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Manufacturers like you want to enter new markets, create lasting partnerships with dealers, and earn lifetime customers.
You want to move inventory.
Taking learnings from our 15+ years serving leaders in the outdoor recreation and commercial vehicle segments, we've created The Inventory —an educational podcast focused on how to win in your distribution model and bridge the gap between manufacturer and dealer.
From dealer programs to product portfolio, we'll cover topics that are relevant to helping you grow market share and ultimately move more units.
John Gough (00:05):
All right, we're back with the inventory. Dusty, we're talking about ABM, and the problem that we see a lot of our clients and people in the market facing today is not really knowing where to start when they're beginning to build their lists in that ABM practice. So what do you think the starting spot is?
Dusty Howe (00:25):
Well, from the marketer's perspective, I think they need to think about this from a company-wide problem. This is something you're trying to solve, not just as a marketing problem, but your whole entire organization can be involved in account-based marketing. You're trying to develop a list of customers or clients targets that you're trying to go after that you think are going to be the right fit for the service that you're providing. And this is not just something that marketing needs to think about. This is where marketing bridges over to the sales organization, it bridges over to the product team, and you can have a really good dialogue around what is it that we are doing today as a company and how does what we do tie into these different customer segments that we might want to target? So that starts a really good conversation around a list of customers that can be developed from different perspectives in the company.
(01:19):
And from that list, you start getting into things like tiering it out and really creating specific targets that everybody in the organization can agree upon, and then you go and start activating from there.
John Gough (01:32):
So if I'm going to go as a marketer and I'm going to start this conversation with sales or product, give me an example of the question that I asked.
Dusty Howe (01:39):
I think one of the main questions is what is the problem that we are best suited to solve today? What do our products or the service that we're providing? Who is going to benefit from this the most? And so from there, once you have an idea of who that ideal customer is, your ICP, you can start building a list of customers that you feel like are good targets for those services or whatever it is that you're providing. Getting really intentional and taking the time to think about what is the size and scope of that list, and then how do you want to tier this out in a way so that you can prioritize it or attack it from a marketing strategy in different ways? So typically the way that I think about account-based marketing is that you're tiering it down to probably A, B, and C accounts.
(02:27):
So your A accounts, I think traditionally some people think it's like, well, let's just go with the biggest, then middle, then small. Or maybe they're thinking it as these are the ones we want the most and then to the least. But I think you need to look at it from, take where you are as an organization right now. Timing plays a big role in account-based marketing. You have probably a year-long plan that you're working against. Who are the clients and the customers that are best suited right now in this moment? And that's going to be a mixture of some of your whale accounts, the big accounts that you really want to get, maybe some up and coming clients that you think are not as big from a revenue standpoint, but have the opportunity to do more business with you in the future. Companies need to look all the way back through their history.
(03:12):
A lot of their biggest customers that they have today were not their biggest customers when it started. So how did that happen? How did that naturally and organically happen over time? And so maybe looking at those lists as A is where we really think we can win today. B might be more down the road, back half of the year, and C might be toward the end of the year or more future type customers. But each one of those lists is equally important. You're just going to attack each one of those differently. And that's one of the ways that you can start thinking about it where each one can still be a big win. It's just a matter of different approaches there.
John Gough (03:48):
You mentioned current clients and maybe expanding accounts. How does that tie into account-based marketing?
Dusty Howe (03:56):
So I think current clients plays a huge role in ABM. I think there's maybe a misconception when you're thinking about marketing and targeting new accounts that it's all about just net new. Thinking about who you are winning with today and how they can help expand your business as well is equally important. So that list of A accounts might be a mixture of 30% of our current customers where you see new opportunities with just in general marketing to your current customer bases is super underrated. People don't appreciate enough that going about that and actually having those marketing actions in place, it's going to help with word of mouth. It's going to do all kind of different things that are going to have positive implications down the road. So never forgetting that those clients are also going to be producing revenue for you and going from that perspective as well.
John Gough (04:49):
Who do you put outside of the list? Is there a part of this exercise that becomes an exclusion list for you?
