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Dave Gerhardt (Founder of Exit Five, former CMO) and guests help you grow your career in B2B marketing. Episodes include conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, and subject matter experts across all aspects of modern B2B marketing: planning, strategy, operations, ABM, demand gen., product marketing, brand, content, social media, and more. Join 4,400+ members in our private community at exitfive.com.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:14]:
All right, Mason. Good to see you, man. For anybody watching on YouTube, Mason's geared up in his scrappy ABM official podcast gear. You're a professional. You got the brand on point.
Mason Cosby [00:00:26]:
I mean, look, any opportunity to wear a shirt that has your brand on, you gotta take advantage, right?
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:30]:
That's right. So we're gonna talk about ABM. I got a note maybe a couple months ago from Tim Davidson, and he said that you're one of the best people to have on to talk about this topic. We ended up meeting at Golden Hour, talked about a bunch of other stuff. But I've been looking forward to having this conversation. I think you. This topic of ABM, it's usually anytime we talk about ABM, it's one of the more popular topics on the podcast. Why do you think that is?
Mason Cosby [00:00:55]:
Yeah, I mean, at the core, I think ABM is one of those things that, in theory, people are like, oh, yeah, I could totally do that. And then you get into it and you're like, this is really freaking hard. I always make the joke that the worst thing that happens is a CMO hears about ABM, and it's like, oh, we should totally do that. They go back to the office and, like, throw it at a marketing manager. It's like, yeah, just go build the ABM program. So, again, in theory, it's not really that difficult. In practice, it's organizational change. So I think that's why people love it.
Mason Cosby [00:01:23]:
Cause it's. Everybody has their horror story.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:25]:
Yeah, I think, first of all, before we get into this topic, we just do a quick background and intro on who you are and a little bit of your career story leading into what you're doing now.
Mason Cosby [00:01:34]:
Yeah, I'm probably the only person you've ever had on the podcast that started their career in parenting magazine advertising sales in Jackson, Mississippi.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:43]:
Well, I had somebody else. It wasn't in Jackson, Mississippi. But other than that, you had the niche nailed. Yes.
Mason Cosby [00:01:49]:
Well, that is, like, honest to goodness. How I got the start is I was given the list of, like, go call 300 people a day and just brute force cold calls, and I was a cradle to grave ae with no marketing support. So at the start, that super sucked because I didn't know what I was talking about, didn't know who I was talking to, didn't know what's going on. And this crazy idea inevitably came up with, like, what if I. With these list of people, instead of just saying, in general, you should buy advertising, I created an individual reason on why I was reaching out to them specifically and just said, hey, I have you on this list. And I'm like, you're on a list, but I'm reaching out for this reason. And that was revolutionary. And I became the number one seller, accounted for, like, half the company's revenue, sales, team leader.
Mason Cosby [00:02:31]:
All that was great. Eventually did that for a little bit. Eventually, this really weird thing called Covid happened, and our distribution mechanism was the public and private school system, so all the schools shut down. And then I had no job, so transitioned into a fintech company, where I led the marketing effort there. And it's funny, I read this post from a guy named Dave Gerhart. That was like, when you're a marketing manager or marketing director, there's a difference between that and a CMO, even if you're, like, the only person. And at the time, I was like, I don't know what you mean. I now totally understand what you mean, because I was so in the weeds.
Mason Cosby [00:03:00]:
Like, I did the part out implementation myself. It was terrible. And then I inevitably recognized, I don't know what I'm doing. So I transitioned into an ABM agency where I ran the marketing effort for the agency, which was the most fun job of my life. Marketing. Marketing to marketers. And essentially, my job is to be an experimenter. My founder was literally a biochemist.
