Storytelling Techniques and Operationalizing Commercial Insight

Last week I reviewed how switching from the AIDA model to the Hero’s Journey could help you build better nurturing and content. Today, I’ll discuss how the famous Zuora Deck works using the Hero’s Journey. A secondary framework that leverages the Hero’s Journey is called Commercial Insight, which is detailed in CEB’s The Challenger Customer. A careful review of the two frameworks demonstrates the two methods are the same: using the same persuasive steps to help an audience take their journey with you.

Before we go further, there’s a reason I’m discussing storytelling techniques with you. Putting content into a nurturing stream is the easy part. Having something interesting to say is not as easy. Most companies (yours included), spend a lot of time blasting out messages across different channels. Those messages almost always say, without any proof, “My company is the greatest at X, you need X, so click here so we can sell you X.” I’ve done it, you’ve done it, we’ve all done it.

Even some of the great content marketers are prone to this promotion type. And there is a time to say you are the greatest. It’s almost never at the top or middle of the funnel. It’s just not. There is a better way to share your good news more effectively. If you are ready to listen, let’s take a look.

The Zuora Deck

The recent Zuora Deck post by Andy Raskin made the rounds this quarter. Mr. Raskin analyzed it, but only to a point. I went deeper, discovering the deck combines the powerful Hero’s Journey with Commercial Insight while embedding psychological influence triggers. The deck is so well constructed that the message is clear without a live narrator. Here’s my expanded storytelling analysis from the slides Mr. Raskin provided. (You can look at others here and here).

There’s a shift from the world we were in, to this new world.

This opening teases that there is a promised land for the audience, something more than what we do now. If you’re interested, perhaps it’s time to step beyond the Threshold of your current world.

There are winners and losers in this new world.

The people who stay behind will be losers. You don’t want to lose, do you? This is a deep loss aversion psychological trigger. It fits into the Hero’s Journey to get the lead to the Threshold of stepping outside of the old world.

What happened to the losers?

The losers are the companies of yesteryear who stayed behind. Still staying behind? Now this fear of missing out hits loss aversion again, attempting to make the pain of change seem less than the pain of losing.

Will you be a winner by joining us?

The mentor now reaches out her hand to pull you across the Threshold. What’s holding you back?

Others have taken the journey, shouldn’t you?

Oh, by the way, firms like yours, people like you, have already taken this journey with us. We can help you do this successfully, so don’t be afraid. The promised land awaits, and others are already there.

There is a path to winning, and it involves Zuora.

Stepping across the Threshold means you have us and our special tools to help you. Once you use us, you will make it to the promised land.

When done well, the prospect is prone to say something like, “Great, when can we begin work?” The conversation about money becomes secondary. There may be a competitor involved, often as a formality to say all options were examined.

What is Commercial Insight?

The commercial insight in the Zuora Deck is “the subscription economy is here and the successful firms made that change.” It sparks interest and can break an existing mindset in the audience, allowing them to question if they are competing in an old, or new, way. Lead nurturing is about helping tell this story, equipping buyers with this understanding so Sales can complete the journey in person.

“A Commercial Insight teaches the customer something new that reframes how they think about their own business, and leads uniquely back to you as a supplier.” –Pat Spenner, CEB.

Another way to think about it is if you were in a one-on-one conversation where you have to convince the buyer of your point of view. The way you do this is to lead them to this new conclusion by breaking their old reality. How you do this follows a consistent process. This is essentially what happens at military bootcamps and religious conversions. Of course, it won’t work on everyone all of the time.

One way to think about the Commercial Insight is it is the critical mission your firm is on. Perhaps it is the “Why” of Simon Sinek fame. Perhaps it is helping marketers tell a revenue based story (Marketo, Eloqua). If it exists at all, the insight is a fundamentally new understanding of a business. As the quote explains, that new understanding means requiring a new supplier, which is your firm.

Former salespeople may see a connection between Commercial Insight and the questioning techniques in SPIN Selling by Neil Rackham. The Challenger Customer offers one method of digging into what your commercial insight is, however, I offer two other methods.

