SaaS Stories
SaaS Stories is my not-so-secret quest to learn what it truly takes to succeed in the world of SaaS—and I’m inviting you along for the ride! I have the pleasure of sitting down with brilliant minds and industry trailblazers to explore their journeys, uncovering the secrets behind their growth, the gaps they spotted in the market, and what really drives them.
It’s not all smooth sailing—there are challenges, unexpected turns, and moments of reflection where they share what they’d love to change about their journey. Think of it as a candid, insider’s look into the world of SaaS, with just the right amount of curiosity, empathy, and wit.
Join me as I dive deep, selfishly soak up all the insights, and hopefully share a little inspiration with you along the way—one SaaS story at a time.
SaaS Stories
Trust Me, I’m your Account-Based Marketing strategy: Fixing the broken B2B funnel
The true essence of Account-Based Marketing isn't just adopting new tactics—it requires a fundamental shift in how B2B organisations structure their revenue operations. In this illuminating conversation, Andrew Seidman, co-founder of Digital Reach Agency, cuts through the buzzwords to reveal why many ABM initiatives fail despite good intentions.
Most companies struggle with ABM because they change their inputs without adjusting their goals and incentives. When sales teams are still measured by meeting volume rather than account quality, they'll naturally prioritise easy wins over strategic accounts. Successful ABM demands restructuring KPIs at every level of the organization—from marketing to sales to customer success—to properly value high-value accounts. As Seidman explains, "Instead of a quota of 10 meetings, we'll give you one point for Joe's Crab Shack and a hundred points for IBM."
Beyond metrics, we explore why word-of-mouth remains the most powerful growth engine for B2B companies. The path to sustainable growth isn't just acquiring customers but converting them into advocates. "The biggest and most effective medium for new business, especially new logos, is word of mouth," Seidman emphasises. This requires exceptional customer experiences, thoughtful relationship building, and truly understanding what makes your customers love your product.
Perhaps most compelling is Seidman's insight on trust-building in B2B relationships. In technical sales, customers face "the auto mechanic problem"—they often lack the expertise to evaluate claims objectively, making trust the primary basis for decisions. While digital channels play important roles, "nothing in the entire world builds trust like being in the same room as someone." This profound truth explains why the most sophisticated ABM programs still prioritise human connection alongside digital sophistication.
Whether you're just starting with ABM or looking to optimise your existing strategy, this episode provides actionable frameworks for aligning resources with opportunity value, measuring what truly matters, and building the trust that drives revenue growth.
Do you see ABM as being specific for that category of client or do you think it works across?
Speaker 2:the board. So, yeah, I think like fundamentally all B2B marketing is account-based marketing.
Speaker 1:What is truly an effective ABM strategy in today's market?
Speaker 2:Nothing in the entire world builds trust like being in the same room as someone.
Speaker 1:Absolutely does, and what you said is amazing because I really wish that from higher up, that could be like a rule that gets given to the sales team. Absolutely does, and what you said is amazing, because I really wish that from higher up, that could be like a rule that gets given to the sales team. What are some of the metrics that?
Speaker 2:matter most in ABM you actually have to change the organization, like the revenue organizations, kpis.
Speaker 1:What are maybe some other tips at convincing the sales team?
Speaker 2:Biggest and most effective medium for new business, new logos especially is word of mouth.
Speaker 1:Welcome everybody to another episode of SaaS Stories. Today I'm super excited to be joined by Andrew Seidman, co-founder of Digital Reach Agency, a fellow ABM-er all the way from New York. Welcome, andrew.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. It's great to be here, Jo.
Speaker 1:Now ABM. It's sort of become a little bit of a buzzword in B2B, even though it's been around for years and years and years. I'd love to get your perspective on what is truly an effective ABM strategy in today's market.
Speaker 2:Yeah well, even just to comment quickly on this idea of it being like a buzzword, I think a long time ago people realized that selling in B2B entirely is account based Like you never sell directly to a consumer, like you're always selling to some organization, and I think people perceived that this was a valuable paradigm shift from how they had worked previously, which is entirely lead-based movements. But the reason why it has been mostly a buzzword and less action is because to actually do it requires this big paradigm shift of how you run an organization. And so the answer to your question of what makes a great AVM organization, it's one that actually takes an account-based view or approach to going to market. And I'll give you an example of like a really common way that organizations struggle with this.
Speaker 2:So many organizations have like an inside sales team or a team that responds to outbound, like BDRs, sdrs.