Mason Cosby [00:03:18]:
So he just was like, Mason, you're going to figure out how to do stuff, and then we'll teach our clients how to do it. And honestly, that's where a lot of the scrappy ABM frameworks started to be developed, because I had zero budget. But we were an ABM agency, and we wanted to eat our own dog food or drink our own champagne or whatever the framing is. So, did that, for about three years, transitioned in that organization to went from 25 to 600, was acquired by a global scale AVM agency. So it's about $2 million in about six months selling ABM programs. So I learned the sales side of ABM again. So my entire career balanced between marketing and sales. And then before I launched graph ABM, I actually did a stint with a company called sales assembly, leading their demand gen efforts, helping sellers learn how to do better sales.
Mason Cosby [00:03:57]:
So, again, if you track all of that, sold marketing, did a weird stint in a fintech company, then marketed marketing, sold marketing, marketed sales education. And now I'm back to marketing and selling marketing. So that is my career journey in a nutshell.
Dave Gerhardt [00:04:11]:
Beautiful, good context for everybody. And the topic that we're going to talk about today is this idea of simplifying ABM because it comes up a lot. And I think one of the misconceptions is we see it asked a lot inside of the community is that there's a connection between ABM and display advertising in some people's minds. You have an interesting approach. I do want to talk about podcasting with you later in this episode, separately. But your approach to ABM is not just go run display ads, it's this signal based go to market approach. And that's what I want to unpack with you. But maybe first, let's start with, before we talk about the tactics here, who should do this? So one of the gaps in marketing, I think, is I'm actually, I'm a believer in that any tactic in marketing today can work.
Dave Gerhardt [00:05:00]:
Podcasting works, TikTok works, YouTube works, email works, events work, but none of them work without a strategy. And I think where many marketers myself, in past lives included, Lax is in the strategy department. Like, let's formulate a strategy and then we can go and figure out the tactics here. So if we rewind all the way back, or we start at the top here, as people are listening to this episode, who is ABM for? Which type of company might want to deploy this as a strategy for go to market?
Mason Cosby [00:05:30]:
Yeah, it goes up saying B2B dedicated sales team. Generally speaking, you want to have an average contract value of at least $50,000 or greater. And there's an asterisk on that. They'll come back to you in just a moment. You have clear product market fit for the kinds of audiences that you're going after. You want to ideally have a fantastic expansion opportunity. So not just like the one sale and then you're done, but ideally there's an expansion opportunity. And asterisks on the average contract value is if you're a vertical specific organization.
Mason Cosby [00:06:01]:
So we've worked with some companies that are vertical. SaaS, prime example, one of our clients had a total addressable market of 500 total accounts because they were a compliance software for like, the utilities and manufacturing space. 500 accounts total. It's like the average contract value didn't super matter because their total address market was only 500 accounts. So if you're super vertical specific, I think you should pretty much only be running AVM at that point.
Dave Gerhardt [00:06:24]:
So I'm just taking my notes here. B two b sales team, 50k aCv. Got it. But why? Why is that?
Mason Cosby [00:06:31]:
Yeah, I actually got this question yesterday, and they really pushed on it. Cause it. They're like, we wanna do it. But like our acv is 13k. I'm like, that's cool. In that context, you're likely looking for more of a transactional sale because when you think about in these traditional approach to building an ABM program, you're gonna create highly specific, personalized content and it's largely the timeframe to create net new content that's really good. You can't necessarily speed that process too, too much or you're going to get not great content that doesn't speak correctly to the audience. So from a setup perspective, to build the full scale ABM program, and you can do it in phase and that's how we recommend it.
Mason Cosby [00:07:07]:
But let's say you didn't do it in phases, you're looking at probably a three to four month lead time to just build all the content, set up all the distribution channels, set up all the tracking, train the sales team, all that is set up. So again, three to four months. And then if you have, let's say you're going from awareness to acquisition, so these people don't know that you exist. How long does it take to educate somebody on the problems that they're experiencing to then understand why they would need your solution? If you do really great marketing, it's still probably going to take a few months, at which point then you have a sales cycle. Now let's say your sales cycle is 90 days. So at that point we had three to four months of setup time. We had three to six months of education on the front end to get somebody to be even problem aware, solution aware, and then see us as a viable solution. And then the sales cycle, which let's say conservatively 90 to 120 days, that means that when we started an ABM program, when we truly saw revenue for going from pure cold awareness to acquisition, we're looking at twelve months.