SPIN Selling Questioning

The summary is that proper research and questioning methods allow a salesperson to lead a prospect to the realization that they have a serious problem that wasn’t fully understood before. If  you are still working on what your commercial insight is, I highly recommend this technique as part of your customer development process. Here’s an example that could have been part of Marketo’s early customer calls:

• Situation: how do you manage your email list now? How do you track success?
• Problem: what’s the biggest problem you have when explaining results? Was it hard to train the team to use this?
• Implication: if training marketers is hard and time consuming, what does that mean for your campaigns? If your CEO wants more leads, but you are having problems tying your efforts to spend, what does that mean?
• Need-Payoff: why is having a clear email to lead conversion ratio important to you? If you could see how marketing impacts the pipeline, how would that help you achieve revenue targets?

Try this out to see how the lead will make the sale for you.

Five Whys/Fishbone Diagram

The Five Whys with a Fishbone diagram can help work back from the problem statement the customer has. If the customer is concerned with high costs, you can ask “Why” until you have several variations on why and how costs impact their business. You may uncover a new understanding of how your unique value can solve the cost problem in ways that were not explained earlier. The book discusses how Xerox wanted to sell color copiers to K-12 schools that were under budget cuts. Color’s nice, but why do we really need it? It turns out that school administrators care deeply about student outcomes and that color materials were proven to engage students better and improve those outcomes. There’s always money to improve outcomes, right?

Consider your experience with any martech vendor. There’s rarely budget for new tools. What happens when the vendor discusses your need to be at the revenue table? What if you could demonstrate your marketing spend is driving revenue, and isn’t a cost? Wouldn’t that be worth something to you?

Embedding commercial insight into lead nurturing stories

Once you have articulated, and tested, the commercial insight, your nurturing programs and sales tools will fall into place more easily. When using commercial insight, the plan is to show the lead the path from their Current Beliefs, to a new set of Beliefs. Persuasion experts know this can only be done with some sort of shock that breaks the person out of their frame. Once a person is ready to accept the new reality, it becomes easy to share the Commercial Insight and offer to help them realize it.

And it is very interesting to see these steps align perfectly to the Hero’s Journey, which takes someone out of their current world and into a new one, full of adventure and success.

Journey Stage	Funnel Stage	Buying Stage	Challenger Stage
Call to Adventure	Known	Learn	Learn
Threshold/Guardian	Engaged	Define Needs	Spark
Mentor and Helpers	MQL	Assess Options	Frame-break
Challenges	SQL	Assess Options	Commercial Insight
Revelation	Opportunity	Are you the right one?	Insight & Benefits
Transformation	Opportunity	Negotiate	Unique Benefits
Atonement	Closed-Won	Negotiate and Buy	Unique Benefits
Return and new world	Post Sale	Build new world	Build new world

There is much, much more to this process that this blog post and deck can reasonably share with you. The rest is in the hard work to build out the details. Let me know how it goes!

You are nurturing your leads wrong.

It’s ok. Everyone is.

The “traditional” way Lead Nurturing is taught is that we should use a content grid to provide relevant information to the prospect at each Buying Stage. The Buying Stage is largely determined by the marketer, not the buyer. Nurturing is then viewed as a series of “drip” emails semi-customized to the buyer persona. The reality is most content is cobbled together from whatever you have. The order of the content is often not considered deeply. And even if the order of the content is decided, it is not tested and never leveraged to keep the audience coming back for more.

A content grid often looks like this, as suggested by Marketo’s Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing.

Stage	Early	Mid	Late
Gated?	Not usually	Yes	Not usually
What to Offer	Blog posts Free tools Information relevant to the buyers’ struggles and possible generic solutions Content related to their jobs	Solution documents Sometimes gated content Whitepapers Introduce your product more	Case studies ROI calculators Demo forms Trial forms Contact Us

The next step is to find matching content, then draft emails and landing pages. Then, decide in which order each asset is sent out. Sometimes the order of content is done by buying Stage or in staggered offers, alternating between free, gated, and free trial push. In my experience working with 40+ firms, almost no one gives thought to the order of emails within a Stream vs. between Streams. Many firms default to the AIDA: Attention, Interest, Decision, Action model of content use.

