 Felly rydym yn bwysig ar y gymryd yw'r cyffredin AM, rhai o'r ciam ac yn bwysig ar yr edrych. A ar y dyma'r ffordd eich bod wedi bod gyntaf â'r gyffredin AM wedi'i gweld, mae'n gŵr arferwad, ond hynny ar y dda i'n morch yn ei gwelio. Mae'r trwy ddod yn fawr nad o Woni'n ddiffyn i ddod yn ddif 이걸nwch ar y cyffredin AM. Ond yn yr adlunydd, nad oedd yn y cymdeithlu ein tym yn pob ar ddim gyrthwyr ond Andy because it's only fair that we do that. Andy's had a really interesting career to date. He's still a young man, but he started out in the creative sectors, managing and co-producing for events and running events for local artists in the creative sector. Much of that was around comedy as well. When he moved into marketing, he took the typical route, as a lot of people do, which is getting involved in a junior role, and then he worked his way up into having several management roles within marketing, which is where he is today. I'm not going to talk too much about that because it's probably something I've missed in there, but the key thing really also to mention is that Andy's worked across different industries as well, including education, hospitality, and, as I mentioned, the creative industries as well. Andy, do you want to jump in and let me know whether I've missed anything there? Hi, Johnny. No, that's a nice summary. That's more flattering than I expected, but it's a nice introduction, and thanks for having me. No worries. Thanks for joining. Where are you today? I'm in Nottingham at the moment, so I'm not too far away from where I typically work, so yeah, it's nice, but it's October, isn't it? It's getting grey now, so I'm talking to you from my home office, and it looks a bit dark and dingy, but yeah. Okay, so is that something that you normally do, how I'm working, or are you in the office quite a bit as well? I'm in the office probably, actually, to be honest, most of my time. I love being in the office, actually. I do prefer to go in when I can because I think part of what I get to do with my job, especially working in marketing, is all communication, and my superpower is that in-person communication. That's how I get stuff done. That collaboration with people, I think good marketers are really good collaborators. They understand each other because they have to understand an audience, right? So I like being in the office. I like collaborating with people in person. I'm glad you mentioned superpower. I want to get on to that, but before we do that, I think it's only fair that we ask you to talk a little bit about account-based marketing, what it is, and how you got into that. I know that having done a few sessions with university students recently, account-based marketing is kind of a hot topic, but not everybody's aware of it. So do you want to explain what that is? Yeah, I'll tell you what. It's actually a pleasure to talk about it because it's something that's kind of growing in a lot of businesses, and I'm quite nerdy about it. It's been probably in the last three or four years to school for me, and I've thrown my job into it, if you like, but all my colleagues get bored of me talking about it. So it's nice to talk to someone about it. It actually wants to listen or finds it interesting. So account-based marketing, you're right. It's very fashionable. It's been bought into now by a lot of businesses, but it's been around a while, but I think it's taken a while for that traction or that kind of businesses to really understand the return of a model like account-based marketing. So it's given you a very top-level overview. Account-based marketing is a highly personalised approach, typically lended to business to business marketing, which focuses on how you, as a business, can identify and target real key accounts for your business and determine the most suitable accounts that will give you the highest return, the highest value by making them your customer. So it's the ones you really want. The mountain, the Everest, the big brand, that's the big account, that's the big company I really want to have as a customer. And it's about creating a personalised approach to really give them a tailored journey and win them over. So it's a methodology that works very closely with sales and marketing. It only works when you've got that true collaboration between those departments. And it's about making sure you're very, very focused on the type of account you want and the number of accounts you want to do in a very personalised way. Rather than, I suppose, what could be seen as more of a traditional marketing approach, which is a bit more the term goes, pray and spray, right? Let's put that out there to a broad audience. Let's see how they land or engage. This is about going, no, we've made very conscious decisions to target a particular person. We've then learnt about them. We've then discovered who they are, what they use, how they do it, and who the people in that organisation are that will make decisions about working with us as a company, and we will then target them with very tailored messaging. And the reason why ABM is so popular is because when it works, you can afford to throw loads of resource at it and you'll get a huge return on investment. But it's high-state gamble at the start because for an audience to do that, you basically have to sign up for a long-form marketing approach, which is why ABM has been what kind of increasingly growing businesses now because after two or three years of businesses trying this approach, they're starting to see all these massive accounts that they wanted the highest value start to come back, but it does take one to two to sometimes three years. So it is going increasingly popular and you're seeing more and more companies take on this approach. And as a result, you're probably seeing lots of job roles start to come into the market like ABM specialist or ABM manager, and that's where my role has grown as well. ABM in a nutshell, very tailored. It all kind of throws towards what a true ABM is, which is a one-to-one marketing. We are them. They are those. They are the people we want to market to, one-to-one. And that's what I've been working on actually in my role in the job where I work now for the last two years. So it sounds complicated to somebody who isn't a marketer like myself and perhaps somebody who's not yet worked in marketing. So you talked there about the interaction with sales department and that kind of piece having some work and it feeds into the marketing aspect and decision making, presumably. So on that basis, are there certain skills and certain capabilities that you feel that you need in order to be successful as an ABM? Yeah, so firstly I would say a good understanding of the basis of marketing generally is helpful, right? Because I think what people see ABM as or account-based marketing as is, let's take our normal marketing approach or business as usual and then let's get far more strategic. Let's get far more focused. So having a good understanding of how to build marketing campaigns is crucial. Having a good understanding of marketing theory, and these are the things I learned when I did a simple