Mason Cosby: Designing ABM Campaigns for Champion-Driven B2B Sales

Sourabh:
Hey, Mason, I'm just gonna give people a few seconds to file in here. They come in pretty quickly. It's only 25 minutes. It goes really, really fast.

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Mason:
Awesome.

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Sourabh:
All right. As we do get everyone else joining us, thankyou for being here. You guys know Lead2Pipeline. If there's one thing we do well, it's work quick. So we will not be doing intros. If you don't know who Mason, you shouldn't be here, right? Everyone knows this guy. I am so, so grateful you're taking time to do this. I will obviously mention, you guys are doing fantastic at Gravity Global, and you're doing fantastic work there. Please check him out. But Mason, if you are ready, I'd like to jump in with the first question.

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Mason:
‍Let's do it.

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Sourabh:
Alright, so our title today is sort of, you know, obvious. ABM deals are gonna be driven by a champion, right? But as you've seen, as we've seen in the past two/three years, that buying committee has grown, not just geographically. You're talking stakeholders around the world, right? Regional budgets, right, and vertical budgets, right? But it's gotten very complex with decision makers who have no expertise in the product or decision they have to make, but that's their job. So, let's start right there with: What data in your day-to-day experience, right, what data has been most helpful in designing these almost one-to-one customized ABM campaigns?

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Mason:
So from a data perspective, it's looking exactly at close lost of our best fit customers and saying, “Why did we lose it?” And when we look at it, our data, what we're seeing often is there is a throughline across the same kinds of clients within the same buying committee structure where we're losing. And it's standardly for us, at least within the finance team, or it's within the legal team. So it is... We are, as an ABM partner, we're trying to get into your CRM and do marketing within your CRM. There's a lot of customer data in there. So again, it's thinking through, “How do we actually create content that speaks directly to our legal teams and to our finance teams to give them the confidence that we're not gonna steal their data”. That we're not going to do anything that couldn't even remotely come back to on them from an investor perspective, from an executive stakeholder perspective.

Or if their customers were to find out, “Oh, we're partnering with an agency that's in our database and they've got access to your data”. Again, just making sure that we've got the appropriate content that actually speaks to those things. So again, looking at your closed loss and then developing content around the reasons you're losing business so you can provide that as not only sales enablement, but also as we talk about champion driven deals, creating buyer enablement. Because realistically, I've yet to actually speak to anybody in legal. I very rarely actually get to get to legal, but our buyer is speaking to their legal team. So how do we give buyer enablement content so that they can go speak to their legal team on our behalf?

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Sourabh:
So I'm gonna piggyback right off of that, right? To be honest, we don't need to talk much about content marketing because I can't tell you right? But the names that are on this webinar are content marketing experts themselves. At the top hundred tech brands, they're our clients, right? Solet's go beyond content to context and positioning. How exactly are you positioning this buyer enablement with the champion or champions? Are you doing it sort of as an assumptive nurture, like you're gonna need this, or “Hey, this will help solve the problem, wink wink, your finance team needs this?” Or is it more direct, right? What your finance team needs.

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Mason:
‍So, the answer is yes. It is highly dependent on the individual client. So again, from the perspective of sitting in a marketing role, the goal is to develop that content not only just to give the appropriate information, but also standardly in the ways in which people will consume it. So, for example, I don't the last time I actually read a blog, just to be very blunt. Blogs are great, they're super helpful, but maybe that's a starting point where you write the blog and then you repurpose that blog into a short video that you kind of keep as a standard. Or even better: you actually give your sales team a script that they then create a personalized video for every person's legal team. Now, when we talk about champion driven deals, in my own experience, we've had a number of clients in which the champion is so bought into us working with them

because we've done such a good job on the front end of educating that champion that they're actually coming to us and saying, “Here's the people in the buying committee, here are their objections. Do you have things that can address this? If not, how do we solve for these things?” So again, if we think about the idea of, “How do we get a champion so on board that they are actually telling us the answers to give so we can overcome the objections before they've ever been made”, then you can be really proactive. If you end up getting to a point where, for example, you get into a deal and its in the contract stage and you haven't heard anything, you just hear it's stuck with legal, then be more proactive and say, “Hey, I hear it stuck with legal. These are some standard things that we're hearing from clients like you when we are talking with their legal team. So I wanted to provide some context and some content. If these are hurdles that are coming up, here's some answers. If there's something else, can you let me know? And we'd love to help support you as you're trying to get this across the line”.

