 Hi. My name is Nathan Roach. I'm the Marketing Director at Accelerant. We're an agency for agencies here in the Drupal ecosystem. And I wanted to share with you what we've learned about account-based marketing, which is quite, oh, sorry, good? A little louder. Who here has heard of ABM or account-based marketing before? Hands? Okay. All right. And who out of those who have just raised their hands have tried it? Okay, good. Disclaimer. I am not an expert at account-based marketing. We're trying this out and I'm going to share with you some of the tactics, tools, and techniques that we've tried. Some of those results and I'll openly talk about what we feel isn't going so well. This is the team. I'm not the one architecting this whole thing. At Accelerant, we have Piyush, Madura, Shirayoshi Shank, and Priyasha, each of them with their own roles all contributing to making account-based marketing at Accelerant something that could work. So I could never do it on my own for sure. How did this start? Well, sales and marketing, we have a very interesting relationship typically and traditionally, right? And this approach to marketing will not work if these teams are siloed. And my leadership at Accelerant recognized this early on and actually sent myself and my sales director on what we call our honeymoon trip. We went from London to Melbourne. We started in India and spent all this time together talking, going to conferences, and aligning what our perspective is on how this approach could work and what it would take to bring it together. So the first thing I would say is that this cannot just be a marketing-led initiative. This has to be a collaborative effort and that alignment has to be there from the very beginning between marketers and salespeople. What is account-based marketing? Well, you can see here that, I mean, this is a typical flip-my-funnel visual, wherein you see on the left a traditional approach to demand-based marketing, right? Typical marketing funnel, let's say. Account-based marketing, in a sense, inverts this. The mentality is flipped. You can see that you rather start with a list of accounts, high-value accounts, and your marketing operations flows from that from the beginning, not the definition of a loose audience and then creating content from awareness consideration and decision throughout that funnel in order to convert them at the end. Rather, account-based marketing starts with the accounts named and known at the beginning. So why, I mean, why do this? What are the benefits? There are numerous ones up here and you can see a lot of them are quite similar. For sales, alignment. Sales teams don't feel that they get the right support from marketing teams, the right leads, the right collateral, the right message. Marketing teams have difficulty planning campaigns that are outside of sales priorities because ultimately our job as marketers is to, you know, produce qualified leads to the sales team to drive revenue. There are many, many different reasons and headaches that this can solve and reasons to pursue it. And we found that it is a process. It is a crawl-walk run process. It isn't something that you can just jump into with your team and a tool stack and within a month you figured it out. This transformation will take a long time. Lots of trial and error. I hope we're probably towards the far end of crawl at this point by no means are we anywhere near run. Learn from the mistakes from other companies like some of the ones I'll share today and maybe your transformation to executing this campaign will be a bit faster than ours. Two things. At the end we learned these two things that adopting a process, this campaign, this approach to campaigning, there's virtue in pursuing it just to stimulate a change in priorities. It's not that you're going to take account-based marketing and at the end all of the results are going to be crystal clear with all the metrics you want but if you go on the journey your teams will be more focused and more aligned and that process is the means to get to that end and we found that even though we're not seeing right now the perfect results that we expected it has changed our mindset totally as a company certainly as a revenue team and it also helps you to ask is what I'm doing right now really valuable is the activity that I'm pursuing today this email that I'm sending or this workflow that I'm building or this landing page that I'm launching what is the end who are we trying to communicate with and you know that from the very beginning because you've started with a list of identified accounts you go from how do we communicate with our target marketplace to how do we communicate with the right account to how do we communicate with the right people at that account in this sense it's very humanizing you go through this process that goes from a spray and pray approach to messaging and you get down to the level of the individual the issues so many tactics budgets it's expensive success by accident is one thing I mean you'll run this these campaigns and great things will happen but not the great things that you intended or expected one of those things was our linked in valor ship for example we didn't expect it to go up because of more frequent linked in publishing but it did and and and of course shifting morale exhaustion with trying something new and getting sales and marketing constantly to read a line and the line and the priorities you agreed upon and not get distracted by an events calendar or the latest idea right but first we had to get organized we brought agile practices to the marketing team because before we weren't doing this we use Jira at our company for development projects but the marketing team never wanted to touch it for just so many reasons and we forced ourselves into this transformation and spend good for us it wasn't easy but now we're running marketing sprints and using the same product to that our development teams use and we have internal resources for agile training so that helped and if you work at a development company using agile methods this can be easier because they can help you to do it we we had to align our KPIs and set goals sales goals marketing goals how marketing team members contribute to those goals quarterly yearly annually and these KPIs for these roles are aligned on closing that new business meaning that marketers to have dollar amounts associated with their activities if you're using an account-based marketing approach you can at least factor the basics and track as you go but without these goals in sight it's a bad idea to begin for us we segmented our let's say account groupings in different ways we do a lot of business with Acquia and Acquia partners as an agency for agencies so we divided our