course, right? That the fundamentals of how marketing works is great. Then the rest is very much a lot of communication, stakeholder management skills. As I said at the start, I like going in because I like to communicate people and collaborate. The best marketers are the ones that can really work with stakeholders and hold great conversations and collaborative moments and workshop and collaborate with each other, right? So communication is key. And then also you're looking at a lot of project management skills. When you're looking at account-based marketing, you're looking at going, I'm going to select maybe up to five accounts in a year, I can really truly focus in that tailored approach. So to do that, I'm lining up five big projects and I'm going to manage these and I've got to show the results and I've got to be really granular. So project management and organisation is really key. Brilliant. So you talked about anybody able to manage a certain amount of accounts and it being of an investment for an organisation at the front end, but then the rewards are there to be had. And I saw a stack recently about organisations spend the most on account-based marketing than any other type of marketing, which is interesting, definitely for you. And I suppose what I'm going with this is AI, right? So AI is coming now. So does that change the landscape a little bit? Because if there's a capacity challenge, then is AI supporting that? And how is it impacting account-based marketing? 100% it will change things, but it's not something we need to be scared of. It's about how we utilise that. And it's the same with anything. Like we've had a lot of discussions in our workplace about AI and the use of AI in technologies, mainly because we're also where I work as a tech company and we're looking at nudes, their tech and software and processes, right? And how that helps people, not needs to worry people. And one of the biggest barriers is that with ABM, because the amount of resource you have to put into an account, you can only focus on it effectively. So the use of AI and technology to expand that resource or start to automate tasks is huge. For example, I have a team where we will select our accounts and we go, okay, we're going to build a tailored web page for that account. We're going to build a tailored brochure for that account. We're going to put them through a tailored email journey so they get the right messages at the right time. We're going to dedicate one of our dedicated sales or business development representatives to email them and call them over a period. And we're going to build that whole roadmap in front of them. So that's a lot of work to put into one account. So if you can utilise AI, and a lot of companies are looking at this to go, how do we kind of cookie-cut to this approach? So even though it's very personalised and tailored, really you just need to make one model and then the AI will start to spin out the variations. So I want to target one business and I built that, but actually what the AI done is just rebadget, rename it, and then make suggestions for you on how you can then tailor that. So AI will never fully replace human creativity or the ability to think in the way that we think. But what it can do is automate the process of redrafting or reworking pieces that can save a market of time so we can then focus on the things that we need to do. There's probably a bit more cerebral, or a bit more creative that AI can't currently do. Okay, bullet. So it's more about enhancing and supporting. It's speeding up processes and getting rid of the burden of the admin I think is probably the one. The stuff that robots probably should be doing and can do. So how are you developing yourself in that space then? Is it something that you look at yourself or do you have a team that does that for you, or are you using tools that are doing it for you? Well, we're very early on in our journey where we are with what we do at MHR, but we're already seeing great results on what we're trying to do. We've been focusing on the last two years of just building the most appropriate model and as the team grows trying to show how we can kind of facilitate more or do more with that work. But one of the things we're always conscious of is looking at what is the tech stack that we're using or what are the pieces that we're going to do that they're going to tell that work from us. But really, it's a tough one, but because every and every business and every marketer will find this when they come into the world of work is going, how can I do as much as possible of my time in resource and do it well? Because people only ever want more. The problem we have with ABM is because it's worked so well, you might work with a sales team, you might work with different stakeholders across the business and go, that's so great for that personalised brochure. We should do that for everyone. And what we can't is just physically impossible to do all that work. So we have to look at it and go, okay, this worked, this has got that result. What can I do with the team? So I say to myself and someone else and we're looking to grow our team because we've seen success in what we're doing and I work for a fantastic business that wants to invest in where we're growing. So I'm very lucky and privileged to have that. What we do is take our wins and go, how do we take that win? How do we carbon copy it? And how do we all start to automate that? So the work, we're not really building the wheel every time. That's the main trick. How do we learn from what we've done and not have to go through the same process? We can just make it easier and easier and easier and we can do more and more and more. And as the results come in, we can throw that back into a team and grow it. And that's why ABM has so much potential and that's why businesses invest so much. Because when you get it right, it throws way more money back at you than what you put into it. Brilliant, brilliant. And it's not all about AI. Obviously, AI is an enabler within that. So if anybody's listening and thinking, I don't understand AI or do I have to now go and learn about AI, absolutely not. What Andy is saying is an enabler. And these things are still being adopted and we still need creative marketers. So that sort of thing then suggests to me, your response suggests to me, then you need to be a bit better at marketing strategy and a bit better at marketing campaigns, is that fair? Yeah, absolutely. Strategy is key. So when I started a couple of years ago in the business that we're working in now, we were all about building an ABM strategy. And the business was saying, we want to start doing ABM. Andy, you've come in, we'd like you to lead this, develop this. The first thing I did was read more books about ABM, read more blogs, go to webinars like this about what people are doing, learn from other businesses. And then it was really strategy built. You can't just run at it and start delivering stuff or trying to create content. You need to understand the world before you try and change it or do it. So, and my role now, as it's grown, as we've got