And then, you plug all of this content into the marketing automation platform (MAP). The MAP helps track response metrics as well as lead data. While a MAP can shift leads to different Stages of content (AIDA or Lifecycle), these are all guesses, and poor ones.

The reality is that AIDA or a Lifecycle stage doesn’t reflect the true nature of the buyers’ journey, nor can it in a logic driven MAP. More importantly, however, your content is not setup as a story which leverages innate human desires for stories and deep psychological triggers available to all marketers.

Wait, isn’t that a lot of work? I just need to get content out into the channels.

Said every marketer.

What if you took the time to organize current and future content like a book? What if you told a heroic story the reader (lead) could use to picture themselves as the hero bringing in new ideas and vendors (you) to further their career? Further the success of their business? What if you could tell that story at the right time, with the right emphasis, to the right person, at scale, and automatically?

(No, you don’t need machine learning yet!)

It is possible, with some work. Here’s how.

Nurturing is a Serialized Novel

Think of Nurturing as a serialized novel from the 1800s. Authors like Dickens would be paid to publish a chapter every week in a newspaper. The feedback was, for the time, fast. The characters and narrative would adjust a bit each week. And at the end, a book was made which they already knew would be successful so the readers could…”binge read” the serial novel. (Sound familiar Netflix users?).

At a tactical level, each email, each landing page, each paper is a chapter in the story. Rather than give it all away, each content piece that is shared uses plot elements and storytelling components to keep leads engaged. Calls-to-action are about continuing the story to find out what happened. Emails or papers might end abruptly, creating cliff-hangers that demand the lead find out the next part of the story. What if a demo were demanded and accessible instead of withheld in exchange for a chat with sales? What if a lead asked you instead of you pestering a lead into a demo?

Storytelling Format is Crucial to Success: AIDA is dead

At the 2016 Marketo Summit, I suggested the AIDA model doesn’t work for lead nurturing. The reason is it is too logical, which places a lot of reliance on non-logical humans; and it also places the marketer at the center (you) instead of the buyer. Another reason is that AIDA is rooted in advertising culture, looking to interrupt and attract attention for the company.

As a storytelling format, AIDA falls flat because it assumes too much rationality on the part of the reader.

The Hero’s Journey is the Narrative Structure for Nurturing

Many of us are familiar with the basics of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, or Hero’s Journey, because George Lucas used it as a deliberate framework for Star Wars. This journey should be the basis for all nurturing and content creation because it taps into the natural human desire to be at the center of a story. It also allows for a natural use of influence techniques in each chapter.

When content is serialized in the Hero’s Journey framework, it will more naturally lead someone along to the conclusion you desire as a marketer: “not just consider us, but use us to be the hero of your firm.”

Telling a story also lets you, as the marketer, feel like you are sharing something important, rather than pushing propaganda. Instead of content that’s about your firm and your needs, you will naturally begin to write more about your audience’s needs, which will be more attractive to them.

Stages and Relation to the Funnel

Each part of the narrative also corresponds to the sales funnel stages, or the Buyers’ Stage. I mention The Challenger Customer here, and we’ll talk more about that another day.

Journey Stage	Funnel Stage	Buying Stage	Challenger Stage
Call to Adventure	Known	Learn	Learn
Threshold/Guardian	Engaged	Define Needs	Spark
Mentor and Helpers	MQL	Assess Options	Frame-break
Challenges	SQL	Assess Options	Commercial Insight
Revelation	Opportunity	Are you the right one?	Insight & Benefits
Transformation	Opportunity	Negotiate	Unique Benefits
Atonement	Closed-Won	Negotiate and Buy	Unique Benefits
Return and new world	Post Sale	Build new world	Build new world

Use the Journey Stages to Determine Readiness for Next Steps

Of course, this assumes you have done this expertly. Not everyone is ready to take the threshold step or is interested in the Challengers every day. Timing is a critical component of any lead nurturing and MQL system. The use of Threshold Content and Ask for Help Content is a natural part of the Hero’s Journey here. If a Lead is actively seeking to go beyond the Threshold, perhaps it is time to accelerate content related to the new world they are trying to reach. Perhaps a chat with a “mentor” (salesperson) might help move the person forward in their journey.