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Sourabh:
‍Love it. So let's double down, right? I, I think we're already at level three. I love how quickly you can do this, Mason, and I really do appreciate this and so does everybody listening. Get your questions in folks! I already have five we went into and we're still just unpacking the first one. We're gonna run out of time, but that happens. I will follow up with you with questions we don't answer. We can answer them, you know, next week via LinkedIn. Is that all right?

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Mason:
Sounds Perfect.

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Sourabh:
Okay. So I'm gonna go further into what you just said there, right? We, as a demand gen service, right, with very large tech clients, we have to train BDR and SDR teams ourselves, right? We're often brought in to help with that is please, “Do not call the customer and say, ‘Hey, I saw you downloaded our white paper‘. Don't do that”. A complete turnoff, not just for the BDR but for the brand, right? So one thing you mentioned there that I think is really important for marketing leaders this year is you help develop the script. And oftentimes with the kind of account managers we deal with, right, and seven figures is their regular income, right? They don't want a script. They want the talking points and they want the numbers, right? How do you guys develop those scripts? Is it in talking to your best salespeople or is it in talking to customers or someone else?

Mason:
Yeah. I hate to constantly give the standard consulting answer, but the answer is yes. So if you have good salespeople that are honest with themselves and are actually tied in with the customer, then salespeople will be a good resource. But the reality is, and I say this from the perspective that is also somebody that has sat in a sales seat. I am worried about the next two weeks. I am worried about, “My pipeline is here and I need it to close”. So, again, salespeople are always realistically in a day-to-day, week-to-week mindset. So again, they're gonna tell you, “Oh, the reason we're losing all these deals is because of...”, typically they're gonna then tell you the last objection that they heard. And that's not a fault to them. That's just their mindset. That's where they have to live.

So there is this balance here of ensuring that when we talk with our sales team, that they are the kind of sales team that can think bigger picture. That can think objectively. That may actually take a second before answering and saying, “You know, that's a good question. Lemme go lookback at my existing data and my past deals to understand why are we losing these deals?’ “And then how do we develop that content?’ So that's one. The other thing is... I think every marketer says this idea, “Talk to the customer”. Actually, please do talk to your customers. The things that will never get talked about enough for sales and marketing alignment and then marketing, actually talking to the customer. So again, do actually talk to the customer. The other thing that I think is interesting is... I'm really big on talking about closed lost.

So maybe try to actually set up a conversation and incentivize those people that did turn you down, that are not your customers and had the opportunity to become your customers, to understand, “Why did they leave?” So again, from this perspective, we're talking with sales, we're talking with our existing customer base, we're talking with those that weren't our customers. And if you wanna take that really a step further, talk with the customer success managers that are over your best clients, that have been with you for decades to understand, “Why are these people here?” “Why have they stuck around for so long?”, so that you can actually get, again, not just the immediate sale, because realistically, if we look at our sales reps, they're buying for one reason, they're staying for another. So understanding the two differences— because we need them to buy, but we also want them to stay. So then how do we make sure that from the onset they're actually being educated on the reasons that they would inevitably want to stay long term?

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Sourabh:
I love it. And thank you for giving the props as due to the customer success teams. That's where recurring revenue is killing it for brands, especially this year because in these uncertain times, people lean towards surety, they lean to the brand. They lean to the one where the customers look happy, even if it costs more, right? You don't get fired by making that choice, right? I love this. Talking about attributing, right, success. How have you seen attribution work best? Because there's all these stages that the deal's gonna go through. Our latest poll shocked us that people are expecting their deals to be four to six months delayed this year. Four to six months! That's gonna go into 2024, right? How are you looking at attribution for each stage where you're supplying your sales and buying facing team with this content? Where do you need to invest more or less?

Mason:
‍So...