Mason Cosby [00:08:08]:
So that's generally speaking why there's that recommendation. Is that a 50k ACV with the number of deals that you would see come through over an 18 month timeframe, you can justify that level of investment on the front end before you actually see the returns. Whereas if you think about a 13k ACV, we need to close three to four of the same number of deals to get the same end result from one deal at a 50k ACV.
Dave Gerhardt [00:08:33]:
I'm going to keep going on this. So B2B, with a sales team, 50k acva, they're going to do ABM. How would you articulate what type of marketing the companies that are so that 13K acv company what are they doing? Digital inbound. Like just, I want to frame it for people in, in people's minds. So like what is, because there also might be people who are on the other side that are listening to. So how do you talk about what is their go to market approach called?
Mason Cosby [00:08:55]:
Yeah, I think that's just pure play demand generation. That's like we are creating great content that is nothing super targeted, super specific. I think you can create vertical specific content. Again, the 13K ACVA is an actual client conversation I had yesterday. We've got 2000 accounts we want to go after. They all have a 13K acV. They're all in the same kind of like vertical in the niche. It was like healthcare associations and they wanted to close healthcare associations.
Mason Cosby [00:09:21]:
They had 2000 of them. It's like, that's great, but I don't know that you need to be running ABM because ABM is super specific, super personalized, and like you're assigning named accounts for sellers, ideally before you started the program. So like a seller knows when they're getting involved. If you don't have the right deal value to then associate a seller to an account as a seller. I don't want 500 accounts at a 13k aCV. I would like maybe 100 accounts that I'm going to work on over the next year.
Dave Gerhardt [00:09:50]:
Yeah, it's just too much. Okay. So it's almost like you need to, with the ABM approach, it is sales led. It's sales led, marketing assisted. So even without assistance for marketing, you are Mason sales guy. You have 100 accounts in a territory with or without help from marketing, you're going to go outbound, start reaching out to people, start trying to book meetings. Where marketing comes in is to make that a bit easier versus in that other model with 13K ACV, like you need to do the marketing that's not going to scale, and on the 13K CV, you need more scalable marketing channels.
Mason Cosby [00:10:25]:
I would agree on all of that with the potential asterisks that I view sales as a marketing channel, which is sometimes a hot take. So I think that essentially the core difference between any other kind of marketing program and marketing that's an ABM program is at the core, it's intentional orchestration from beginning to end around the set of shared target accounts. So a client of ours named Olga Karynikos, that's the CMO sales screen. One of the things that they started to do is if they are going outbound, they exclusively go outbound to target accounts, period. So there's no other outbound, there's no seller that's going rogue. That's saying, I've got my own separate list, I'm doing my own separate thing. If you have a viable list of great individuals that you want to be outbounding to, why are we not also marketing to them? So it's the core difference. One of the core challenges of building an avian program is that sales and marketing alignment, because sales is really protective of their accounts.
Mason Cosby [00:11:15]:
Again, when I worked at the global agency, one of our clients was Airbus. An Airbus has a ten year sales cycle because you literally have to. From an engineering and a manufacturing perspective, the engines that are inevitably going to be bought for the new jets have to be designed for that product, for that end result, which is a literal jet. The sellers have those relationships. They're super protective of those relationships. That's an extreme example, but oftentimes legacy based sellers are super protective. They don't want marketing touching their accounts because they want to control the entire narrative from beginning to end. The challenge is if one seller owns the entire relationship, what happens if that seller leaves? What happens if that seller has their relationships leave? And the last component is you do not get exponential scale and the ability to more effectively break into an account across every component of the different departments and divisions if you only have sellers involved.
Mason Cosby [00:12:09]:
So the core shift in an account based program versus an outbound program or an inbound program or marketing program, however you want to call it, is that it's the intentionality from beginning to end of how do we engage with these accounts and what team members are involved at every single stage.