With all things in Marketing, it is best to carefully test responses to each chapter in your story. Are you losing people between chapters? Do certain chapters work in a particular order? Try it!

How Should I Use Storytelling with…

• Marketing Automation: figure out key lifecycle and storytelling junctions to trigger MQLs or story pace.
• Nurturing: content drip should work like a serialized novel: in order and designed to keep leads reading.
• Content: each content piece is a chapter in a novel in which the Hero is your Lead or Account. Don’t just slice it up willy-nilly; write like a novelist, use intrigue, conflict, and cliff-hangers.
• Account Based Marketing: leverage the nurture waterfall to move leads to the right parts of the story told by email or humans.
• ABM Play: if a lead appears to be on the threshold, a mentoring chat with an SDR/BDR might help. The challenge is how to approach this chat so it’s not condescending or sales oriented. A solution consultant or message from a non salesperson may work best.

Interested in building out more? Here’s a worksheet from CampCreative.

Next time I’ll share more on how to reach deep into your audience’s mind with CEB’s Commercial Insight.

With the explosion of ABM talk and tools the past year, many demand generation marketers are struggling to shift gears to ABM methods and metrics.

Do not panic.

There really isn’t any reason for any marketer to worry about ABM. Most firms have their top 100 wishlist customers and each salesperson has that list for his territory. The question ABM has brought up is, “How can marketing help automate more of the work required to bring together the buying team?”

The answer is already in front of you. Your existing frameworks, databases, tools, and content are often enough to move forward on a Target Account List. Could you do better than today? Yes, of course. Do you need fancy tools and new list techniques first? Not at all!

Do ABM now, with what you have.

And just how do you do ABM without all the fancy ABM martech tools? Let me show you.

Create Your Target Account List

This is not just any old list in a Word doc. No, this is a special list. Once you have the names in a Word doc, transfer them to Excel.

1. Company Name IS
2. Company Name STARTS WITH
3. Email Address CONTAINS @domain.com

If you do happen to have tools, interns, or existing Scoring Lists, you can use those to help construct this faster.

Create a Target Account Persona List

Then divide this list into similar industries or solution areas, depending on how your firm best works with others. Usually Industry+Solution is the best bet.

Once you are done, you will have grouped all of your Targets in a way that can be easily converted to a Smart List in your marketing automation platform.

Create Buying Team Persona Lists

If you do not already have a Buyer Persona segmentation or profile, make them now. Then map those against the Account Personas so you have a deeper set of smart lists:

Account Persona+Buying Persona = ABM

Now you can identify precisely whom to target in each Account. You can also see a count to understand your Coverage in each Account and across Account-Personas.

Database Cleanup and Appending

At this point, you will likely realize that your database is woefully out of date and has bad data. Most of us do happen to have list cleaning and appending tools already, so use them now to fill in data gaps and fix errors. If you do not have a list tool to draw on, there are several, non-cash things to try:

• Map Title to Role using data management flows.
• Adjust State and Country picklists and entry points for geo targeting.
• Clean up Territory Rules and Assignments. Nothing breaks ABM like sending emails from the wrong rep to the wrong list.
• Ensure you have permission to email your target account lists. If you are missing this, then your initial strategy may need to change

Using Content and Storytelling Effectively

While we can’t go deep right now, it is important to organize your content in a way that will resonate with your Account Persona Buyers. You aren’t speaking to companies, you are speaking to the individuals who play a particular role they were assigned by the Decision Maker. Here are some tips:

• According to some experts, you get one chance to make a target account email work – do it right.
• Draft content areas for each Account+Industry+Buyer persona so you speak the language the people do and offer real solutions to their daily problems.
• Use website personalization effectively along with retargeting, but this is not really the point of ABM.
• Find your audience at their watering holes – communities, LinkedIn, newsletter ads, and syndicated content. Make sure your landing pages and offers are highly targeted to these Buyers.

