you?

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Kristina:
Oh, that are within their customer success team?

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Sourabh:
Mm-hmm.

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Kristina:
It's usually leadership, like a leadership to... So whoever's overseeing marketing and goes to whoever's overseeing customer success to see if there is that leadership or strategic alignment, that's where it has to happen. Because if it happens just with maybe one or two CS managers, it might not be a success. You might get a pilot and maybe that's it, but you really need leadership to be on board. You have to speak their language. So if the person, head of marketing or VP of marketing CMO, is going to go over to the customer success leadership and not speak their language, then it's going to be harder to get alignment and get people to cooperate and get people to kind of, “Let's try this account”. And try it with a few set of accounts so we know that maybe, “These top 10 accounts bring us the most revenue.

Let's try a couple of them that we know maybe are at risk or really there's great potential for expansion and let's try a pilot program with them”. So whoever those are responsible for those accounts on the CS team kind of bring them in. But it's all about if you can get that alignment at senior level, then it's going to work. It's very hard to do it otherwise. I've seen it done where it's done with lower level people and kind of build a business or use case for it, but it's a top down approach. If leadership's not on board, it could be challenging.

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Sourabh:
But I mean at the same time, our customer lifetime value here is potentially half a million plus. It is entirely worth it if leadership is on board, like you said, if you are already invested in ABM. Now I said I'd triple down. I'm going to come back to the second part of what you mentioned and I'll come back to platforms brcause we already have a question around that. We always have questions around technology, but let's come back to that, right?

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Kristina:
Yeah.

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Sourabh:
When we're talking about these larger deals, it seems like this is most effective and it would be the biggest payoff, is for larger deals. Two things about larger deals, I really would like some clarity on please, for our audience. One, these are going to take longer, so we do need some help understanding how do you keep that momentum, how do you keep the buyers and the sellers engaged on these longer deals. Secondarily, this isn't five people on a buying committee situation, there's going to be dozens of people involved. How do you track that? How do you create content for that? Two parts there.

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Kristina:
Yeah, I mean, content specific for the organization is key. You have to make sure that you're getting engagement with not just champions but actual decision makers. And you have to make sure that there's contents for specific people within the account. So obviously a champion's going to have different KPIs than the person who's actually saying yes to that deal and making the final decision. So you should have content and messaging specifically for that business leader. What's important to them in their role, what's important to them as, it's typically a C-level or VP or SVP, and then what's important to the people that will be using the solution? So not only do you have to have relevant content for the organization, but what's relevant to the individual. So stop thinking about them as a persona. Stop thinking them as they fit into a target category. What is going on internally that's going to affect them and how can your solution give them results, help them be better at it and create content around that. And I know you asked the second part, but what was the second part? I'm sorry.

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Sourabh:
No, that's perfect. The second part is around duration, right? These take longer. So how do you keep the momentum?

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Kristina:
Well, once you get that momentum, you have to keep fostering it. It's like any relationship, you have to keep fostering it. So let's say you get in with a champion. You have to get as much information from them so that you can create content and you can get messaging to know what's really important to senior leadership. So when I, for example, working with clients, I'll listen to those sales calls and a salesperson might say, “They really like this”, or “They really agreed with me”, or they weren't... “Everything went well”. And then I'll listen it from a marketing standpoint and I'll say, “You didn't get that ‘Aha!”, you're not as engaged as you think we are”. Let's try to get them more engaged. Let's show them exactly what we're talking about, whether that's in a case study or an article or even a webinar that's specifically for them, but let's get some content that's relevant for them so that it can get that “Aha!”. And it has to continually be done and it has to be multiple touches. It's not going to just be once every three weeks we're going to check in with them.

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Sourabh:
Now, I assume when we're talking about content for larger deals like this and multiple buyers, right? Again, we're talking dozens of people involved because it's a six figure deal. And for the buying company, making the wrong decision isn't about how much they're paying you, it's disastrous. Because if it doesn't work with you, they've lost a year and they've got to back out and find something. It's just the worst possible case. So I'm assuming when you talk about content for these deals, we're talking not just content, but also experiences like events or multiple meetings, even off-sites, but actually ways to connect the individuals so that to your point, we can gauge where the deal's really at.