an active new business ABM programme running, is actually to step above that, allow people to drive that and go, what's the strategy? How do I keep changing that strategy? How do I evolve strategy? How do I bring that strategy and move into another part of the business? So a good example is we run a strategy for all the new business we want to collect. But now we're looking at what we've got all these customers. Surely we should be really personalised and tailored to them. How do we build a whole new strategy from that? So my career has grown from doing the doing and building and doing all the nitty-gritty writing and creative stuff and building those programmes to get that works. You can do that now. We'll make it easier. We'll automate it. And I'll take the bigger picture. That's good. Before we open up the floor to more questions, not from me this time, just to remind everybody that you can answer, sorry, ask your questions. So just use the question mark icon within the platform and then type anything in there and we'll do our best to get to those. Just one more from me, Andy, because I like hearing the sound of my own voice, but you talked about superpower earlier. And that's really interesting to me because the whole employability piece, and if any of my colleagues have listened to this, they'll probably think you're talking about employability again. But for me, employability is much about having the technical capability to be a good marketer, but also touching on some of those transferable capabilities, skills, knowledges and behaviours. And me knowing just for those that are listening, I actually know Andy because I used to work with Andy and we've kept in touch ever since. So I know Andy is being a considerate person. I also think he's really creative as well and he's a really kind person. So Andy, I hope you don't mind me saying that, but the reason why I wanted to bring that up is I wanted to just ask around, I suppose, do you use that? Is that something that is your superpower in your daily life in work? 100% and it helps, right? If your approach to life and your personality comes into your work and you can use the best parts of you to try and get the things done. Because one, you'll enjoy that work more. But two, there are definitely different parts of the world of marketing that require certain skills that some people might call soft skills. Actually, there's nothing soft about them. They are really integral things that people need to develop. And that's where you really succeed in your career because lots of people can learn technical stuff. Lots of people can learn process and lots of people can learn ways that a business wants to work, but it's who you are as a person that helps rethink how they do or become a bit more strategic and push things along. And that's where marketers, I understand this is why I love working in marketing because I think you're in a perfect place to really impact that because at the end of the day, I remember doing my Sim level 4, day 101. Marketing is about being rich. Can you explain what the Sim level 4 is because people might not know? So when I started, as you explained earlier, I came in from a ground level up. I went from an events world and a production world into marketing and I wanted to retrain and I worked for an educational institution at the time which encouraged me to do a Sim course. I did a Chartered Institute of Marketing level 4, which was a foundation course, so it was an undergraduate level. That was based on three modules. I did very much an introduction to integrated marketing. I did a foundation marketing module. I learned a lot of terminology and how that works. And then I did a module at the end of digital marketing and the upcoming trends about that work. And it was brilliant because actually I found because I had a certain experience just through my life that I knew a lot of some of this stuff but I could now really put it into context and put it into a and it was brilliant. It was really good. Best thing I did because it really gave me the foundations I need to grow as a marketer. And that's where I got to where I am. So really recommended doing it. I would recommend anyone to do it but it enabled me to understand what skills I have as a person, my personal skills that can be applied to marketing. Number one, communication. Huge. We are communicators. That's what marketers are. We communicate what a business is trying to say to our target audience but also we have to communicate what the business wants to do around the business and we have to communicate to sales people and product people and finance people and HR people. Like this is what our brand is. Now you might not understand it but it's my job to make sure you do. So that everyone becomes a marketer really because we're all talking off the same hym sheet because we want to make sure that the way that we're perceived as a brand internally is how we're also seen externally, right? If that's what we want to achieve. So marketers are communicators. So my superpower is the ability to walk up to anyone I want and talk to them and use my niceness that you described. I wouldn't just come on here and call myself nice but I'm glad you did and build relationships and collaborate with people and understand that okay and I'm very lucky. I work in a company called MHL. We have quite a large marketing department and there are people in that department that are experts in data and market research. There are people that are experts in product and what we're bringing into the market and there are people who are experts in building campaigns and strategy like the team I work in and there's designers and there's writers and it's a gift. I love it, right? Well my job is to be able to go. I understand what you need to do, what you need to do, what you need to do and I have to make sure that what we're trying to put out there as a business are lines of who you are and how you think and how you work. So not only am I marketing really to my target audience but I've got to use my stakeholder communication skills to market to the team to get the project that I want done. So market good communication skills, good stakeholder management is absolutely key and that's that's what I like to think is my superpower, talk to my team, they might tell you differently but that is integral. I think it's also important to actually mention that you don't have to just be like that or be like people like me to be a good marketer. The department I've just described to you is a good example of how you can be way more analytical. I'm a creative, probably very fluffy guy because I like concepts and I like to go, yeah we're going to hear that account of this and we're going to do this branding and it's going to be exciting but some people are like no my what where I get a kick out is going give me all your data, I'm going to look at it, I'm going to read it, I'm going to destroy it, I'm going to throw it into different things and I'm going to nucleate it and I'm going to tell you with real data what we're going to do and my work with people like that and working with people like