An example for this site might include the following:

• Directors of Demand Generation at Medium Sized Tech SaaS Firms using Marketo.
• Tell stories about getting Marketo setup right the first time. Talk about how easy it is to feel the implementation is a failure. Talk about how to fix key areas in a step by step way. I could also write about how hard it is to find great marketing operations talent and how to find and recruit that talent.
• Post content on website, but also link from LinkedIn Groups, Ads, and Guest Posts on vendor sites.

Similarly, your nurturing flows must operate in a way that tells this story naturally for each buyer.

Reporting without ABM Tools

While Jon Miller and others have offered reporting frameworks tied to their products, you can easily take their concepts to plug into any existing tool such as Salesforce or Marketo.

Report Type	Marketo	Web Analytics	Salesforce
Coverage	Smart Lists Lead Performance+Custom Columns		Lead/Contact Reports Dashboards by Title
Engagement	Company Web Page Report Scoring by Company Program Success+Segments (RCE) Created/Last Updated Last Interesting Moment	Demographics Visits from Personas	Contacts by Score or Asset used Activity Reports
Awareness	Company Web Page Report Program Success Web Activity (Anonymous) Company Web Activity (Anonymous)	Demographics Visits from Personas

 

Update: May 10, 2016:

Here are the slides from the original presentation, with resources at the end.

Last week’s post generated some interest in how to make ABM happen at a low level – the execution level. I suspect since I went from the general to the particular campaign tactics that I inadvertently created some confusion in my points.

Ultimately, the post was about how to begin applying ABM to your marketing operations and campaign frameworks today, and not wait for a new ABM marketing tool.

A commenter called me out on this saying that I was confusing strategy and tactics. I gave this more thought and think that this is an inherent problem with ABM: is it a Tactic or is it a Strategy?

One point I made was that a firm in the Customer Development mode or one focused on a small number of Enterprise Accounts will always consider ABM a strategy. It’s what they do and they are setup from marketing to sales to work solely on Accounts.

If we look at Lean Data’s ABM ebook, as quoted by David Crane of Integrate, they agree with me:

“Take a hard look at your business model. Are you a high-volume SaaS solution company? If so, you probably would benefit more from targeted lead marketing strategy. But if that same business is seeking to chart a different course by having top-tier sales reps focus solely on large enterprise accounts, ABM absolutely will have value.”

ABM is a Strategy (for some), as well as a Tactic, (for others). I suspect that most B2B marketers considering ABM should look at it as a tactic to be applied to lead nurturing. Eventually, ABM could be run by an Account Marketer or BOFU Marketer (field marketing anyone?).

DemandMetric’s September 2015 study clearly showed that tactical application is likely most in use, with 41% of firms over $500MM already using ABM. Such firms likely have a separate Enterprise team that needs ABM. And these firms also were using ABM the longest, with 42% over 1 year of use. The smallest firms were using ABM the least, with 67% of companies under $24MM just starting to use it and 42% of medium firms using it less than one year.

As a marketing framework, ABM has a strong point to make: marketing and sales are about adding Logos, not people’s names to your website’s Client page. Yet, people make decisions, not companies and we still have to build a list, one person at a time. Integrate’s KC Cox (and others) have pointed out that no matter how much you automate, Sales must get in there and use the human touch to understand relationships, the politics, and when to close.

What Sales Does to Build Accounts

Salespeople have been practicing “ABM” manually for 100 years. They tirelessly keep in touch with the leads that come in, slowly building a relationship and increasing their network within the firm, finding Champions, Users, and Decision Makers. This traditional sales process involves both inbound leads and prospecting.