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Kristina:
Yes, absolutely. I even do it for our own business. When we're meeting with an account, I'll create an executive brief for leadership that I know that I'm meeting with based on what I've learned from the champion of, “What's important to them? What they're going to be hung up on? Where's their focus going?” And then we will send them that executive brief prior to the call and then a couple of days, meet around that brief, see if there's any questions concerning of where our solution plays into what we know about them, where there might be some clarification. And it's almost like we're learning about what's going on with them. That way, we can better support the conversation and the sales relationship, whether that's a webinar that we create, again, just for them, a case study that we create just for them, an article that shows examples that they might've not gotten a clarity around when we were speaking with them in a meeting.

So it all depends on who you're talking to. So you might create an article for a manager or actually have a meeting with the C-suite over lunch and learn about what's going on and how you can fit into them. Or maybe they're going to a conference that you're going to and you want to make sure that they see something specific that will help them and be of interest to them. So this is cultivating a relationship. And again, over six months, 12 months, sometimes even two years depending on the solution and how long that contract could be.

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Sourabh:
Love it. So I'm going to go back now to the platform question. It's not my favorite question, but we get them all the time. But I'm going to lead into it. You've been talking a lot about this multi-pronged approach towards winning the account and all the folks involved in the decision, and that's a ton of qualitative data. But for the higher ups who are looking at this every quarter, and every month, where's our money being spent, right? Where's the revenue, right? I know it's a massive account, but where's the revenue? What's the quantitative measure of progress on deals like this? Is there scoring of leads and a deal or how do you know?

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Kristina:
So I think it depends what your focus is. Before we start ABM programs with people that either have maybe just ABM light or they don't know where to start, we kind of figure out. We go back and say, "Where's the red in the business? Are you guys losing deals to your competitors? Are you churning too many clients? Are deals getting stuck in the pipeline? What is the problem that we want to fix? Where's that red in the revenue, red in the business that we want to fix?" And then go back to there. So it's obviously going to have different KPIs and different measurements. So if we're having an issue with longer than usual sales cycles for whatever reason, we got to figure out, well, where are they stalling? We have to actually examine these deals. Why are they taking too long? Are they getting stuck at the three-month mark? Are they getting stuck once they hit decision makers because,, oh, maybe we're not actually aligned with the decision makers and that's why they kind of lose the attention and the engagement.

We really have to figure out what's really important. And I like ABM tech, don't get me wrong, but unless you have your one-to-one nailed down, scaling it with ABM tech for one-to-few and one-to-many, you're basically just scaling what you're already doing. And if there's already broken parts in the process you're scaling, it just may be a little bit targeted. So when I tell anyone, well, we work with anyone, technology is usually the last piece of the puzzle, and it's for scaling one-to-few and one-to-many. I mean, you can do one-to-one with tech, it's just not going to be as successful and it's not going to generate the ROI that you're really looking for. I mean, these tech platforms, they're not exactly cheap. And you need to have someone that's an expert on them and knows how to run them. So that's another thing to take into consideration.

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Sourabh:
Plus these deals of these size are won on trust, not speeds and feeds and colors and-

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Kristina:
Campaigns and,  yeah.

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Sourabh:
They're won on trust, won on relationships. Like you said, I tried to hold this question off till the end. I have one more after this, but let's take the question. I mean, it's somebody who asked, right? So to achieve “one-to-one”, they have it in quotes, can I implement a platform like Demandbase?

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Kristina:
If you were to ask me, I would say no. Because one-to-one is not just a targeted landing page or a targeted campaign. It's really how are we going to, as a team, win that account. And if you're just putting the one-to-one in Demandbase, then it's automatically just a marketing play. You didn't get any insights from sales necessarily. You didn't get any insights from customer success. You don't know what's really important. Did you do the account intelligence in order to do the one-to-one? And if your deal sizes are not at that six-figure to seven-figure mark, then maybe you can do one-to-one. I don't know because I don't work with people that have smaller deals. So I would say no. I'm sure people that work with Demandbase or Sixth Sense would say absolutely yes, but I have yet to see it done successfully. And I'd be willing or open to someone changing my mind if they have a really great example or something.