Dusty Howe (04:57):
It's kind of a challenge or a burden on the sales team maybe in a way that they aren't going to be able to handle that. I think that's a good way to think about exclusions. With account-based marketing, let's go take it back to this is an opportunity to bridge the actions of marketing and how they're going out and potentially producing leads, and then how that's being handed off to a sales team and how they're able to go execute. So I think when you think about how you might exclude accounts, that's where you can have a really good conversation with sales and say, look, what are we set up to go do as a sales organization? Where are there gaps where if this kind of lead comes through, we're just not able to execute on this. Again, take it back to product or operations engineering. If these kind of leads are coming through from marketing, are we just not built today to actually go and execute that?
(05:49):
Hopefully you're not just thinking it from the perspective of this is too small, we don't see the revenue opportunity. That might be the way to exclude it, but you don't know, again, where that client is going to be two, three, five years from now. A lot of this is a long-term play with account-based marketing. You're really trying to name people that you think long-term are going to have success and you're going to be able to build a positive relationship with. So excluding can be dangerous if it's just from very simplistic means like that. But again, if you don't have the organizational power in different areas to go in and serve them well, then absolutely, I think that's where you think about excluding accounts.
John Gough (06:32):
So what I feel like I hear you describing is marketing, trying to get a really sense across the organization and being willing to ask some questions that maybe feel obvious at first and you'd be a little embarrassed to ask. But being willing to go there produces the kind of conversation that builds a lot of trust, I think, for marketing. And you were telling me a story earlier about a current client and we got this awesome lead for them, but it turned out to not actually be that awesome a lead. Can you give us a version of that?
Dusty Howe (07:07):
Yeah, so we pulled in a lead that they had specifically asked for on paper. It looked like the right amount of units that they were trying to go after, it was a bigger lead. It was kind of customer that they really wanted. However, the model of truck that they were trying to build this thing on was not in their world. So we were talking about just something that engineering hadn't thought of, hadn't addressed yet. Maybe that's still an opportunity, but that's where marketing can actually go and go to engineering and say, "Hey, what would it cost for us to explore this? What does this do? Is this maybe a business opportunity that we should think about going forward and actually be able to serve this kind of customer?" But at that particular moment, not so much, didn't really work out. But it doesn't mean that the marketing action didn't work.
(07:52):
That was still a win in terms of pulling in the type of person you're looking for. It just wasn't quite the fit at that time.
John Gough (07:59):
Yeah. And I think our question was, does the lead count? As a marketer - What do you think? Yeah. I think no. Ultimately, it's not revenue available to the organization. Exactly. Yeah. And I think that's sometimes where marketers get in trouble is they feel held accountable to this one number. Does marketing generate leads for the organization? If not, then they get this stigma of being the arts and crafts department. And I think that comes when they aren't tuned in to what the organization is really trying to generate. And they try to argue in this instance, "Well, you said you wanted a hundred units. I got you 100 units. It's not my fault that that's not the kind of truck that we build for, but you're on the same team."
Dusty Howe (08:49):
That's the thing. You're on the same team. So how do you generate a conversation as a marketer that goes company-wide? I think marketing sometimes gets put in this, kind of what you're just hinting at a little bit. We're in our little silo, we're over here, we're going to send you leads, and that's all we care about. That shouldn't be the way it is. And again, this is where account-based marketing can help where when you're going and really defining what you're trying to get after, you can define your wins and losses. You just said that was a loss at the end of the day. It's not going to generate revenue. That's what a win is. For any organization, you have to generate revenue. And if marketing is a part of that conversation in a bigger way and can play that role of asking good questions of all the different departments, why aren't we doing this thing?
(09:33):
Why isn't this the customer that we're going after? At that level of knowledge about the entire business and how everything's operating allows you to be better at creating content and messaging that is actually going to be impactful to the customers that you're going after. And I'll go back to the list building thing a little bit. Your job in trying to generate good leads is at the end of the day, you're trying to hand something off to sales that is going to be a win and drive revenue. It's stacking those wins. And so when you go back to list building, those A tiers to me are like, where do we feel like we're going to get some wins? It's kind of like a sports team. You get a couple wins, that builds momentum. Now all of a sudden you get on a little bit of a winning streak.
(10:17):
And I think getting everybody into that same universe of where we're playing gets everybody more excited and the entire organization works better as a whole. And I think if marketing can start thinking about themselves as a facilitator for that, there's a lot of potential there.
John Gough (10:33):
Yeah, I like the facilitator angle too. Yeah.