I did this back in my Sales days, finding all the right people to bring into one giant meeting at a government agency. We won that sale. I also spent a year visiting several Universities in California to build support for a large purchase, had the big meeting, and did not get the budget approval. It was very manual, and very expensive to meet each person.

Could I have automated more of that process? Yes, such as keeping the leads aware of our benefits and other developments. Would that have made me more successful? Only if ABM had reached the right people at each university – people with budgets and needs that I could not uncover with prospecting. A large organization is always going to be hard to crack.

The Sales Account approach includes finding several people. In Demand Gen, the first two groups will show up the most and we often leave it to Sales to complete the relationships in the CRM and by phone.

• Researcher – the intern, associate, or manager who does that “60%” of the research into solutions.
• Influencer – these could be key people on teams related to the service. In Martech, these may include IT and Sales, for example.
• User Champions – the people who really want this to happen because they have the burning pain. They are usually Managers and Directors. (in small firms and buys, this may be enough).
• Executive Sponsor, or Executive Champion – the VP (or higher), who can own the initiative and push it through. This person may also be the Decision Maker if the project is small.
• Decision Maker – the person who can sign the approvals for budget and contracts. This may not be the Executive Sponsor.
• Purchasing/Contracts – the contract manager who can ensure you get paid.

Wouldn’t Sales love it if all of this data were in their lap, with each person clearly marked as “Ready to Hear from Sales”?

What Should be Automated in Account Building?

ABM suggests that much of this Sales process can be automated, which implies an ABM product that can do certain things:

• Relate leads to each other through their Titles, Company Name, and Domain Name.
• Report on Account metrics, such as Accounts at each Lifecycle Stage, Coverage (depth) of Buyer Personas, Awareness, Engagement, Program Impact, and Influence, as described by Jon Miller.
• Understand how to identify the Account and modify inbound and outbound communications to tell the firm’s story more clearly to each person, yet coordinate that specifically for that industry and Account.
• Limit email to that group of related domains to avoid going into the spam filter.
• Push Account records into an Account.
• Push Account records into the proper nurturing stream.
• Push Accounts to the right salesperson.

Thus, I see an ABM tool automating the nurturing step of the process and the data relationship step of the process. Humans have to be a part of this process and know when to stop the marketing and automation.

Where are the ABM Platforms?

There is no separate ABM platform to add to your CRM-MAP constellation. Thus, my advice to marketing operations professionals the other day, was to first modify their nurturing framework to be able to focus more on Accounts, using a modified content grid and buyer personas.

Scott Vaughan of Integrate, seems to disagree in an unrelated interview, and was cited in the comments:

“Using email and nurture through your ole ‘reliable’ marketing automation system to nurture within an account is not an ABM strategy.”

I disagree a bit with Scott here because most firms still need to learn and test ABM concepts. They can, and should, do this with lead nurturing and the MAP.

The Demand Metric Survey also showed that technology is not necessarily the barrier, with only 11% reporting technology was a barrier. Instead, 34% reported they did not really understand ABM at all, with another 17% saying they had “other reasons.”

And this is the challenge because all the tools and training have often been about leads, not Accounts. Instead of worrying about the technology platform, as I have suggested, try applying ABM in the process and nurturing tactics first. Understand it, track it as best you can, and by the time you are ready to expand, there will be new ways to scale the effort. 

Tools to Operationalize ABM

This blog is about bridging the gap between high strategy concepts and getting down to the brass tacks of putting the messaging out there, whether that’s on a website, email, landing page, or elsewhere. There are serious details in running a demand generation campaign just as there are in running an ABM program. In the previous post, I offered a framework for handling ABM tactical applications to plug into your tools.

Fortunately, you already have most of the tools at your fingertips today:

• CRM (Salesforce, etc)
• MAP (Marketo, etc)
• Data Cleaning and Appending (RingLead, Reachforce, etc)
• Data Connections (LeanData)
• Retargeting (Vendemore, Terminus)
• Content refinement
• Dynamic Content in Emails (Marketo, HubSpot)
• Account Based reporting (Engagio)
• Predictive Scoring – this is one area I believe is ideal for the predictive tools, assuming you have enough data. (LatticeEngines, FlipTop, etc)

Note that these tools form part of the martech stack and are not a single ABM platform, at least not yet.