Speaker 2:Almost invariably those people are incentivized by a quota of meeting set, like they have to get like 10 meetings per month or something like that booked, so for them the quality of the account is not relevant to them.
Speaker 2:There's no incentive associated with like oh, I need to, instead of booking this like a warm lead from Joe's Crab Shack that just like came through the form where I can go get one of my meetings books, call it good.
Speaker 2:I should instead drop that lead and focus on developing the IBM account and like do research into, you know, the buying committee and the org chart at this organization no one will probably ever talk to me at, and that single example I think highlights the difference between really good orgs and really kind of struggling orgs. With IBM is like the really good orgs they get it. They've said okay, how about this? Instead of a quota of 10 meetings, we'll give you one point for Joe's Crab Shack, we'll give you a hundred points for a meeting with IBM and if you get that meeting you'll make your quota for the year, and so you can balance the scales in a way that is actually account-based. But most organizations are still kind of stuck. They would like to be thinking about this in an account-based paradigm but they're still kind of in a lead-based paradigm, if that makes sense.
Speaker 1:Absolutely does. What you said is amazing because I really wish that from higher up, that could be like a rule that gets given to the sales team because I run into so much trouble. You know, marketing's all on board, they want to try ABM, they know it's effective, and then they create a meeting with sales and they're like you're going to have to convince them because you're right, they're not just going to drop everything and suddenly start working on, you know, target accounts and economic buyers and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, I think what you said it kind of made me think of a good approach is going in there and saying well, you know, we're going to help you with those meetings and we need to create a little bit of change management here. But what are maybe some other tips at convincing the sales team, especially in organizations where you know that higher up they're not gonna get that support? They're still gonna be looking at those KPIs, you know, I think it's not even just the sales team too.
Speaker 2:Like it is anyone who has, let's say, short time horizons for their KPIs. We see this in marketing, too. Like marketers also struggle to get out of the lead-based approach because you can show real progress with leads quickly. Right, you can say I'm getting wins under the belt. Now, they may not be the types of wins that will like leverage your company. It's a really powerful brand position and, like you know the real kinds of like logos you really want, but you can actually like put something on paper, whereas nurturing like a big account for a long time, while it might be more valuable to the business on the whole, like it's harder to show that immediate win or like that, hey, like here's a very short term metric that really worked. There are metrics you can do, but again, they require a paradigm shift of like how you do reporting and what your data looks like and so forth. But to answer your question about like how do you convince the sales team, I honestly it's the same way that I think you have to convince the marketing team, which is you actually have to change the organization, like the revenue organization's KPIs, and that usually comes from the CEO or some mixed chief revenue officer, like somebody with enough influence to actually have control over what the incentives will really look like. Some good examples of this are like you can just set acquisition goals for a certain tier of accounts. You can say, our company cares about getting 10 new logo accounts from our top 100 and like that is the success metric that we'll be graded on. However many leads you get, or whatever is fine, but like we have this metric that's really important to us.
Speaker 2:Where this gets really really tricky is everybody is on some kind of economic time pressure and so if you're a startup, you're looking to your next round. You need to hit some number of revenue for the next round, and so you don't actually have time to be, let's say, philosophically accurate as to, okay, this might be the best thing for the business over a 20-year time horizon, but also if we don't hit our numbers this quarter, we're not raising another round and the company dies. So it's like you kind of have to balance the short-term pressure that is really can be kind of like lead focused, like meetings focused, like let's get some stuff moving with, like okay, but actually what will make us the most successful company? Or like we'll actually get us to the next level. So I think it's actually really difficult to set those incentives regardless. But you usually need, you know, really really high level, ce level, like kind of incentive setting, to make the whole thing work.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Good point, Really interesting, and I think I think a lot of companies you know they're willing to do that for the big whales or the enterprise level clients that they're going to land. Do you see ABM as being specific for that category of client or do you think it works across the board?
Speaker 2:So, yeah, I think, like fundamentally all B2B marketing is account-based marketing, and so I think if you took your known universe of like addressable market let's say it's I don't know, 5,000 companies or something like that, 10,000 companies the ABM approach is effective, is essentially what you're going to do regardless to all of those accounts in some form.
Speaker 2:The way that I like to think about tiering or like segmenting out like a tier of like really valuable small white glove accounts versus like kind of maybe some middle value accounts to like the long tail of additional accounts, is just that, actually, one thing abm is designed to do well is to align your resources with the outcomes, which is to say, if the long tail accounts are all roughly the same like if joe's crab shack is worth roughly the same as, like you know, em Emily's cake shop or whatever if they're all the same, then you don't really need to do much personalization to like differentiate yourself between those two experiences, like from your perspective, you're just as happy getting either one as a lead or a customer.