tiering between Acquia partners and not Acquia partners and we were able to break down our tiers with parameters that allowed us to or organize these lists of target accounts because not every list of account of accounts are going to be treated the same there are going to be certain attributes and similarities for example that you have to consider when you're launching your campaigns this is Shashankar our growth analyst and when I asked him what the most significant takeaway has been for him regarding this approach he said it's been about team alignment he worked in sales previously and now was on our marketing team full-time so it was great to have someone from the sales world joined to become a marketer and and he saw that that that alignment really helped and certainly coming from a different team he was able to bring a sales perspective into marketing that we previously didn't have I'm going to get into some of the tools and techniques generally this is how we started some of the the tools that we use to isolate the right lists to track progress we are actually moving now from HubSpot COS over to so that will be interesting and lead forensics and lead feeder I would suggest looking into both of them has allowed us to track and maintain whether or not our message is resonant and we're reaching the accounts that we've chartered to reach that makes sense so this was our beginner stack and we were using our HubSpot dashboard to track engagement across tiers so we built in HubSpot away to see our contacts at these accounts visiting these landing pages opening these emails engaging on our platform and ultimately spitting out these reports which are segmented by tiers to show how we're doing in our campaigns you can do that in HubSpot but you can do that in other technologies like Motic for example this is a lead feeder dashboard just to show you an example these are companies that visited accelerants website just recently and it's matching the data within lead feeder the lead that comes in so these are not converted accounts these are people who work at these companies who are visiting our site and you can isolate where they're coming from and where they're going on your website sort of track performance so if I'm running an account-based marketing campaign and I'm targeting a handful of accounts am I seeing in this tool that the individuals that we want to be visiting our platform and engaging with our content are they coming how long are they staying is it working it's a way to mark your website audience with the strategy of your campaign right so this is an ad group example everyone knows that LinkedIn is becoming pay-to-play right you if you're just publishing content on LinkedIn and you're not targeting audiences and boosting that content you are going to stagnate and others who are putting a budget behind it they're going to accelerate much much faster and I would say that if you spend all week creating a piece of content or coordinating content for a campaign and your man hours are going into this and the designers hours are going into this etc. and you're producing then a piece of content which you'll then just publish and send out there into the ether and hope that it does well it's non-contextual and you wasted all of that time and all of that effort to just publish something which maybe gets three likes from people you really don't care about versus creating content which is highly strategic and targeted maybe short or maybe more affordable a part of your budget is going to be promoting that to the right audience right and then tracking the results of those ads for example or native LinkedIn posts it's just an example of uploading a list isolating a list of target companies or account lists and individuals at these accounts and if this sounds complicated you can simply search this and see that LinkedIn gives you the steps one after the next so it's not complicated it's it's very very easy they give you the spreadsheet and the parameters of what to upload and you build your lists and they match it and you run your campaign but these are a few things that are interesting so in October we looked at our LinkedIn follower count and we were retrospecting and saw that we had over at that point 5,000 followers or is the previous October here before we had 500 followers on LinkedIn and this was perhaps success by accident maybe because we were increasing our publishing on LinkedIn and our activity but we found that that activity was resonant to audiences and that it was reflected in fact they are following us you can see on the right there is an ad that we ran particularly targeting Aquians regarding what we do with their teams as an awareness approach to our partnership and you can see the amount of reactions and engagements all from this this target account so if you do your list building well and follow the LinkedIn parameters that's the sort of engagement that you can see at a particular company on the top you can see a piece of content over a period of time that had no LinkedIn ad budget and then you can see the change on the bottom of that same piece of content only with with a budget behind it boosting it as a native piece okay first your target audience right this is how you would begin and then you would focus on the biggest accounts in terms of big in terms of relevance to you within that group and then within those accounts key people because decision influencers and decision makers ultimately this will distill down to a handful of people right that go into buying your product and then move together with sales and not in silos so start with an audience then go to the companies then look at the people working at those companies that you're looking to converse with and then move together with sales to make that happen this is Prashya our marketing operations manager and she's she's seen that our efforts now moving together we've seen like some of the examples I just shared real results where before we were struggling with just typical inbound marketing lead gen this feels more targeted and the reports are more meaningful okay so there's something called an abm play and this is like like a campaign or an approach so what you see here is lead to opportunity that means that they're in the system and they're a lead and you're looking to convert that lead into an opportunity right and there could be let's say a campaign of content topics that you could expose them to sequentially and target them with sequentially that would nurture them from one stage to another stage right so this is another way of organizing your campaigns are they a lead and you're looking to convert them to an opportunity or are they an opportunity and you're looking to to close that opportunity right so there