Dave Gerhardt [00:12:23]:
Beautiful. So a couple times youve mentioned this, and also, I love what you said, that sales is a marketing channel. I think that that is a great way to think about this. I also think that, man, we just spend so much time having those things competing. And I think one of the reasons that im drawn to ABM as a topic I know a lot of listeners are for their company is solely around the alignment, the alignment thing. I once worked at a company where it was really challenging because we had a self serve funnel where people could sign up for a free trial and convert at a really low end. And marketing's job was to generate those. But there was also a sales motion and we actually had different metrics and we were gold differently and comp differently.
Dave Gerhardt [00:13:00]:
And so we just battled all the time because they were like, no, we don't want marketing to touch those. We close those and then another company. It's also hard to feed both funnels. I had Shane, who's the CMO at Webflow on last week, and he was talking about how they used to have one team in marketing that focused on, like, their self serve funnel and then one team in marketing that focused on their enterprise, and that just ended up leading to friction. And so now he's kind of combined them into growth, and they each have to think about feeding both funnels. So I like the ABM approach because I do think it kind of removes all of the nonsense. And the most popular podcast episode we've done is with Hilary Carpio from Snowflake, who ran ABM there, and she basically said, yeah, well, I don't know what you're talking about. We don't have any sales and marketing alignment issues because we have the same goal, and they view sales as a marketing channel and marketing as a sales channel.
Dave Gerhardt [00:13:49]:
They work together to get into named accounts. And I love that. I think it clears up a lot. But you mentioned it takes time. You need to create highly specific, personalized content. I've never understood what that means. So does that mean, like, we're trying to sell to Snowflake and we're making a personalized PDF that we just wrote for Snowflake? Like, what the heck does that actually mean? Let's unpack that a little bit of super great question.
Mason Cosby [00:14:14]:
We helped a client build, like, this partner EVM program because they just unlocked this integration with SAP. So it's a huge opportunity for them to go after all of SAP's customers. So we ended up helping them build out is they had generalized landing pages that were like, if you work and work with us, you'll see these specific benefits. Like, they were a software for the manufacturing space that helped with digitalization of sops. So greater safety on the floor, greater efficiency, all that kind of stuff. What SAP lacked was the actual correlation back to, how does this increase our overall profitability as an organization? So what we then did is we married up look alike accounts and said, hey, at the core, companies that are using SAP that made the switch to us saw these benefits. So it wasn't just, hey, by partnering with our organization, you'll see these benefits. Or companies that have an SAP like software saw these benefits.
Mason Cosby [00:15:10]:
But it's the specific data of, you work with SAP, when you work with us, this is what your life can look like. And it was then nuancing every component of the messaging. What's the onboarding timeframe? What does the process look like? How difficult is it getting really specific to that level of granular information, because the goal of good marketing is not to necessarily convince someone of one thing or another, but it's to tell them a good picture of what the future looks like when they work with you, and an accurate picture. So what I like about account based marketing is when we get so specific, we can, with a high degree of certainty and relevancy, say, based on all these factors that we know about you, if you are like these other customers, this would be your life after. And that kind of level of information and detail takes time. So it's that creation of core content and then it's all the peripheral content around it. So prime example, like actually helping people understand, for lack of better word, in that context, what gaps does SAP have specifically for manufacturing companies in EMEA? So, like, you have specific enablement content that enables your sales team, but also maybe showing up in search. So it's the exact same stuff.
Mason Cosby [00:16:20]:
It's problem awareness, it's solution awareness, and it's viewing us as a viable solution and then painting the picture of their viable future when they work with us.
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:28]:
So it starts with this topic, and there might be multiple topics that we're picking. And ideally this stuff is applicable to multiple companies, right? You might create personalized content for one, but it's going to be like the same three to five challenges that each company has. So we have a great content team. We spend two weeks doing research, writing this in depth article. Where does it go? Is it on the website? Is it a email campaign? I want to get really tactical and use an example to bring this to life. So let's talk about where does it live, what does it look like? And then distribution of that content.