Speaker 2:But then some many organizations will have a big difference between, like the local small business or like mid-market business versus some really large business. So, in this sense, like it's an improvement upon old school like lead generation, demand generation stuff, where you're kind of evenly distributing your effort across the entire market, whereas in this case you're distributing your effort based on the expected value of those accounts. So you're still doing ABM. You're just not putting as much resources into the accounts that are like less valuable on a per account basis and you're putting more resources into the ones that are more valuable. So I think, yeah, you're always doing ABM. It's just like question of how intense the extra effort is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I guess one to many versus one-to-one, and you know all the different levels of personalization that come with that. Going into the weeds, a little bit of ABM. What are some of the biggest mistakes you see companies make with ABM? That's a great question.
Speaker 2:I think one of the common ones is well, I guess I'll start with kind of the key one, the key mistake. That is probably the biggest mistake, which is folks decide to change their inputs Like these are the things that we're going to do to do ABM. They're like we're going to market to this account list, we're going to do these things differently and so forth, but they don't change the goals or like the KPIs that they're going after. So they might say like oh, we're going to focus on driving attention from these hundred accounts instead of you know 10,000 accounts that we normally focus on. And then they say ABM is not working. Our lead counts way down and like the way we evaluate success is by the number of new leads and we have so few new leads now that like it's, it's a failure and it's like, well, the KPI of lead volume doesn't make sense if you're looking at 10 accounts, right, it makes sense when you're looking at the you know the long tail of all these other things, but like it's just not a very good KPI.
Speaker 2:So I think the most common mistake I see is that folks actually don't start with a good definition of what success of the program would look like, and often this is metrics that you don't currently have in your system. So the one that we often get brought into build is like account engagement or account life cycle Like do you have milestones similar to like a lead life cycle? Do you have milestones at which an account reaches degree of qualifications? So the way we do this usually is like an aggregate of all of the contacts engagement plus some of the demographics associated or firmographics associated with the account, and you can start to see like funnel account funnel movement over time basically. So like that is a metric that we recommend, but most organizations are nowhere near able to like run with that that thing, so they often will just start off with purely generation and kind of wonder what's going wrong. So I think I think aligning on that one is like the one that kind of stands out um, maximally to me as like this is.
Speaker 2:You know this is like the biggest problem, but there's a bunch of things, that kind of waterfall from that where it's like you're not, you're not developing your programs in alignment with those KPIs, like your teams are all kind of like scattered in their you know, in their KPIs. Often there's another mistake that people think that personalization is kind of the key to doing this. Like you know, like somehow, if you're going to change the you know the ad, instead of saying like, oh, this, you know, this is for B2B companies, it's like, oh, this is for B2B, like insurance companies, like that's now going to suddenly like launch your program forward and, to you know, make millions and millions of extra dollars. So they often like go for things that are a little bit more superficial than what I think the really meaningful stuff is, which is maybe, how well do you define what makes a great customer of yours? Who are the people at those existing great customers who love you and what do they say? Like, how do they talk about you? How well do you maintain your relationship with your advocates? Like your entry points into perspective, like really large new engagements.
Speaker 2:So I think folks often go about it in a little bit of reverse order, where they think they're gonna penetrate these super valuable accounts through like nifty top of funnel techniques, whereas, like in actuality, it's a lot more about having a great brand, having a great word of mouth presence, putting out really, really good content that your advocates are sharing. Like it's a lot. There's a lot more like deeper philosophical and substantive work to be done than I think. Like the often impulse is just like we bought demand-based, we're going to run personalized one-to-one ads and like everything should be good. Now, right it. Just like we bought demand-based, we're going to run personalized one-to-one ads and like everything should be good.
Speaker 1:Now right, it's like, well, it's not quite how it works. I love that you said that. Actually, I've definitely run into this problem myself and I think, yeah, setting KPIs from the get-go is one thing that a lot of companies can get wrong. I think you mentioned there as well. You know, I suppose, awareness versus you know what's already in the funnel. And this is another mistake I see is when people start ABM, they're still focused on net new logos and they completely forget about who's already in the CRM that has engaged. What is the marketing? Specific marketing campaigns that you've seen work really well for moving the leads that are in the funnel across the pipeline stages, I suppose.