are different approaches that you can use this we actually have not started yet and I know the sounds complicated and lots of spreadsheets and details this is part of the the the concern when you start abm that you can tactically just fractionate and go everywhere and then get nothing done at all this actually in all honestly we have not started to do yet simply because we're focused on the baseline of operations and we have to be careful how we further segment our campaigns and approaches or we'll try to do all things and then get nothing done if you have a larger team perhaps that that could work better for you abm content planning so this is our old content plan i mean maybe this looks familiar to marketers here who were responsible for blogging and running calendars based on let's say seo strategies where you are isolating the type of content description of each piece the keywords that you want to include and you kind of rinse and repeat and cycle through and then when the time comes you go to another slew of topics does this process look familiar to any of the marketers here and how many of you are mapping buyers journeys or you're looking at content planning from the perspective of where your prospect is on their journey to closure okay and another you can plan content topics like this it's a great way to organize it and you can see here right the way our old buyer's journey was sort of like a topic generator and the new one it it's it's similar but it's a little bit more targeted and it begins with an icp and then we're able to use let's say the sections of this buyer's journey to plan frequency let's say in the beginning you need more awareness pieces and you find towards the end you simply need a few bottom of funnel content pieces in order to close them it can help you to organize priorities in the calendar and it keeps all the topics focused with your accounts in sight the the temptation is well each account each company is unique therefore each company should have their own buyer's journey right each company is unique with their own teams let's let's create a buyer's journey for each company and content and we'll send them on that nurturing path well good luck with that maybe your team is bigger than mine but it would be impossible to fractionate down to the company that content rather that's why we grouped in tiers right in order to do this so we have let's say three calendars tier one tier two tier three do you see how you can simplify it this way is that real abm well they they're calling it abm light which i think like i said is on the far side of that crawl phase maybe there are ways to accelerate and automate some of this but in terms of content creation and content planning we don't see another way to do it um we would waste too many man hours trying to accomplish all of those things okay the content board so i already had mentioned that we um transition to agile marketing as a framework in our department which is great because then you can take that buyer's journey and then you can plan out with sprints how long it's going to take to have a complete cycle for the tier for the tiered campaign from awareness to decision so you're able to plot out and estimate timelines this way and then track it through sprint cycles so you can answer a question when is the campaign for tier three going to be done when is that content going to be ready you can break it down into sprints and you can estimate that time okay so madura's point here regards um getting granular and specific and understanding our buyers and our customers the the topics that you're writing about or the videos you're creating the webinars or podcasts that you're planning when you're thinking about the accounts and the people at the accounts and what's resonant to those individuals you get very specific into what the content is really going to be about it isn't we're going to write broadly about this case study or this aspect of how we delivered something or produced this white paper and then they'll convert and the leads will come no you're thinking does this person or these this group of people at this company what will they make of this it's like a sanity check and that's what i said in the beginning that this process enables you to think and it's just what i'm doing right now really affecting that bottom line that kpi that i have will this piece of content really be resonant to this audience or are we making a mistake in our our planning and social media of course can be a huge a huge help and i'm not so sure if the marketers here work at an agency or a larger company do you both work at agencies the ones who raise their hands yes so i would ask them do you find that most of your most relevant traffic is coming in through social media channels or organic organic okay but if you were to target let's say on linkedin for example these audiences with a paid campaign and include that in your budget would you be able to plan a more robust social media strategy would you be able to with the visuals with the content would you be able to convert because you're putting your stuff directly in front of your predetermined buyer versus banking on your buyer's potential web searching habits okay um yes yes these are all very inspiring and uh i think every single marketing tactic or strategy that's ever been created both some kind of increase in performance but but certainly you will know very soon whether or not your content is resonant to your target audience if you're running a linkedin campaign with that content in front of that audience you will know whether or not it's working or not so the performance comes down to how good are you at failure and then representing that content or reworking your approach to then seem more impressions that turn into clicks and visits our social media strategy right now is look we've got this isolated list of accounts what well what do we do and this is sort of interesting because if you're looking to target individuals at accounts let's say an awareness campaign i want this department at this company to know that we exist and to know what we do right so how do i do that do i tag their account on twitter and like publish their most recent blog say we see you you know we see you come like us follow us i mean odds are the department you're trying to reach is not behind that twitter handle you're gonna have to go deeper into the individuals that work at this company to see what they're publishing if they're publishing where that is maybe it's medium and maybe it's on forum somewhere else at that part of the research it's it's quite important so these are for example things we look for parameters do they do this content reflect our culture and values does it emphasize partnership is it Drupal