that helps me understand that you combine those things and you become unstoppable with what you want to do. So you don't have to be you don't have to be creative and fluffy in that kind of text book kind of everything's a vision person, you can be very analytical, you can be very practical, you can be very project led, I work with a lot of people that work with marketing agencies as well as marketing business and businesses with the marketing department, they all think differently, the more marketers you can have that think differently working together is a good thing. Really love that answer, great answer. So I'm going to jump into questions from those that are tuning in live now. First question is what are the key factors to consider when selecting targeted accounts? And then kind of rolling into that question is how do you then know that that targeted account that you've selected is viable and worth spending lots of money and lots of time on? This is crunch point number one, right? You have to get this right and we're still working on it, we will always be working on it, we have to think about it. You need to understand from a top level of your business what your business determines to be the most valuable thing for you. Now, commercial business, privately run independent business, the biggest thing for us is how much money could we potentially get from that customer and the priority will always be who is going to give us the most money if we win that business. So in order to figure that out, you firstly need to decide what factors of an account would justify that high return on investment. I'll give you an example. Say I'm selling a piece of software and I'm selling it to an account based on how many employees they have. So immediately I'm justifying which of the most high value accounts based on how many employees they have because that's where the money comes from. So that's one thing we could be doing. You also need to look at it in terms of what your business goals and your business strategies are. Now, if you're a public business or if you're a charity, it might not be about revenue. It might be about brand association. It might be about going, okay, what's really important to us is that we win over like-like businesses or businesses that share our values so that they're the people we're going to target first. So what you have to first do is identify what's the most valuable element for your business in terms of what a perfect customer looks like. And then in order to target them or to whittle that list down to who you should target first, you need to look at which ones are the best match for you already and we do that based on how much you already know or what you no need to know. So, for example, selling tech software here at the moment, I want to know when, what do the people I want already use? And how long have they used that system? What problems and limitations does that system have? And when are they going to come into market? When are they going to be reviewing that? Because if I know that, I suddenly know they've got enough people that's high value and they've got a system where I know its limitations and I know when they're going to look into market. So I can time that person that's going to engage with that account at the right time to go before you come into market. I don't want to let you know that I know you're struggling with this. We have a system that's better. Let's start the conversation before your people need to make a decision on it. So it's about timing. So who they are to you, it's how valuable they are to you. And it's where you think you can do something better for them where they currently are struggling. And if you can identify those elements, you can start to create a pool of people that you think are your strongest hit list. And then the main game after that is timing. In private businesses and selling cycles that I work in, businesses of this size tend to take maybe one to two to sometimes three years to make a decision. So I need to know if I'm going to start a very lengthy ABM process to target an account, I need to know that the system they've got isn't going to run out for another year and a half, two years because if I do it and they're going to run out in six months, they've already made that decision because they've already had a team look at this and I'm just too late and I'm wasting all that resource. Does that help? Yeah, that's fascinating. Love that. What about campaigns then? So if you've gone through all that, you've identified the organisation you want to target, what do you do to create a targeted campaign for a single organisation? There's an interesting thing here because one thing I haven't mentioned was what I'm trying to work with at the moment with what we do is called programmatic account-based marketing. And that is the idea of working with your big pot and then because they engage with you well, you go to a smaller pot and then you go to a one-for-one. So it's the idea that, and this is where ABM stops being a standalone piece of activity and starts becoming business as usual or a method you can use in everyday marketing, is the idea of going, okay, say we have a potential 4,000 people in the world that we could do business with. Why don't we call that our plan of wanting many? That's the world. Why don't we throw that out and why don't we do our normal business as usual activity to them? When they nibble and then there's something there and we know that they kind of tick off that high value of them, let's throw them into a smaller pot and when they nibble with that and we know they work, let's just target them on a one-to-one and that programmatic ABM does that, it creates a funnel that generates your own one-to-one accounts. However, a lot of businesses still focus on just a one-to-one marketing, right, which is a one-to-one ABM. For us, what that looks like is firstly having that machine tell us who are the people that are going to be in market in the three years, so we use that data list and we go right. We know who they're with, we know when they're going to come into market and we know that they're really valuable to us. Looking at a timeline, we will then build a campaign that hits them with a full marketing mix and our marketing mix, and it's different for every business, but we utilize digital comms, so we will look at what we can do to create standalone pieces of our website that no one else can see, but we can send it to them and go, look, we built this for you. This is just your interactive hub, so it's about making them feel special. In the old days, ABM would make them a paper brochure and then mail it to them and hope that they'd read it and go, oh, isn't it nicer that made us this glossy brochure, but for us now it's about digital. Going digital, we can track everything and we have so we can judge intent, so everything that me and my team do is to create websites or eguides or generate or make conversations with sales people or BDR people that everything that goes out, be it an email or anything or a webinar, is tracked, so we can go, John, at this company, open it then, listen