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Sourabh:
Do you have any customer examples that started on Demandbase and then they sort of progressed or solved at least part of the problem? You must, you must have customers-

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Kristina:
I do. We worked with an organization that was selling conversational AI and they were actually using Demandbase, and this goes for other platforms as well. And they were able to build their pipeline, which is what these tools do. But when they came to us, they were challenged with accounts going dark. And we really dug deep and figured out what was going on and we realized that there was limited alignment with the accounts they were going after. They were specifically going after Tier One banks, so Wells Fargo, Chase, Bank of America. So those are the people they were trying to win. But the content and messaging was really only talking to industries and personas versus really speaking to the specific count, the specific buyers and their strategic priorities, gaps, and impacts. So banks might, on the surface, all look and sound the same, but they all have different strategies and goals for the next couple of years.

And their go-to market team lack the relevance. It lacks the content and messaging as it wasn't resonating with the account-specific story, and they were stuck in that state of indecision because they feared where they should go, that they had intent, but they didn't know where they were going with it. Our client wasn't creating an environment and an experience where the buyers were uncomfortable in their current state, but also comfortable in making a decision. They were basically pushing out content to them and pushing out information based on their persona, but they weren't selling and marketing change. They didn't really show future customers, existing customers that they were missing something. So that content and the messaging was speaking to something they already knew versus what should really be keeping them up at night. So they, in particular, asked us to work on an account, Bank of America, and we looked that they were gaining traction with them.

They got them in the funnel. For whatever reason, they went dark. What we noticed is that they were sharing content on the use of AI in conversation, so for their call centers. And Bank of America was already on board. They had a huge IT team that internally developed, integrated, and created their own AI for virtual assistance program. It was named Erica after America, I'm assuming, and they had hundreds of AI patents. So they were on board with AI long ago. So the awareness and generic consideration content that they were sharing and the messaging around that wasn't really going to move them forward, but that's what they were delivering. So we changed the content to focus on where the bank was, understand where Bank of America's strategic vision was, where their product roadmap was for Erica, the desire of those eight different lines of business that Bank of America had and the impact that our client could have on the solution.

So one of the key things was why that bank should outsource versus taking the time and the resources and to have their team internally rebuild or make changes when our client's solution could kind of overlay onto what they already had. And this was only found out by deep account research because this deal was worth at least $500K. We really needed to go in and do that research, see where they were, see where gaps were. And prior to working with us, our client wasn't leveraging those insights because they didn't take the time to do the research. So they needed to really have that “Why change” conversation to create that buying vision and align with the key accounts strategic vision. So they could go from an account going dark to closing $500K-plus deals and down the line, even be more.

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Sourabh:
Yeah, exactly. Because to your point, most of us and especially experienced sales leaders and experienced marketers at leading brands, we nail value. We can establish value, we can establish credibility in a heartbeat. The trick, to your point for strategic accounts, for strategic deals that take 12 or 18 months is urgency, is how are we tapping into a problem they're actually struggling with that they can't solve in the next six to nine months that's actually scaring them. And to that point, you've got to know thy customer, you've got to have that one-on-one knowledge. I love that example, Kristina. It's such a good summary of everything you do. And I only have time for one more question and this is going to be it. So, like you, from Q4 last year through today, I was just in a meeting yesterday about this, there's been a huge shift to the clients that we work with, like you guys had massive tech brands, everybody is looking at upsell, cross sell.

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Kristina:
Yeah.

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Sourabh:
Yes, there's still white space and there's still please get me net new accounts, but there's so much budget that's been moved into, “Here are my existing customers. They are not buying what I need them to buy. What do I do? How do I get this right?” So that is going to be the focus in 2024. I know last year we talked a lot about pipeline acceleration. This year it's about pipeline protection. I just don't want my deals to die. I want my deals to get all the way through. So how is one-to-one used with existing clients not winning a new deal, but you already have a client, maybe you've had them for years. Any examples you can think of effectively using one-to-one to build an existing customer?