There are three areas in which marketing should touch. Itis pipeline acquisition, it is pipeline acceleration, and it is customer expansion. So look at your existing business. And again, I think very practically. So from the perspective of, “Where's the biggest gap?” So if we look at this, I've heard this analogy of, you want to create a marketing engine that functions like a factory in which you're putting in the right inputs that inevitably turn into the right outputs. But let's say we're building a car and we keep putting in tires and all of our tires pop immediately. That's the clear problem. So stop fixing the hood, fix the tires. So again, looking at where's the breakdown in our overall process from pipeline acquisition into acceleration, into expansion, and focus there. Focus your attention there. So taking that back into specific deal stages, again, we wanna understand what's the time that's spent in each deal stage so we can have an expectation around, “Okay, this is taking longer”, and understand why is it... Everybody's seeming to get laid off and there's a perception that times are really, really hard. And to be real,

they are difficult. But again, there's also a narrative that's being portrayed that only amplifies the effects of it being a difficult time. If that's the case, then how do we create content that actually showcases and speaks to the benefits that are in our current, potential recession. Sot hat's one thing. The other thing is, as we look at a pipeline, also looking at who's in the pipeline to understand, “Is the pipeline taking longer because we brought in the wrong people in the first place that are not actually the best fit customer, that don't have the problem that we solve exactly”. And they're good customers, but they're just not the best. If that's the case, go get better customers. Put those in the pipeline. And then finally, if we're starting to see customers are not expanding, we're bringing in good fits, we're bringing in best fits. They're closing quickly. You've got that side down. Focus on retention and focus on expansion. And understand how do we then say, “Look, we've been able to support you in all of these ways. Here are addition always that we can support you”. Because realistically they already trust you to some extent. People are more likely to spend money with those that they're already spending money with. So don't make it more difficult. Go after those that are already spending money with you.

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Sourabh:
Oh my gosh. So, I have to reiterate this because I think it's just really powerful for marketers at every level right now. Your company didn't get to eight or nine figures or 10 right figures, right, without committing to the best product ever. As a marketer, what you just heard Mason say is, your job is to get the best customer ever. And if you're not getting that, stop and do what it takes to get them. I love this. I'm going to ask a related question to this and then, and I'll switch gears for a moment.

We're seeing, and the attitude has changed, but not quickly enough. We're seeing an artificial mindset around the number of buyers that are hypothetically involved in a deal. And to us the number seems very, very low because we sell too. We're growing, you're growing. There's a lot more people that our salespeople are talking to than the number of leads, right? Middle/bottom-of-funnel that a client may be buying. What do you think has changed and how should marketers be thinking about the number of people in a buying committee, especially when the buying cycle's longer?

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Mason:
So I wanna make sure I understand this question correctly. What we're seeing is that sales reps are speaking to more people than are actively in the CRM. So it looks like we're generating like two leads, but they're talking to like 20. Got it. I would say two specific things come to my mind. One would be budgets are getting tighter. So again, realistically we've seen a, a pretty significant portion of time in which there was this growth a tall cost mindset, and money was pretty cheap. So money can fly a lot faster and looser. And now, what we're seeing is that's no longer the case. Interest rates are going up. People are not able to get as much VC or PE money as they previously were. And again, that's why we're seeing so many layoffs. That's why we're seeing so many companies that are actually, you know, we're about to start seeing a lot more pivot like we did in the midst of covid.

So realistically, because budgets are tighter, there's more people that are vying for that budget. So to some extent we're seeing more people come in because they want one of two things. They wanna understand, “What does this mean for me? And can I buy this instead of buying something else that I'm already looking at?” Two, we're saying, “This taking away from my budget. I want to shut this down so I can go get the thing that I want”. So again, you've got two new— maybe not new, but two heightened perspectives of, again, really focusing in on, “I need to do more with less technology. So can this technology accomplish what I was trying to do with this other technology? ”Or, “I don't like this for whatever reason. I'm gonna try to shut this down”.

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Sourabh:
Yeah. If you've ever worked at or worked with a blue chip tech stock, right? It's the classic ads versus events conversation. Totally different. Why are you even comparing them? But it's because they report to exactly the same person. To your point, no one is gonna be quiet right now because their job is on the line. I love it. Thank you, Mason, and thank you for being so real about it. Now, let's switch gears and talk about data, right? You talked about closed lost, right? Please, please help us move up the funnel a little bit. Okay? What data is really helpful in the middle and the very tricky part of the funnel where, let's be honest, nobody knows exactly what's happening.