to it then, we know he's going to make a decision, so I'm now going to call him up, or now I'm going to see that he's visited the website, so I'm going to say, hi John, great that you did that, lovely to see you downloaded that guide that we wrote for you, I could see Lingard on that page, let me send you something else about that so you can understand more about what we can do for you. It's all got to be digital led, because if we're going to spend so much money and time on these accounts, we need to show that it's where we're going to keep investing based on what they're doing, otherwise we're flying blind and that's why I hate sending letters and posting stuff because you get nothing back, marketers need data. Brilliant, thank you, another question from one of the listeners is about studying alongside your university degree, I mean I don't think I even know this, do you have a marketing degree and did you go to university and study marketing? No, back in then you kind of explained it earlier, back in my events and theatre production days, when I was making events and kind of marketing them about knowing what marketing really was, I did a drama degree, and I learned so much about the communication and the transferable skills, so if you're a creative, especially a lot of all English literature or anything in that world I think, especially in the humanities, your transferable skills into marketing are so strong, do not underestimate the foundational skills you might have, you do not have to do a degree in marketing, obviously it's fantastic if you do, if that's what you know you want to do, oh to be honest, I didn't know what I wanted to do what time I was at university, and then my career's changed and I went back to university, so I did a drama degree, I learned the skills, I did my career and I went on pivoting into marketing, so I went back into a university setting and actually studied while I was at work in my foundation marketing role, so I balanced SIM with my job and it was brilliant because actually applying what I was learning on a week by week basis into my job was brilliant. Brilliant, excellent and Nicky's referring to SIM, so some people know it as CIM, some people know it as SIM but everybody knows it as the Chartered Institute of Marketing, and just to add to that then, I think it's important to let people know that there's different roots into marketing as there are for many careers, but marketing probably more so than many because marketing is everywhere, it's ubiquitous, it's across every industry, it's across every sector and sometimes people stumble into it because if they work with smaller organisations they can tend to be given or gifted the opportunity to do some marketing and promotion for their organisation or brand, so the different ways and like Andy talked about there, if you are thinking about going to university or you are at university and studying marketing or not, it doesn't really matter, there's lots of different options and I'd absolutely encourage you to have a look at what we are doing as an organisation that's at CIM and because people have different ideas about how they want to learn as well, but what CIM does is it produces lots of free content like this which is great and it gets people interested and knowledgeable about things, but also it gives people practitioner experience as well through the qualifications and the modules that we offer and even bite-sized courses and training as well, so don't just think of it as going to university and moving on, but if you are at university bullying you're in a good place as well, there's lots of options for you. I think that's what I found, just from my experience, as a customer of CIM, I learned some foundations that I could just take away with me and it's still to this day, I think it's only the other week I went back and went, but I think one of the first things I learned in terms of marketing strategy and that's my thing, that's what I get nerdy about now, but it's SOSTAC and anyone who does CIM courses you'll learn that first thing and I was like right guys let's go straight back to SOSTAC because whenever I'm down, whenever I'm stuck, the strategy that I learned at CIM will get me out of the problem, so even now I'm years down the line and I think I'm very good at what I do and I'll waffle about being an expert, I'll go back to the basics and go there's the way out of the problem and that was something that CIM gave me and it's something that even if I worked people maybe didn't have that level of experience I used to them and go look this is what you could learn more about this by looking at this stuff. Really and there's no better way of learning things by practicing them, we can all sit and learn about how to do something but unless you apply that so it's really honest and interesting to hear you say that you've still got that textbook and you refer to it and it's useful. Brilliant another question here is in ABM how does the business structure affect the managing accounts? It's very interesting and so with ABM we've talked about the fact that actually we're always looking at the biggest highest value profile accounts as soon as you start to identify them you're getting a lot of senior investment and interest from the business into those and I think what you need to do is be very careful on how you're identifying what the marketing responsibility is for those accounts and what the sales responsibility is for those accounts and then what any other form of the business's responsibility is so you can as a marketer go look I built this program I built this strategy but this isn't I don't own this outright this is a collaboration and it only works from both marketing and sales take equal responsibility so when what you need to do is be very clear on this is a program that's going to achieve this by these dates and this is what this team will do and this is what this team will achieve and that is how you have to report it up but naturally you will find that you will get lots of senior attention on this because these are the things you know it's it's all designed about getting those high value results so for me it's I did a lot of like stakeholder management training in my own work that they could offer me and I learned how I needed to firstly communicate how it works because it's all alien to a lot of people and they don't understand it and some people still don't understand it and that's fine but it was learning how that I what I needed to do weekly or monthly to report upwards to make sure that people understood what was working and what we were doing for these accounts because there's also a lot of perception change you need to do in a business when you're introducing a new way of working because with ABM if I'm saying it's going to take me two years to win this account the immediate thing is well this is going to take too long I don't want results straight away first thing I have to do is communicate to going well I'm not being lazy I'm not doing anything but all of these actions that are happening and that I'm going to report to you are going to give you a big