Dusty Howe (10:36):
How do you think about from an agency standpoint, how you come in and play that facilitator role? And where do you see us playing a role in building those lists and helping them define that?
John Gough (10:46):
It's one of the best parts about being an outsider is you get to be frankly a little bit dumb on purpose. We have a lot of domain expertise in the verticals that we serve. And also we get to fall back on that like, "Hey, we're new here and maybe we don't know all the specifics about this particular product." Where people who have been in the organization for a long time, they get steeped in organizational knowledge or it's a little embarrassing or hard to ask a question that an outsider, a fresh base can come in and be like, "Hey man, I don't know anything and I don't have any ego about the way this has always worked. And so you can tell me anything." And often what our clients will experience is that surprising moment of I've heard that person say those kinds of things before, but never in the way that they just said them to you.
(11:39):
And so you facilitate those kind of moments internally that just accelerate that team.
Dusty Howe (11:45):
Yeah, I love that. I think it's a little bit of a disruptor model. I mean, even for me and working on the other side of when I was not here in the agency, I've played a role in a lot of different industries and that same thing. You come in and you ask questions and you just shine lights on things that's like, I don't know if this is right or wrong, but have you thought about it from this perspective? And it starts opening up that book of potential clients, customers that might fit with inside these different tiers of ABM that you're talking about that they weren't thinking about before.
John Gough (12:18):
So it's really
Dusty Howe (12:18):
Cool.
John Gough (12:19):
The way you're describing the role of marketing in that moment is different than some people think about it. And I think it demands a beginner's mindset, demands you keep coming back and asking the question over and over again, even if you feel like it's already been asked and answered, not in a annoying kind of way or that kind of regularity, but being open to what the market is really telling you is one of the roles of marketing that I think often gets forgotten about. We treat marketing like it's advertising only. We are a megaphone into the market to tell people why they should like us. And we don't respect the microphone side of that as much where if you got a lead for a hundred of these units and we don't have a way to service that one time, okay, that's a data point, but maybe we're not going to spend the engineering cost to go out and solve that problem.
(13:10):
But if you get that lead 10 times in a row, it's marketing's responsibility to go back to sales and product and say, guys, there's real demand for this. Why are we not choosing to service that? There may be legitimate reasons, but you should talk about them.
Dusty Howe (13:26):
Well, even thinking about it from most marketing from a content side of things, I feel like you need to try to address pain points. Really get at what are the problems that we're solving? Because sometimes engineering builds a product and they think it's solved this problem. It gets out in the world and you find out it's solving a completely different problem. And that's when marketing can really play a fun role in stepping up and saying, look guys, now we're going to have to maybe go back and readdress this ABM list that we just built because what we though we were going and solving, we might still be playing that for sure, but we found something else over here that is a completely different portion of the segment that we're serving and there's an opportunity there as well. And so that's where thinking about even simple things like AB testing when you're building content, different headlines and stuff like that, what is actually getting at the heart of the problem?
(14:27):
And I think this is again, this is where marketing, sales, product, this is maybe getting a little bit away from the list, but get out and talk to the customer. The customer's talking to you in different ways with how they interact with content, but whether it's when you're out trade shows, all these different things, you need to have conversations as a unit, not just as marketing or as sales. And that's how you can then go back and address these lists that you've made and constantly be thinking about what are the right customers to really try to go after.
John Gough (15:01):
So it's a habit that, again, organizations typically don't have of that shared responsibility for communicating with prospects and customers, but they're afraid of that too, right? And especially sales guys are going to be the ones who are first to say, "Don't wear out my customers." So you've been in-house in these organizations and been really close to the sales side and the marketing side. How do you think about frequency and going back to the same people on the list over and over? How much is the right amount? What is too much? How do you deal with that?
Dusty Howe (15:34):
I think there's a conversation that needs to be had between sales and marketing to define that. I think marketing has to be careful to not step on the toes of the sales team. You need to be value-add all the time. You need to be considerate that their tool is really the conversation that they're able to have. You're trying to open that door, you're trying to get research and actually be able to hand some stuff off to them. It's like, look, we're getting signals that these guys are landing on our webpage, they're clicking on our ads, whatever it might be. Here's what we know about them. Here are some of the job titles, whatever it might be. Go do some research and hopefully they are then able to go and execute on that. If once that handoff's made, they're still getting peppered with unwanted emails or maybe they are showing one pain point and then at the handoff they're getting peppered by emails that are something that are completely different and there's just a disconnect between the way sales is talking to a customer and marketing's following up with a customer.