centric is there an element with our ecosystem in aquia shared circles or networks which we pull on maybe they go to the same conferences like you all hear and if so we should look at the individuals that fall under these parameters and find out what they're producing what they're writing and if it's new and newsworthy sharing that out and that is a way to begin an awareness campaign on social right so this is basic social media 101 but would it look different for you if you were to start with those accounts from the beginning it becomes a little difficult because it turns out that what we market towards let's say agencies as our core marketplace a lot of agencies don't write really great content they're busy writing content for their clients so you you sort of have to factor in and think what are they doing or how can I find out more about what they're doing that's interesting how do I communicate that how do we make that resonant to the right the right people and what am I publishing on my platform am I using this target accounts list as a check for the kind of thing that I'm going to read to you maybe there should be parameters social media practices that you outline which aren't just about best practices generally but best practices in light of the audience you have to be reaching this is Shirayu she's our content marketing associate and she heads up social media and from her perspective being able to see our channels that we see more engagement from the right audience is something we really haven't seen before because for so long we were simply publishing reposting what we were writing what we thought would be resonant now that it's more targeted and more focused we can see those likes those retweets from the right people I'm as I said not an expert but these folks here are I would say follow them on social media and follow what they're writing join their newsletters does anyone recognize any of these folks up here this is a new and emerging means of marketing and these five are some of the first to be really writing about it and open sourcing that content okay so another thank you to Matt at Burn in Gray I don't know maybe some of you know him he doesn't go to Drupal cons yet but Matt Skinner that's his Twitter handle he's really helped us as a consultant to focus our efforts with account-based marketing and you can find all sorts of people out there who are doing this and and trying this out he's been our our guy and it's been quite productive so far well thanks thanks everybody can I answer many questions because most of you here have not used account-based marketing before when we do we need to speak Oh okay you have to walk up and oh sorry to make it awkward and now everyone has to line up please go ahead very nice talk probably this is more about details is what I understand you talked about getting to the right person within the account and they're talking so right LinkedIn if you look at LinkedIn you have sales navigator like my team sort of getting their heads around how it works how do I reach out in a particular large account how do I reach out to the CMO or the CXO right reaching with a specific message look at how he's going to respond do you have any thoughts on how that works right I have a few I think the temptation is to bring an outbound approach into LinkedIn where it's well I'll just email them or email them and I think we all know those of us who are on LinkedIn that sponsored LinkedIn posts and your inbox filling up with even sometimes relevant content is not exactly a way to reach you personally it's simply just another email inbox which we now have to manage and that marketers are now saturating with their content so I would say I'm not I don't have tons of advice on how to do it perfectly but I can tell you what I think you shouldn't do and that would be to take an outbound approach into email and start reaching out to these people keep in mind it's not like you can start with a group of 20 accounts and then cycle through emailing all of their CEOs in one week it's a well nobody answered I guess I have to find another 20 accounts that that wouldn't be good it's a long game so I would say it's it's also one of mathematics if you if you know a company is of a certain size and it meets the parameters of the minimum LinkedIn campaign can you figure out the odds that someone did see or did click are you using lead forensics or lead feeder or other tools to see are people visiting from this account and who are they are you running content with you know really resonant and relevant content for download that will then capture who they are to do the work for you that's inbound of course applying inbound to it but I suppose the only solid piece of advice that I have is do not go aggressive outbound on LinkedIn if you're trying to do account-based marketing anybody else I know it's kind of weird walking up to that microphone in the middle of the room well I'm who has been following this is this the first time raise your hand if it's the first time account this is the first time you've heard of account-based marketing okay well I'm very happy to be the first to cause you a world of trouble and trying to figure this out don't get discouraged and I would say just as my last piece of advice the process of trying to get there will be helpful because your sales and marketing teams they have to align even to begin the conversation it's a great way for marketing to approach sales and sales to approach marketing let's do this thing together that thing that you need to do together would be something like this so Nathan would you say that this works better for like larger companies or is there like a certain level that you need to be at right sort of start you know working really well for your work well the the as we said LinkedIn is really pay to play and the kind of budgets that you need for let's say targeted ads is expensive so to creating the content for those targeted ads but my team were only what four or five people and I can tell you our marketing budget isn't through the roof so and even if you were to do this and of course there's LinkedIn biddings it all depends on your industry it's all contextual as to who you are and the kinds of clients that you're looking to get but if we can do it so can you four or five people and it's not the only thing they're doing so anybody else I'm really glad that this is a new topic to I think most people here follow these folks they know what they're talking about in a way that I don't so and if you if you have any other questions after this please find me after or find me on LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever I'd be happy to help and to share anything that we went over here with you and to talk about it thanks