picture of where we're going so stakeholder that stakeholder management is key but you do definitely need to make sure you're communicating to a high level a senior level on this because you will senior stakeholders managers chiefs do not like not knowing what they don't know if they're asked about something and the more you can communicate to them the the detail you're doing without boring them with the stuff they don't need to know the more they can get excited about the the long-term thing you're doing rather than worried that you're not doing anything. Yeah I guess I guess you've got you've got people who are pressing the button in terms of where you apply that the budget and the spend so does that then mean that what you're doing is is centralised is it is it a function that kind of sits in the middle as part of a direct directorate for example? Well for us it's starting to start to grow into its own thing but we we have to recognise it as a marketer I'm in a team that's responsible for lead generation right we want to create new business we want to go out there and get engagement from new businesses so my activity and what I've done is strategies as part of that growth side of things so you'll see job titles going into the marketing world of growth marketer used to be field marketer and these are these are marketers whose job is to build campaigns and go out there and create new business right rather than maybe a product marketer whose job is to understand products and bring them to market or a designer so I'm in a growth field because what I'm doing is bringing in a strategy that's going to get new business that's what I'm doing so I sit within that I sit with a growth team however ABM has been so popular at the business that I work in and they've been so supportive and they've allowed me to grow that into going okay let's stop seeing ABM as just ABM and let's just see it as a strategy and what if you took the same strategy so you've done for new business in the growth space you did it for customers or if you did it for any other thing how do we take this personalised model and we've actually had a real perception shift over the last year from going oh Andy he does ABM to going oh Andy no he does strategic programmes it's just he uses ABM to do that and there's so many other facets and elements of marketing you can do that with as well it's not just ABM but um it's about going let's take your brain and your expertise and apply it to the bigger picture so as a result my team is growing and we're kind of moving away from other stuff because we're taking our knowledge and not trying to do one thing but use the same approach to multiple things and is that is that a conscious thing from a risk point of view and reward yeah so obviously there's risk there if you don't have the results where if you if things work and you get the return people are going to want to invest more into it so the biggest challenge you have if you want to work in account-based marketing or you want to do something with account-based marketing is you have to prepare that it's going to take you a long time to get the results to begin with and you have an awkward hill battle at the start but when those results come in you have to capitalise them and you have to build a reporting model and a strategy that helps show you the progress on the way because otherwise you've gone from zero to a year and a half we will not count it's like well was it really worth it yes because i'm going to show you from day one what we did and how all those led to that final decision once you can prove that to your manager and once you've gone okay this is the biggest business we could ever possibly win and it's given us by no four million pounds right suddenly they go yeah we need to do more of that so that's that the results speak themselves and that's i've been very we're not very lucky we've worked very hard and we've had we have a very supportive management of all this that's seen results and gone let's do more of that we need to grow this brilliant love that and i appreciate the detailed description as well you've given us a lot of insight here into into your world so yeah i appreciate that um what what do you most enjoy about abm um i like that in a way it's quite childish but it's detected right i just feel like i'm a private detector um because and that's and it's really childish so i'm a creative person i i love strategy and i like thinking about how people work and using marketing strategy to kind of get people thinking differently but ultimately i'm like ah i want to feel like i'm in mad men and i'm doing some kind of crazy advertising campaign and it's all fun and i've got full control and what i like about abm is that you can't take you can't target all the same that all these different businesses in the same way you you've got to really do your creative work and your detective work to find out about them and do something that's really clever that speaks to them and resonates them and you can do it really personally and if you're really creative you can get your teeth really stuck in and some of the most fun that we have in my team is going echo we decided we're going to type target account let's say hypothetically john lewis right let's go in their website let's find all those little words that they love using let's pull them out let's use them against them let's find who all the people are that are going to decide if they're going to buy from us and then target them and then find out what they like let's go into their web page and pull out their strategies let's look at all their adverts how can we make some really funny engaging pieces to throw back at them using their own content like it's fun play and you do that spy work you do the detective work and the luxury of abm is it allows you to do that because you have to be so personalized you can't afford to do that in a traditional marketing approach because you need to keep it light and you need to keep it brand level and push yourself out this is about going to hold everything detective then be clever and then hit them with something and see if it lands and I think that's quite exciting that's the most personalized approach i've heard really because that's not only you it's hard getting things that they've used but also to have the foresight and the wit to be humans about it and create something that's novel like that and then to me as well i can from like a comedy background writing theatre background as soon as i can get creative with language and I can make people laugh or I can engage them on a humorous level and I can be human or what I think is like just a bit more different that I get a kick out of doing that sure I imagine I don't always like to be funny Andy you'll have to let me know um the uh what about kind of like learning then so um continuing development really around understanding abm are there any things that you can recommend whether it be physical books audio um videos anything like that um well firstly cim really helps us to that um linked in as your friend to everyone should be using it I know it's not the most fun social