Speaker 2:Well, I think, when you're in the pre-sales or in the kind of like what most marketers would consider their part of the funnel that they own, again, I would like start immediately on like thinking about your brand, quality, your offer, what, what is it that you're actually bringing? Cause? I think a lot of folks tend to skip over that part and assume that they um that because they know and love their product, that, like, everyone else will love and know, their will know and love their product um in the same way, which is often a big mistake. Like, it's often the way that you talk about or think about your product internally might be completely different than the way that your market talks and thinks about it. So I think, starting first and foremost with like, what is the content? Like that you're planning on producing, like, what's the brand message that you're carrying, and so forth, from a tactical perspective, once you have a really great set of offers and really good content, we do something called sequential retargeting at Digital Reach, where we are basically aligning your content and your audience by funnel stage and potentially other segments as well.
Speaker 2:But so you often see this, you see this from cold emails all the time. For example, here's a great example of a bad cold email hey, we've never met before. Can I put time on your calendar? Great example of a bad cold email hey, we've never met before. Can I put time on your calendar? It's like no, like a very big ask. I don't know you, I have a lot of, don't have a lot of time for this, but the cold emails that I've gotten that have really been helpful, have been like or like good. I'm like hey, do you ever struggle with problem X, y, z? And I'd be like yeah, actually I'm struggling with that problem right now and it's just like oh cool, like here's a few resources that I think are valuable in solving that. Like, let me know if you have any questions. I'm happy to be helpful.
Speaker 2:Right, it's a process where he is, or she is, aligning with me. Where am I in this process before we get to a conversation that is ready to buy Now? Now, you can do this in advertising, you can do with emails, you can do with all kinds of media, but like we would never show an unaware upper funnel audience like request a demo or talk to sales CTA, like we're. So that's like from a. What would you do to align these things in the pre-sales area. I also per the previous question. I also want to just call out that, like most marketers, just stop their field of vision, like at the opportunity creation or opportunity close, like that's kind of like okay, we're done, marketing now, like that's it. The biggest and most effective medium for new business, new logos especially, is word of mouth, and so you actually your job is not done until you have converted that individual into an advocate who is referring more new business to you.
Speaker 2:So, we have a metric that we really love, which I stole it from somewhere. I can't forget who I stole it from, but it is number of new referral customers per month divided by number of churned customers per month. What is the net virality of our service offering?
Speaker 2:and if we are turning customers faster than we are getting referred new customers, it means like we're not viral we need we actually need a big injection of marketing and sales to sustain our growth, because we're like we're losing the clients faster than they're gaining on themselves. That said, if we're gaining the clients sort of organically and naturally, then we have sort of like the type of thing that ends up leading to like viral, like massive growth, which makes marketing look really, really good.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I always say you know ABM can play a huge part in customer success as well. I think it's so crucial to, like you said you know, get referrals from expanding different departments within that organization. People know each other and it's so much easier and quicker to do that than you know convert and convince a brand new customer. You mentioned cold email. I'm actually super surprised that in this day and age that still can work really well. And I think it's about landing. You know exactly what you said that pain point that they have like right time, right place. They do respond to that cold email. Time, right place. They do respond to that cold email. And it made me think of intent data, because you know, in a way, with intent data, you're supposed to find out exactly who those people are and deliver that message to them. How are you finding intent data? Tools like 6Ns, demand-based, all of those when it comes to your account-based strategies, do you think they're pretty effective or is it very?
Speaker 2:hit and miss.
Speaker 2:I think intent data is a very cool innovation I guess not that new, but a very cool like additive function.
Speaker 2:I don't know if it by itself similar to many other like really valuable, like tactics, for example, like I don't know by itself it can overcome the other parts of a go-to-market that are really critical.
Speaker 2:So it will give you some directional information as to whether or not someone is more or less likely to engage with your offer.
Speaker 2:But, for example, like going back to email marketing here for a second, like let's say that you have somebody, that you got intent data, that this account is engaged in your product area, and again, if you email them and you say, hey, let me send you a calendar invite, like, let's get on the phone, that person still has no pre-existing relationship or trust with you. Even if they're interested in your area which, again, even that is just directional and kind of fuzzy Like, it's still pretty likely that they will not find your message resonant at all. So the best way to think about this is like emails just are ads, they're ads that are served in the inbox. If you actually, if you've done marketing on both of them, you know like, okay, well, you make a headline which is like your subject little text and then, like you, make a sub header like in the ad but that's also that's your like preview text over here, like you've just got a few characters to make your pitch.
Speaker 1:And so I think, the.