Mason Cosby [00:17:03]:
Yeah, I'm going to come up higher level and give us a framework that we use for all of our programming. So it's a 4d framework. So the first is data. So who are we going after, why are we reaching out? And how do we have those people appropriately? So again, in this example that we're using, it's partners that use SAP. So that's who we're going after. Why are we reaching out? Well, the SAP integration just went live and it already has shown massive benefits for other companies like you. And then how do we message those people appropriately? We know that they're using SAP, we know that they would see benefit from us, and we message them in such a way that helps to paint the picture of the future. That's data.
Mason Cosby [00:17:39]:
Next would be distribution. So there's two sides to this. One distribution is, again, this is where I call in sales is just a marketing channel because at its core, outbound emails is just a distribution channel. So could be email, could be LinkedIn ads, could be search ads. If we get really tactical for a moment, HubSpot through the ad extension, somebody keep me honest if this has been updated, because HubSpot has been making some recent updates. But if you have a lifetime spend of $50,000 in Google through the HubSpot ad extension, you can actually do a list upload to search and you can do advertising to a thousand contacts in Google very natively in HubSpot pretty easily, like that's a distribution channel. You do the same thing through Facebook, you can do up to 300 on LinkedIn. So again, those are all distribute that.
Mason Cosby [00:18:30]:
We get really tactical, we can go that route. Additionally, you've got outbound sales sequences, you've got LinkedIn DM's, and all of these are just channels. Additionally, if you really want to get into additional content creation, a webinar is both a promotional vehicle and a distribution channel of information. Additionally, quick context, how did we get here? Tim Davidson recommended that I come on the show after he saw me speak at B two bmX. B two BMX for me was a distribution channel. So all of these places are just how do we get information in front of our target accounts? So we've got a couple of clients we're working with that are like a part of their I ABM strategy is the event. So all of that is distribution. So again, core tactics, it's going to be some component around email is one of the things that we like to use a lot.
Mason Cosby [00:19:17]:
It's going to be some form of ideally organic, social. And the other context, if you're watching this anywhere, you see a neon sign that literally says scrappy ABM. So for us, we like to validate an unpaid channels and then scale through paid channels. So that's one of the reasons we like email organic social communities, because again, at the core, ads can get really expensive. They are a great way to validate messaging if you have the budget. But if you don't, unpaid channels validate messaging, you scale through paid channels. That's distribution. Next would be destination.
Mason Cosby [00:19:49]:
So again, what we haven't talked through is the idea of an account progression model. So like where is this person in their journey? The core functions that we often reference are awareness, initial engagement, meaningful engagement, marketing, qualified account, re engagement, a lot of engagement pieces. If you picked up on that. Next is then qualification and then opportunity to quickly define those awareness. Do they know that we exist? Initial engagement is more like problem solution.
Dave Gerhardt [00:20:13]:
Wait, sorry, sorry. So this would be like, you're essentially like building out a journey. Because one of my questions for you was going to be, I get the approach to ABM, but one thing where I would get lost is like, yeah, man, we've been doing this for five weeks and we've emailed the heck out of the context that we have at this account, and they're nothing and they're not answering. So this is a funnel that you've built out, right, basically, which maps out the steps from. And somebody might jump over all the steps and book a meeting.
Mason Cosby [00:20:37]:
Yes. I don't really care what it's called. It could be a fly bill, it could be a funnel. It can be an account progression model. At the core, it's. We are stating at every stage of this approach, what is the goal for our accounts? What do we want them to know and to understand, and then how do we then know to serve up new content? I want to be super clear. This is never perfect because, like, prime example, Dave, you have a great community of people that talk about a bunch of stuff all the time that will never be tracked anywhere. So it's never going to be a completely closed model.
Mason Cosby [00:21:09]:
But what you can do is, to the best of our ability, say, at the awareness stage, the win is that we see these accounts hit our website, period. Because now we know that they know that we existed.