media tool sometimes because it's very professional but it's very very good and I've been I'm still to this day reading blogs about abm and the future of AI which is a conversation you've kind of almost had a bit earlier uh there there are books um the one of the best things cim ever did cim did me was give me a reading list when I started the course and I learned all of these look more than all and just went into a tangent um there are lots of good books about abm problem of a book sometimes is that by the time it's published there's something else already new and advancing but to do an I I I bought a book I think it was by the edges on the abm it was fantastic and I would recommend it um if you're quick reading that's okay if you're a slow reader like me I'm completely on board of that one yeah yeah yeah um but there are lots of webinars you can go to um you do you google it's such a it's such a inaccessible topic now that you will not struggle but um yeah there's lots of uh marketing uh forums and sites that are all about marketing theory and a lot of them I've said how having having read a lot of them I can come to you say we're all talking about the same thing which is reassuring uh but you know you're only ever at google away from learning something I think you just got to throw yourself in and understand that the source is legit and then and then go for it precisely it's how you interpret that right yeah um so what about the um the path into into CIM then um you did talk a little bit about being a career changer really so yeah can you just talk a little bit about that and and your can you can remember as far back as the membership bit as well yeah yeah I can do um so I work with someone now very closely uh who did the same CIM course I did um um and we we we didn't uh we knew each other then hadn't seen each other since and then she started working at my job I was like oh hello and we realised we dove to the same sin course uh so I I started I had a career in kind of event production and comedy production theater production and all that kind of stuff from my degree and then on the other side I wanted a bit of a pivot change and then I started a role in events and marketing and to do that I basically had to start at the very bottom of what marketing is and I realised that I had some good skills for it and it suited me very personally very well but I needed to I wanted a push at my knowledge or at least to give myself confidence uh and I was lucky enough to work for an institution an educational institution that said well we'll support your development uh we offer courses on marketing as a member of staff can we support you to get on to this course and sign up so I went through the unit I went for a university course CIM level four and I didn't look back really from there um I did the course it took me a year I had some fantastic tutors across the three modules I learned so much I went went away from it going I want to do the next one but I changed jobs and I then couldn't do it same in institution um and I just I've got the textbook still like I said I've got all the guides I've got all the resources but all the notes of course work I did because I always go back to and go am I am I sticking to the theory am I just sometimes the biggest worry I have as a marketer is that I learn how to do marketing for the business how it wants to work but not how marketing could be the best it could be um you can be a really good marketer but you might have to challenge how things have done in the business to do the best marketing um but I'm quite lucky I've worked for a good company then we're doing exciting things um so yeah so that's a good approach um just to answer that then um I guess in terms of determining your own path because everybody's different um the one thing I would encourage people to do is if you are considering doing a CIM qualification or any of the training is have a look at where your strengths and weaknesses lie where your interests are and can I work backwards really because if there's for example a particular job role that you're interested in start to pull out some of those things that they're looking for some of the things that they're looking for in the job description you know the um desirable and the essential skills that they ask for and some of them might be knowledges as well and then think about which modules make up a CIM qualification and then that might help you select your your pathway and in terms of the membership membership is different to different people um but essentially as you move through your career from studying member where you get a certain amount of access to support you in your career at that time you might want to progress more into the space where you're improving your membership or going up a notch where you're at you're getting access to more cpd content the cpd content is is really where you continue to develop throughout your career and when ai comes in and when sustainable marketing comes in and all these new things come about you have to move and you have to evolve yeah yeah absolutely and I think that's quite interesting if you're like a young market that's coming into the market as well you will end up working in a business for people who might be a lot older than you have done things for a certain amount of time and you'll realise that things you may be just learnt is something that's new to them and that's that's a really interesting position to be in and that's why I do I do think the CIM membership is highly valuable because I you have a lot of confidence going into that going this is fresh off the press this is new stuff you know I'm not learning off a marketing textbook I was I learned to uni maybe 20 years ago I'm going this is the new approach and I can take this into work and have those interesting discussions about it really really love that and Andy and I didn't go into this session just trying to plug loads of CIM products so I appreciate you giving a nod to this area I'm there just to remind everybody you still have time to put some questions in that otherwise we're going to we're going to look to wrap up the session in the next few minutes I just wondered whether you could talk so you talked a lot about campaigns and strategy and things like that and is a particular skill or key skill that you feel you need to learn to apply to ABM in terms of strategic skill yeah you need to you really need to learn how to structure campaigns over time you need you need to under you need to make very clear expectations on what you're going to do and when so for me is a growth market as I was talking before about someone who wants to grow new business my skill is about understanding all the elements of marketing and putting them in a plan so one of the things again I learned when I started studying marketing was about integrated marketing campaigns I know that it doesn't matter if I just do a social campaign it doesn't matter if I just build a website it doesn't matter if I build a guide if they don't work together and you don't create multiple touch points with your audience you're not going to engage