Speaker 2:The key element of making either of these successful intent data agnostic is is your. Is the quality of your offer aligned with the where someone is at in their journey, and Intent Data can help refine some of this, especially on the advertising front, can help you refine a little bit of like how accurate are we likely to be? But, I, think it still kind of doesn't. It's it's less important than the bigger picture question of like is my offer appropriate? For what? For the person I'm talking to?
Speaker 1:yeah, for sure. You mentioned ads there and it just made me think of something I personally struggle a lot with and you know, even with one-to-one and one-to-few ABM, we still have to target these people, but the audience size is quite small. Require, you know, a minimum audience size of, say, 300 to a thousand. How do you tackle personalization and and those types of campaigns? You know, when you're running one-to-one or once a few abm?
Speaker 2:well, the first thing again, I would um, there's a natural temptation to fall into um, the same type of like, lead generation or demand generation trap of saying the like, all these impressions are roughly created, equal, and so, therefore, like we, we like getting fewer impressions or something is bad.
Speaker 2:These, the idea of these smaller ad or campaign groups or campaigns, or whatever it is audiences that you're looking at, like the idea of it is that each of those impressions is far more valuable than, like, your normal impressions, your normal campaigns are, and so, in that sense, it could be completely fine to have a very small number of overall impressions, so long as those impressions are super valuable.
Speaker 2:That's kind of like this question of like, of like, how much is your, is your resources or your like, your effort, aligned with the value of the customer that you're going for? That said, there is a size that is too small to run. So there's some balancing point you want to find between how accurate and narrow and precise am I versus for the effort that I'm putting in, versus like, how likely am I actually to claim any real estate here at all? One thing that I often will do about this is I will like expand the audiences a little bit and imagine that this like material is often going to get circulated, like if you're doing a good job with your offer, even if you don't reach the director level or the C level or the EVP or something like that, maybe you reach a manager who, like, circulates it across other people, and so forth.
Speaker 1:So yeah, I think it's.
Speaker 2:I think it's worth doing, even if, like, there are, even if it's a smaller audience than you would get otherwise.
Speaker 1:Just coming back to ABM and what are some of the metrics that matter most in ABM? I still have, you know, people when running an ABM campaign talk about things like MQLs, sqls, and I'm trying to get them away from that, you know, and into some of the other metrics. What do you find is the most successful metric to measure? And maybe, like in the early days, like within a 90 day cycle, because obviously everyone wants you know revenue and profits and new wins. But what are some of those early metrics that we should be looking at?
Speaker 2:The first one that I think is a nice way to bridge the gap between demand generation methodologies versus account-based methods is the idea of matched leads. So you're still counting leads, but you're only counting leads that are matched to accounts on your list, and so in this sense, you might still say like, oh, we have a demand gen program which, by the way, you can run a lead gen program at the same time as an ADM program and do them together. So you could say, oh, we're still driving all the leads we were driving before, but now we're also evaluating which, what percentage of those, or what's the total count, that are matched to our account list. So I think that is like a pretty quick way of getting like an account-based metric without doing a lot of heavy data lifting or anything like that. So I think that's like the first place that I would often start.
Speaker 2:Personally, I, when we when our like we have a RevOps division in our company, when our RevOps team builds like a lead scoring and a lead lifecycle infrastructure, we just build an account one at the same time.
Speaker 2:So ideally, if we have been brought in to build like funnel and reporting apparatus in the first place, we would have built the account lifecycle as part of that and then we would report on how many marketing qualified, how many engaged accounts, like what is the overall flow of accounts in the life cycle. So I would say those two are kind of like the immediate ones that I am often jumping into. Also, you know, ideally people will be reporting on like book meetings and revenue and like pipeline, like deeper pipeline metrics, but often those just take a while, like often your cycle is going to last a little bit of time and so, like starting off by, you know I need to see the total pipeline generated by this program in the first month. Well, it's probably going to be zero. Like it's probably going to take a long time for us to develop and nurture these big accounts, or these target accounts at least, into something that is actually turning up in the pipeline, if that makes sense it does.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. Getting into the weeds of ABM a little bit again. We spoke about emails, we spoke about ads. What are some other channels that you have found really effective, For example, programmatic events, roundtables, anything that really stands out in the world of ABM, and I suppose let's say specifically, we're trying to influence the C-suite here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would say yeah, that's not how I would think about programmatic. Programmatic has value in providing brand credibility and additional brand kind of reference points, brand recollection, that when your name then comes up there's more likelihood of you being trusted. But almost certainly the C-level is never, is rarely, making those kinds of evaluations themselves Immediately. They're almost always getting some people on their team to do the kind of like to do the evaluations and make recommendations and then from there they're going to kind of like make a value choice and programmatic can be helpful in that. But I don't think. I think you know selfishly like Demandbase and Sixth Sense and these other types of companies, they want you to believe that if you spend a bunch of money doing programmatic ads towards your target account list, that that's going to turn into meetings with a C-suite Probably not directly. How that works Like it probably has some positive influence, but it's not where I would necessarily look first. But you mentioned another medium that I think is probably the single most valuable medium and that is events, we would say like field. Also I mentioned before how word of mouth is this like incredibly powerful thing? And that is because for very technical things like if you're selling something in a product space.