(16:34):
I think it's more of an issue of messaging that's relevant than it is about the consistency. In terms of maybe revisiting and talking about that, I think that's a conversation that you have and say, look, we've been going after this account in each organization's be different. Maybe it's six months, maybe it's a year, and we're just not getting anywhere. Let's move them off the list into a different part of the list and put our focus elsewhere. Again, it goes back to what I was saying about building wins. If you feel like you're just beating your head against the wall and you're just constantly messaging somebody and you're not getting a response, there's a reason for that. And just because you see a fit doesn't mean they're going to see a fit. Maybe you're not hitting their pain. Maybe they're at a down cycle from their own revenue and things like that, and they're just struggling as a company.
(17:23):
I think it's why you have to think about different sizes of organizations as well. A tier cannot just be big customers because half of those guys aren't having a good year and they're not looking for what you're selling. So going back and having those conversations and moving things around, I think you have to define that internally of what you feel comfortable with. But it could be every order where you go back and look at things and maybe reprioritize that, or maybe it's at least yearly or something like that. But making changes and moving things around shouldn't be looked upon as a negative. It means that you're actually communicating really well and you're not stagnant, no different from marketing things. You want to be doing different motions, whether it's paid ads, whether it's email, maybe you're trying to direct mail. It's good to vary things up and see what's working from time to time.
John Gough (18:11):
How often are you working hand-to-hand with sales on the marketing team? You said maybe revise the list on a longer period, but what's the regular cadence?
Dusty Howe (18:25):
I think it's really good if you're working on a cadence of, I like weekly of just being able to touch base with the sales guys. I think it's really important. It doesn't have to be a half a day sit down. It can be a half-hour check-in and just like, what's working? What's not working? Where are your conversations going? Here's what came in last week. How can I help? Just having that dialogue is important.
John Gough (18:48):
I wouldn't do it less than a weekly, honestly, especially if you're new to it. I would say that weekly is the bare minimum because you need to get into that rhythm. You need to be looking at the same scorecard and the same dashboard and feel like you have shared accountability for metrics.
Dusty Howe (19:02):
What do you think's important in that conversation?
John Gough (19:05):
I want to look at leads. I want to look at the list of people that have been generated. I want sales to say yes, no, qualified, not qualified. And I want marketing to have an opportunity to hold them accountable and say, "Hey, are you following up with these people? Are they making it into the sales cycle effectively? And if not, why not? And if I'm not giving you good leads, tell me to my face and let me help do my job well." Because keeping that separate, keeping that siloed and not giving that feedback, you're just shooting yourself in the foot. I think feedback should be like breathing. It's expected. It is the thing that keeps you alive and it keeps you all on the same team. If you don't know what's working and not working, how do you ever expect to improve it? All right, we've covered a lot of ground.
(19:48):
If you had to give a listener one takeaway as they're thinking about building lists, starting ABM, what do they do?
Dusty Howe (19:57):
I think for me, the takeaway is spend time building that list. Don't rush through and just think that the list building process is this versatile thing you do, and then you don't think about it ever again. The list building in and of itself and the strategy behind that list is, I think, one of the most important steps in ABM. And really try to get buy-in throughout the org. Make this something that is probably starting with your marketing and sales org, but how is everybody in your company thinking about this? And is everybody like, "Yeah, this makes sense to me." And when you present that list, have a strong reason why you have these 25 A accounts, these 25 B accounts, and then have a very strong tactic for how are we going to, in different ways, win in each of these different tiers? Don't just think it's like most of our time goes to A and then not a lot of time in our B and C.
(20:57):
Have a very specific strategy of how you want to do it, different marketing tactics that you're going to use, and then be ready to sit down in three months, six months or whatever and revisit it and really enjoy the process of learning about how your tactics are working within these different tiers and try to enjoy it. Have some fun with it. It's something that I think ABM is looked upon as maybe a little bit confusing or not well understood, but it's a way to really bring an organization together, bring sales and marketing together, and hopefully drive revenue.
John Gough (21:33):
Great stuff.
Dusty Howe (21:34):
Cool, man.