them properly so learning understanding that marketing theory but understanding that if you to build a good campaign to be really good you need to know that you need to understand different methods of communication and you need to learn how to make them work together to show you a group result rather than certainly going well there's a what what there's a website visit oh they he clicks on that social oh they came to that event it's no game I actually did that deliberately and they the idea is they will knock on to each other to show intent to create a lead which means that one like it's about understanding how to take someone through a journey understanding customer journey is really really brilliant thank you um so and let's be any more questions from those tuning in live um I'd like to finish on something that um I tend to ask everybody that comes on these sessions and that is um rolling forwards and you can consider abm or another another line of work what is it that you would like to be better at and what you're going to do about that um you know what I'd like to be better at pitching and getting kind of crazy brave concepts out into the world because I think that like so so I'm quite lucky I work in a team right where I can be like oh I think we should do this and people are yeah okay but I I love so it's great what I do in abm but abm isn't everything I do right abm is just something I use as part of a wider role right I I love as a marketer getting into a space of creative people who think differently to me and I'd love to just keep doing this and to the point where people I walk in the room and people go oh no Andy's coming with some crazy idea uh but then it turns into something that works like that's the most rewarding thing for marketing going from I'm going to work with this person this person and we're going to make something from scratch blank piece of paper and we create something clever and creative and then I'd love to be better at driving that into a team and showing how that's grown into something that's made us better um I know that's a very intangible answer but it's it's that's the joy of marketing right create something and get it result but the journey and engaging stakeholders on the way and getting them to buy in and getting them as excited as you are that's that's the trick yeah and I think that's a really really important skills to have because you can have the greatest ideas in the world but they mean nothing you've known understand yeah yeah brilliant um we did actually get another question in do you have any digital tools that you can recommend for abm um I would assume that that is about sort of third party platforms and things like that yeah yeah yeah um oh this is where I'm going to get loads of emails from people who are trying to work with me reminding me about the things that they offer um there are loads and I would heavily recommend them so firstly um it doesn't matter what size your business is it doesn't matter how big or how small you need some kind of crm system right so you need some kind of database system um if you're a very small independent business you need to start use your things like yeah uh uh like your mail chimps and so between you've got to make sure you're collecting data because if you don't collect data and you don't collect information about your accounts you need to make sure uh you're not you're not showing that you've won 10 so stuff like making sure you've got good use of sales force stuff like that is crucial for a start up get your data right get your ward there so you can analyse it um there are lots of companies out there that use uh who deliberately build you software or guides or brochures and then give you all that data and ammys is back like in um so pdfs are dying right we used to send pdf so it's it as emails to people all the time go look at this document i've made for you it looks really fancy um there's a lot of companies out there now that will make interactive call guides for people now there's a company I've worked with recently called Turtle check them out that's turtle about the e and they make interactive e guides that show when someone's access to document what page they've lingered on what link they've clicked and I can just look at that and go great I've got a target really good for abm we also do personalisation features where they can go you know that document I'll change the logo of the name for you like that that's the kind of AI element coming into it um so companies like that do a lot of really good work um there's lots of companies that try to take all your data for you in a good way and then automate processes for you to help abm such as um delivering mail so go okay okay andy I can see from your mailing list that you've got this guy called john who opened your website what I'm going to do is a piece of software is email him a brochure and go thanks for viewing the website it is something that you might be interested in and like all of this stuff so I don't want to name too many companies and seem biased but there are there are can definitely like delivery automated automation companies there are lots of e guide companies bubble wise it's about for abm it's less about trying to create too much new stuff abm is actually about taking all the things that you do really well and funneling it to that account in the best way possible actually my job isn't about creating as a content my job is going m in charge is amazing stuff and we put loads of really cool content out there how do I make sure it's delivered to that account at the right time and how do I personalize and tweak it so it looks like it's made for them brilliant thank you um we did lose you slightly or I certainly did lose you a little bit there could you just quickly just list the um the brands and tools you talk to have a look at companies like turtle who do interactivity guides um they and they they'll give you analysis and track all those guides performance so you can use your targeting better um have a look at companies like to be honest just google data or intent right and then you'll get loads of companies that will tell you how they're tracking the people you're targeting um but mainly it's about you you need to understand what your marketing mix is but you need a good software um CRM system you need a you need a sales force you need an emailing system and you need something that's going to deliver this content and track the data that's your priority the rest is what you already do as a business for the account put it into chat gpt right and they'll still give you the answers yeah it's not having long discussion about chat ddp and making content because that could go on forever didn't it that that's for another another day right um i'm going to wrap this up now um i'm going to say thank you again andy really good talking to you um it's great to get proper insight into into your world so thanks for thanks for being so honest there and dealing with questions off the cuff as well and thanks to those that tuned in and thank you for your questions i hope you have a great rest of the day and find that useful