Is Demand Generation Dead?

Most of you out there are at a larger volume SaaS firm where lead counts matter. ABM will be part of your constellation of tools, especially as your firm works to add Enterprise logos. Your funnel will then have a few pipes running leads to a separate set of ABM funnels, working each group of Accounts by Industry, or another segmentation. In other words, a more developed bottom-of-the-funnel system.

Certain consultancies, project shops, and high value advice firms will find ABM a better overall strategy to winning clients. Companies focused on only Fortune 500 type firms will use ABM as their strategy.

Still, I would caution against throwing out the demand gen concepts of building an audience and then combining touches to move people closer to talking to sales. Many consultancies have built large audiences for their content and point of view as part of their marketing. Only a small number will buy at anytime, but you never know when a long time follower will be promoted into a role where they can hire you for a project.

Account Based Marketing Managers

ABM is a different way of thinking from the typical lead generation demand marketer. Instead of leads, you want Accounts. Accounts, however, are made up of individual leads! Thus, I suggest that your firm may want to hire an ABM Manager to interface closely with Sales and Marketing Operations. This new hire can think in terms of Accounts and be in charge of the sales-marketing alignment required.

The standard funnel setup looks like:

1. TOFU Team (Content, Inbound, Ads)
2. MOFU Team (ABM?, Demand Gen, Events, outbound emails, webinars, sales tools)
3. BOFU Team (ABM, testimonials, case studies, reference accounts)

My initial instinct is to have a BOFU team run by an ABM marketer. If your firm has a traditional “field marketer” it may make sense for them to shift to the BOFU team as Sales’ ABM go to person.

Demand Metric’s survey, however, reported that those firms using ABM reported higher impact in MOFU, where “accounts choose to interact further with a vendor.” A full 32% of firms said ABM impacted the mid-funnel, while only 13% impacted the bottom of the funnel. If ABM, then, is about influencing the individual leads to include your firm in an RFP, meetings, or call backs, then it makes sense to put ABM techniques higher up in the funnel.

To me, this supports the idea that ABM lead nurturing programs are an appropriate starting point in terms of technology and technique. The ABM programs would then start at the Mid-Stage content and attempt to encourage sharing in the organization so you can collect more Coverage.

In terms of staffing and workflow, the ABM Manager may work for Demand Gen and cover the Middle and Bottom of the funnels. Each organization may need a different setup.

ABM Tactics vs. ABM Strategy

Last week I mentioned Terminus as a method to begin ABM using retargeting. Marketo’s RTP also claims to help run ABM. These are tools, which are part of the overall strategy. They help keep messaging in front of leads and can use Account segmentation to send the right message repeatedly.

Interestingly, others disagreed. Scott Vaughan followed up his earlier quote with:

“Neither is using advertisements to target and retarget a group of people because they work at a company and came to your web site.”

Yes, absolutely doing retargeting is not a strategy; it is tactic that should fit the overall ABM plan. If your ABM plan indicates that retargeting CXOs is not aligned well with the way you sell to CXOs, then surely do not spend the money.

The Funneholic discussed many tactics to use in ABM in a recent TOPOhq post. A few of these tactics can be automated, while others require careful segmentation, and still others are for Sales to work directly.

Ultimately, with 76% of firms (Demand Metrics) reporting they are testing, considering, or not using ABM, there is a long way to go. These firms should absolutely decide to test the tactics of ABM first, with new frameworks and focused nurturing programs. If the results look good, then it makes sense to consider a separate ABM team or moving to ABM as a complete Sales-Marketing strategy.

What are your plans for ABM in the next year?

(Speaking of plans, Jon Miller just posted a very detailed ebook on ABM which expands on the implementation I discuss.

Image Credit: flickr Salford University

[Updated Oct 7, 2015 to add vendor names; Updated Dec 14, 2015 with Link to Engagio]