Speaker 2:All technical products run into what I think of as like the auto mechanic problem, which is I don't know about you, joe, I don't know if you're a car person, but, like I'm not, I'm not an auto mechanic. So if my car breaks, I go to a shop and the shop tells me it's going to cost $5,000 to fix this. I have no idea. I'm actually not capable of knowing whether this person is telling the truth or not. And even if I go to another auto mechanic and get a second opinion and they say oh no, this is, this is 5,000. Do I trust both of them now or do I think like no, they're both trying to rip me off, like it's very difficult to know these things, and so, as a result, the decision is almost entirely based off of trust. Who makes you feel like you can trust them? In fact, two people give you the exact same quote. You're going to pick the one that you trust more regardless, even if the quote is the same.
Speaker 2:So in high level enterprise, c-level selling, it is almost exclusively a game of trust, and who is going to be trusting you more than others? And nothing in the entire world builds trust like being in the same room as someone and so if you can actually have a real conversation where they can get an emotional sense of what your company and your product are like, who the people are that work there, what it would be like to be in a partnership with you, I think that goes much further than basically every other medium combined. But you got to be able to qualify yourself so, like when you get in that conversation.
Speaker 2:You have to have a website that looks great. You have to have content that looks great. Collateral that's really good. You have to have your case studies and your other. You know there's these like prerequisites that you need to have to avoid disqualifying yourself. And then you ideally, ideally have done such a great job of nurturing those advocates and evangelists of your brand already that there's like an army of people that are ready to introduce you and ready to vouch for you and so this is um.
Speaker 2:Again I say marketers often put the cart ahead of the horse and they just focus on this like lead to mql zone, whereas most of their revenue actually comes from converting customers to evangelists, which can be done with careful attention. Great product experience, like a timely gift, like what are they doing for their birthday, you know something like this can really help say, hey, this has become an exceptional experience.
Speaker 2:I know I'm on a long-winded rant right now, but I'll I'll no, I love it, keep going with one idea here, which is I've talked about this in other podcasts as well where this company I don't know if you know the company zappos, the american shoe sales company, um, but their whole thing was just we're gonna make an exceptional experience, and we know that doing is in some ways, commoditized, like other people sell shoes on the internet, and that's we get it. Our differentiator, our brand, is going to be that the experience is exceptional and as and they did it to the point where anybody who ever had a customer experience issue at zappos, like it is, was so much better. Like their customer support. People could just send you cookies if they felt like it. They could just do whatever they wanted to to make sure that the experience was exceptional and, as a result, like millions of customers for life would never shop anywhere else.
Speaker 2:And so I think, as a marketer, I think we do ourselves a little bit of a disservice by not thinking critically about how are we going to nurture all these, all these um, you know, contacts, customers into evangelists. Get their case studies, get their quotes, get their referrals hang out with them at parties, like you know, do these things. We spend way too much time trying to generate new relationships from like and nowhere near enough time like, nurturing the people who will actually grow the revenue org.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, that's a really good point. It's so true, I think, as marketers, we're so focused on content. What can we put out there? You mentioned gift giving and cookies. That's actually you know. Why don't we send that to people that we're already in relationships with, and I think, with ABM? You know, I've seen good ABM where we are trying to nurture the people that are already in the CRM, where there's already existing relationships. Maybe there's already been a meeting, one or two. However, you know there's now this gap where no one's really communicating or doing anything after that meeting. Do you find gift giving in that instance could help? You know? Start the next conversation.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, I actually I am a huge believer in giving gifts and showing like extra touches of, like special care, but not as a cold medium.
Speaker 2:It's actually like really and again I think this is self-serving from the people who like run these, like gifting companies, who would like to position this as if you send 10,000, 25 gift cards like that will give you a bunch of new business, whereas what I find has been very effective is the like you know that somebody really loves um italian food because you had a conversation with them about it once and you send them um a hundred dollar 150 gift card to a italian restaurant near their house to take their them and their husband out for a nice dinner, and it's like that thing feels like a friend, it feels like a really nice personal thing, like you just really value it.