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Kristina:
I do. This is one of my favorite examples because of how the company was positioned. It was RGL Logistics. They were a logistics company that had a tech services and they protected their biggest account, well, one of their biggest accounts. They had about 40% of revenue from this one account. It was Procter & Gamble. And they were at risk of losing it to their competitor, which had a much bigger footprint in the area in the industry. RGL was like a regional Wisconsin-based logistics, and they were going to lose their... Procter & Gamble came to them and said, "You're at risk of losing us to Ryder because we want to have everything under one provider." And at that time they had some under RGL and some under Ryder. So RGL was an example of a must-keep accounts because of that 40% of revenue coming from that one account and how we must grow that account to... We were expanding alignment with sales, marketing, and customer success to focus on that complete experience.

They had already had P&G on their list of accounts to grow, but the current discussions that they were having were only at the director level, and they were basically just talking about activities completed, general benefits, and not about the gaps that they filled in the business and how those gaps impacted across the organization. How were those gaps that were filled, how were they impacted in operations and finance employees, customers, P&L, all across the board. And because they were not having the right customer conversations and supported by case studies and messaging, and prove that unique value gain and not showing them where opportunities were to grow, they were not driving that top-to-bottom engagement. They were still stuck at that director level and they were having a hard time getting access to those VPs and the CXO. And they actually knew from internal, I guess relationships that the C-suite at Ryder was actually at the clients a lot.

So they had their ear to the ground, they knew what was going on, and it's not something that our client did. So they knew that there was a closer relationship. So how could we develop that? And they had this client for a while, so they had three years of having the wrong conversations with Proctor & Gamble, which would cost how they got to here, that they might lose to a lower cost national competitor that was larger. So they needed really to change the sales and marketing conversation to save the account and actually expand the account. And they took a different approach. A lot of companies will do customer acquisition conversations and customer retention conversations as just basically past-tense and current instead of having a totally different conversation. But they needed to show where their value was, the reason that they're the safest choice, where there were gaps in their competitor.

And to overcome that relationship gap with that much larger competitor because they knew that they were more tightly aligned with them and they needed to involve sales to take that personal approach to marketing. So they needed to look across the touch points, it was marketing that was talking to them, their customer success teams that were talking to them, or even the operators seeing where they could increase their relevance. And one of the places that we did that was with their SVPs of Sales and Marketing at RGL. A lot of people have this, and it's something that hasn't changed in a couple of years. Their LinkedIn profile looks like a resume versus talking to where you fill gaps for clients, where you fill gaps for your customers. So we used it as a Sales and Marketing tool. So we showed how Procter & Gamble was under-leveraging their warehouse and their distribution and how those costs could hinder their growth.

We showed client stories that were relevant to Procter & Gamble and how they were segmenting their warehouse and distribution and it was slowing inventory turns and putting shipments at risk, which is all going to affect finance. So what we did is we moved away from that traditional conversation. We even created a case study specifically for them and had a conversation that was shown, or case study, was around what was important to them and for them at the time was on time and full because a lot of suppliers. If they don't do that correctly, then they get fined from their vendors. So that was something that was important to them and the numbers were helpful, but they weren't enough to sway the customer on that emotional level. We really needed to remind them what life was like before working with our client RGL and what it could be in the future.

And so we created different content pieces. Other than that case study, we created an article to ensure that that relationship was more broadly made and it was designed for that sale, for that account. And it basically mapped out the conversations that they were going to have once they met them in person or in meetings in general. And we needed really to influence all these touch points to protect that account. And thankfully they went on to protect that account and they were awarded even more business without having to go to RFP or even to a bid process. And then they were in conversations to expand that contract further across Green Bay, Wisconsin, and other Procter & Gamble sites in the Midwest. So it's all about changing that conversation into value achieved, room for growth, and how that value achieved impacted the company as a whole as opposed to maybe just the one little area.

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Sourabh:
I love it. I love it. And turning yourself into that strategic partner instead of that transactional vendor, right? And like you said, shifting that risk perception away from what's wrong with what I have now. Did you know how bad it is out there and starting from scratch, the nightmare. I love it. I wish we could keep going, but we are actually over. We're out of time, Kristina, so I will see if we can bring you back. But this has been phenomenal. And thank you everyone for joining us. I know I couldn't get to all the questions, but I kind of told folks that upfront. So look for the On-Demand so that you can dive back into these examples when we send it out and we'll see you all at the next one. Thank you again, Kristina.

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Kristina:
Thank you.

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Sourabh:
Take care everyone. Bye.

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