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Mason:
So I measure off of... I wanna be clear of. I measure off of when I'm reporting into our executive team, specifically SAT meetings with ICP Feds, because realistically, and I make this joke all the time. Hypothetically, my CMO and my CRO and my CEO wanna know that people are engaging with our content, but don't really care. If a meeting's not being had, it doesn't matter. Now, we all know as marketers, those metrics are important. We need to see target account engagement. That's really our leading metric from an account-based perspective is, “Are the accounts engaging?” But again, as we're talking about, “How do we potentially buy for more budget, how do we prove value to the executive team?” If there's not a meeting and that doesn't end up turning into closed one revenue down the road, or at least have... I'll actually give you a prime example.

From a sales perspective, we had deals that took way longer at the end of last year, that I'm still trying to close right now. But again, we had so many positive signals, we had so much communication around those deals that even though they didn't turn into closed one yet, our executive team understands what's happening. Whereas it's more difficult to talk about, “I got this many likes on a post”. And again, we know those things are important. Specifically, if you're taking an account-based approach to your actual LinkedIn profile, that those engagements, those comments are important. But I'm never gonna report that into an executive suite. So more up-funnel, it would be target account engagement and when we talk about engagement, my recommendation is work on specifically building out an engagement model within your existing CRM and marketing automation platform that can actually track—

and again, there's this balance here of, “We don't wanna just recreate a lead scoring model and say, ‘Oh, it's an account scoring model‘, but we want to create something in which we can track and showcase. The accounts are actually on our website. They are engaging, they're starting to have conversations we can see‘“. And again, not only see first party engagement data, but also third party intent data to then give a comprehensive account score so that... Let's say it's the beginning of the year and our pipeline is light and our SDRs don't know who to go after. If we can provide an account score and showcase, “Hey, these accounts, they've been looking at our website for the past three months, they've got a ton of third party intent. If you were to go outbound, these would be the best accounts to go outbound to”.

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Sourabh:
That is the story of Q4. That is the story of Q1 for almost every client we're working with. Right? Where are the most touches? I don't care if it's an additional qualification, just show me the most touches because my SDR, my BDR team needs focus. So I'm allowed to ask one non-ABM question. So I'll come back to it before we end here. We're almost done. And I will circle back to the ones we didn't get to. I apologize to everybody. The 25minutes, your time is important. Go sell, right? Listen to us later. So the one non-ABM question is your zero party data, right, and your direct feedback from customers. Like you said, if you're a director and above and you're not talking to customers, demote yourself. Just go get a job as a senior manager.

Run campaigns, right? It's fine. If you're a director above, you should be talking to customers, right? So your zero party data is giving you your ABM mindset framework coverage. But your first and third party data is able to give you what we call inbound intent search, right? This was not planned. We were not expecting them, but like a meteor, they are coming towards us. And anybody who's been in B2B marketing for at least three years knows they're either buying from you, they you're top competitor, right? Or throwing up their hands and saying, “Nope, there really is no budget. Forget it”. But you're gonna miss that window. How do you balance when you're so focused on your ABM program? And maybe the answer Mason is, “I don't, you know, Jenny does that”. But how do you balance when there is someone who maybe should have been in a cohort that isn't and they're coming at us when all of our focus is on these top 100,000, 10,000 clients.

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Mason:
Yeah, that's a great question. So I'm gonna ask real quick. In this example, have they already raised their hand and come inbound? Or are they just kind of actively on the website still kind of searching around?

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Sourabh:
Oh no, no, no, dude. This is B2B tech sales. They've absolutely identified themselves, right? They are engaged. Let's say they're here on a webinar with our experts, right? How do I... What do I do?

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Mason:
So my recommendation, if we want to get to the... I'll give two answers. One is if you've got a robust tech stack and you've got all that stuff set up. Again, from a filtering criteria perspective, once somebody's been a hand raiser, that's the ICP fit, they're showing high levels of intent. You should have automation in place that filters them into an existing campaign that is an acceleration campaign, that is focused around serving up the appropriate ads at the right time. That is giving the SDRs or your AEs the appropriate triggers and scripts and all of that. So again, if that doesn't exist, I would, at a high level to take it one step back, I would look at your existing sales pipeline in your deal stages, understand, “Do I have the appropriate content in the appropriate channels and the ability to trigger my sales team to actually keep someone moving through their buyer's journey?”