Speaker 2:It's really lovely.
Speaker 2:The impersonal $25 Starbucks gift card feels like kind of weird and like not very natural and like out of the flow of like a normal human interaction, and so I think gifting is an insanely valuable like we've given gifts up to like you know, like many thousands of dollars for like very fancy experiences, because like this person really stuck their neck out to help us and it wasn't like a quid pro quo, it wasn't like you give us, we give you this gift and you give us like something back.
Speaker 2:It's like hey, just thank you for like sticking your neck out for us. The way, the way that that person did this like earned us a lot of pipeline, like was a very, very valuable thing to do, but was like really cause they did something special, and so we were like we're not going to limit ourselves to like a hundred dollar gift card here, like we're going to take this person out to the french laundry, you know, like this is like a special thing that they have done for us. So I would say, being again like in the mission of converting customers into advocates, like, honestly, there's probably very little limit. You should think about for what. What would be like a good gift so long as it's in the flow of like the normal engagement.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure, Andrew. I feel really bad. I haven't asked you any questions about yourself. I was so excited to have someone with ABM expertise on this podcast. I just dived straight into that.
Speaker 2:But tell me a little bit about Digital Reach and how you got started. Yeah, so actually I've been talking about this a lot lately because we just unrolled, or in the process of unrolling, a new product this year that I'm really excited about, but it has to do with where we came from very much. So we were founded almost 13 years ago approaching 13 years as a pure, actually at the time, just paid search. Just did paid search ads. Small businesses, like literally type in a word on Google, find out who's advertising for it, call them up and say, hey, I noticed you were advertising for lampshades. You know, let us help you manage your ads. So totally bootstrapped. And then over time, people asked us for more and more things Like they asked us for like social media, advertising or SEO, and then we started to uncover that the the solutions to these things were actually super interdependent on one another.
Speaker 2:Like if you wanted to do a good job of advertising, it wasn't just what is the keyword list, but it's also what's the landing page, like what, what's the website like. So we started building these additional point solutions of like, okay, we build and design websites. Now we have this digital experience like mini agency. People needed reports. But like, if you've ever done reporting work, it's not just the actual report, it's the data that goes into the report, and so it's like that ended up in this like RevOps thing, where we became experts in the stack and understanding the CRM and we hired Salesforce and Marketo and HubSpot people and so forth and so we had the pipeline generation stuff. Like we had all those things, we had the RevOps team, we had the digital experience team and then maybe in the last like three years, it just became very clear that the brand and the content were like critical defining factors, that you couldn't actually make any of this stuff work if you didn't have good brand alignment. So we built a kind of brand and content strategy agency. That sort of is all part of this. So this was kind of where we were, have been, with these kind of four critical point solutions and we have this kind of understanding of how they all like work together.
Speaker 2:And so a couple of years ago we sold a new thing that was like we call it a holistic retainer and the idea was like you would buy like a block of hours it's like 100 hours a month and we would give you whatever you want and you want, you need creative work, you need data work, you need like advertising work, like we'll just do whatever you want, and it was really easy to sell. People really seemed to like it. And it was like a horrible experience, like a terrible failure and mistake in most cases because the client's priorities were not super well organized, our priorities were not super well organized and the clients would kind of put their hands into the cookie jar and the hours would just evaporate and it would put our CSMs in this horrible position where a client stakeholder would say I need my landing page to be done by Thursday. It was going live on Thursday and our CSM would say I'm so sorry, if you want that to go live, you have to pay us $5,000 more. And it was a horrible extortion-y feeling for everyone our internal teams and the clients.
Speaker 2:So we scrapped this product painfully and eventually kind of came to this new product which is actually really instead focused on right-sizing the engagement with the need.
Speaker 2:Which is to say, instead of trying to level up an organization from, like you know, level 101 of their paid search to level 501 and become like incredibly sophisticated, you're doing offline conversion, importing, you're like doing all these things Can we just level the entire go-to-market up by one step.
Speaker 2:So your problem might not be that you need the world's best ad architecture Like you might need just a good ad architecture but also, like a good report, a good data system, like a good asset, you know something like that. So we built this maturity model basically to align on where folks actually are and what's valuable for them, and so we've been selling these like as a roadmap to figure out where are you on your maturity model, what are the things that make the most sense for you to do next, and it's been really exciting. So very long answer to the story. But like that is a kind of the evolution of DRA from originally a super point solution based org now into a pretty sophisticated like go-to-market agency that kind of matches our client's level of maturity and ability to grow that's really interesting.