So again, understanding what are the stages of our sales process? How does that map to us buyer journey? And then, “Do we have content and channels identified that speak to those different stages so we can keep someone moving through the funnel?” So that's one thing. If you're low tech and you see somebody— and again, this is not sexy marketing, but this is, “I'm looking at a list and I know my ICP is two 20 million to 200 million B2B Tech”, whatever that looks like. And you look at a company and you say, “Huh, that's interesting”. You Google 'em. You look at Crunchbase. They're the right fit. Fantastic. Just tell your sales team to go after them. It doesn't have to be that complex because realistically, especially if you're super low tech, you're probably doing some things a little bit more manually.

You're actively probably looking at your list to filter out personal emails and all that. So again, make a mental note or actually write it in a standard process document of, “I'm gonna filter out potential best fit customers into a separate list and do deep dive research on those”. And when I say deep dive research— let me take one step back. It's actually not that deep of a dive. It's just the basics of like, “Are they the right industry? Are they the right company?” Do they have the right, if you as much data as you can find, if you've got data enrichment like a ZoomInfo or sales intel, fantastic. But as much information as you can find and then send it over to sales.

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Sourabh:
Exactly. And to your point, right, in the low tech world, especially at fast growing organizations, stack ranking. Just ask the honest question. It's not binary, do you want this or this? If you couldn't have these other customers, would you want them this week instead? Sales teams will give you answers immediately of what they think that customer's worth, which is now giving you, like you said, that fast forward to, “Hmmm... maybe I should think about that in my ICP“.

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Mason:
And one point: This works if you've got a salesperson and you're sending 20. This doesn't work if you have a single salesperson and you send over 500.

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Sourabh:
Of course.

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Mason:
So to be clear, you are doing the upfront baseline qualifications, because this also builds trust with sales. Because again, as we look at ABM, some sales teams are not activating on actively engaged accounts because they've been fed into an MQL hamster wheel and they're getting a thousand leads on a weekly basis that are garbage. So again, if we're low tech, it means high touch. So we're sending over, “Hey, I've got a really good feeling. Here's the data I have to support this. Would you just add these 20 accounts into your outreach this week and just see what happens?”

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Sourabh:
Exactly. And I'm right there with you in that I don't think they're fully qualified, but they're showing us they are. So you are the person that really makes that decision. You are that bridge for our company. That's your role, right? Now, we are out of time. I know you're, like, what? It, it goes really fast, Mason. But before we close, people need to learn more. You do this professionally, man, this is one of the reasons I love having you on. Can you talk a little bit about what you're doing? What is your podcast and where can they find you?

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Mason:
Yes. So, actually, separately from my day job, I do have a Marketing Careers Focus podcast. So if you're looking for a job, go check out The Marketing Ladder wherever you find podcasts. That's my shameless, personal brand podcast that I really love doing. Separately from that, if we're not connected on LinkedIn, please connect with me. I post about ABM and marketing careers and marketing pretty much every day. And if you are looking for a partner, realistically, if you can do it actually on LinkedIn, you can just shoot me a message. We can find a time to help you build an account-based program. Or if you want to go to gravityglobal.com, if you go to where you can request a call, there's a dropdown of services. We're the world's most awardedB2B agency. We have about 30 different service lines. You can just check the ABM box and then you'll get me. So again, that's how you get in contact with me. And realistically, if you need support across other services, like I mentioned, Gravity Global is the world's most awarded B2B agency, and we have30 different service lines. So anything from brand strategy to community, to PR, to paid media. If you are needing support, we likely can support.

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Sourabh:
‍Not bad bro, not bad for a marketer. Pretty good pitch. Thank you all for being here, Mason. Thank you. We will talk again, but the only thing I want to close on is if you heard one thing, it's that you have the data, right? You have the focus. You really shouldn't wait. Move, make the best decision. Circle back next week and work on it again. Love this. Thank you so much, Mason. We'll see you soon. Thanks everybody.