Speaker 1:I've certainly been there with the pricing models as well. It's so tough to um to get it right, I suppose, as an agency, and it just makes me think we've done the hourly, you know, pick your hours type thing before and um with people have kind of felt like they're paying lawyers in a way like oh, is everything billable here?
Speaker 2:um, it's not a good like. If you think about zappos and they're like amazing customer experience, like this was not that right. Like no one likes paying their lawyer, you know what I mean. It's like did that really take you half an hour? That really take you 45 minutes, you know? And so I think yeah, I think we agree Like it was not a great, not a great customer experience.
Speaker 1:Now I happen to know you've got a background in high stakes poker. Tell me, how has this shaped your analyzing risk? You know, maybe pattern recognition when it comes to marketing and ABM.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think so. I played poker professionally for maybe eight years, like a very formative period of my life, and one of the core things that is maybe the most important takeaway is just to understand that in a variant environment the process matters and the results are not that important. Which is to say, in gambling, you might find yourself in a situation where, due to good process, you will win this pot four out of five times. You can't guarantee perfection, you can't guarantee you'll always win it, but like four out of five times is pretty good. And then you might just lose that pot, win it but like four to five times is pretty good, and then you might just lose that pot over and over and over again for like a year.
Speaker 2:And it's very tempting to say maybe I'm doing this badly, maybe I'm you know not I'm not winning, the results are bad, but the process is actually quite good.
Speaker 2:Like the process is putting you in a really advantageous position and so you're kind of like unable. You need to be able to separate that process from the outcomes. So marketing, for example, especially ABM marketing, with like a smaller audience size, the degree of variance is really high. Like you're trying to catch not just the right person at the right time, but the right person at the right time within a very specific, narrow account, like they're just not that many times that that's going to be the case, and so, understanding that like, oh, we might just blank this for several months at a time before we maybe, like hit the big opportunity that's going to tip us over the edge. So I think there's like a um, uh, there's, there's something to be said about like understanding and being tolerant of like risk and variance and that kind of thing that I think is different when you come from a gambling background. So I think that's a huge thing.
Speaker 2:And the other thing is just emotionally not to get too high or too low. I think it's tempting to be ecstatic when you're closing a bunch of business and you're hitting all your numbers and to be like in despair when you're missing your numbers and so forth. And in gambling you're just kind of always on a curve in some sense, and so being comfortable being on the curve, I guess, is another way of putting it.
Speaker 1:Put it that way, they do feel like very similar things, don't they? The poker and the marketing that's really interesting. I love that. Take on it. Marketing that's really interesting. I love that, take on it. My last question for you if you could go back in time, what is one piece of advice you would give yourself?
Speaker 2:One piece of advice I would give myself. Going back in time. That's, you know, not deep at all or anything like that. You know that's that's challenging. I think so in a funny sense, like a bunch of my job has changed from being a marketer to more being a leader, like I still do a lot of marketing, but it's it's more about like leading people at this point in a lot of ways, and I think if I could go back in time, I would have like told myself to be a little, allow myself to be more vulnerable and to lead more from a position of, like, transparency and honesty and sometimes that's really hard Like it actually means, you know somebody is not, you know, performing up to the standard and like there's an impulse to be like I want to provide discipline and I want to like, you know, like be hold their feet to the fire, kind of thing.
Speaker 2:But in actuality it's like I'm kind of just anxious, like I am worried and this person is actually on my side, like they're, they're on my team, and so being able to change the picture from, from one of which, like, is sort of more like confrontational, to one that's more collaborative, I think starts from a position of personal, personal vulnerability which is also the truth in sales and in, like, interacting with people in general like one of my favorite interview questions is just anything that the person doesn't know, just to see if they say they don't know, because if they tell me that they don't know, I I'm going to trust them forever. You know what I mean, and so, um, so, yeah, I think I think like, um, that's probably, uh, probably one of the places I would start. Um, I would also like I learned a lot of this from hiring a coach and I think, uh, I would probably simplify things by just going back in time and telling myself to hire a coach much earlier, because there's a lot to learn.
Speaker 1:Love that. I think managing people is one of the hardest things in a business. So, yeah, that was really good advice actually. Andrew, thank you so much for being on the show. I really appreciate all the insights into ABM. I've certainly learned a few things. I've been inspired to go and try some other things. So, yeah, um yeah, I really appreciate our chat and I think that the audience will learn a lot from it. Thank you so much, see ya.