Dave Gerhardt [00:21:21]:
Got it? Yeah, yeah. So you're looking for little signals along the way, like little breadcrumbs of, maybe we haven't booked a meeting, but, like, we're doing something. And now this company knows we exist. And like, someone from that company is visiting our website. Let's move on to step number two. Okay, cool.
Mason Cosby [00:21:35]:
Yes. And the content that you share is dictated by the account progression model because at awareness stage, to your point, what will often happen in the first round of an ABM program is somebody will, will build out their target account list and they'll just email everybody and say, hey, you were showing third party incentive signals. You must be ready to buy. Let's book a call. And that's never the case. That's not actually ABM, but also to.
Dave Gerhardt [00:21:59]:
Your point, I see this question come up and I'm like, sir, I'm not an ABM expert, which is fun about doing these podcasts, is, I don't know, I just get to interview people and ask my questions and try to, like, understand from my perspective, I'm good at copywriting. That's about it. But people are like, or I'll see, like, a new company. They're like, well, how do you get customers? I'm like, you email them, you reach out, they're like, that's it. There's got to be other ways. But they're missing exactly what you said in there, which is like, for me, it's about the feedback loop. And so if I have an account list of 100 accounts, I'm not just going to email 100 at once because we don't know what's working or not yet. So I'm going to pick off five to ten accounts.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:33]:
I'm going to reach out to them with a subject line, with a pitch, with a particular offer, call to action. If that is crickets zero through ten, then the next ten batches of outreach that I'm going to do, they better not be the same because you're kind of like finding these pockets of what works for, like, that initial outreach. And so it is, it's this constant game of getting feedback and adjusting your copy and your messaging. And so I actually think if you reach out to 20 accounts and you don't get a response, that's fantastic. We've now learned something, right? Did we not get a response? Because we're just not recognizable in their, in their inbox and they have no idea who we are. And this is just straight up cold. Is the subject line not right? Is the copy of what we're saying not interesting? Is the ask and the email not right? It's. There's a lot to unpack there.
Dave Gerhardt [00:23:18]:
And so I get frustrated when someone's like, well, it's just email. No, there's like ten steps of the funnel just in that outreach alone that you have to then go back and adjust and calibrate before you go and do another round of outreach.
Mason Cosby [00:23:31]:
Yeah. Directly address that. We are not typically recommending that a seller gets super high touch involved in an account program until the meaningful engagement stage. Because you can run marketing programs where the goal is, let's make sure that they know that we exist, nobody can buy from us, that they don't know that we exist, and nobody loves to run awareness programs, but everybody likes to know that when a seller walks in the room, they're like, oh, I know you. So again, that's the core.
Dave Gerhardt [00:23:57]:
So basically you're using marketing. You're not doing the cold, straight up sales outreach right away. Let's start with marketing efforts to warm something up to get some visibility into this market to lead with content. Then we're going to have sales reach out when we've already done something.
Mason Cosby [00:24:15]:
Yes. And then depending on the client and their internal capabilities at the awareness stage, it might be that their inevitable AE is going ahead and sending a connection request on LinkedIn, working through how do we start to plant the seeds early that there's an inevitable conversation to be had? So again, it's hard to give like an exact prescriptive answer. But at the core it is we need people to know that we exist. We need them to be problem aware, which is kind of our initial engagement stage. We need them to be solution aware. So for us, meaningful engagement would be things like product page, case studies, pricing page, schedule a call pages. If accounts have already started to engage in other content that we're seeing, and they hit those pages. From my perspective, that's a high intent signal that we can then follow up for a re engagement and with the goal then being this is great cause.
Dave Gerhardt [00:25:02]:
I've battled in the past years and years ago, so I'm not relevant anymore. I'm just a LinkedIn thought leader. But I love that signal based approach because I feel like so many times in my career in marketing, it's like we've done good stuff, we've gotten people back to our website, but they didn't fill out the form and book a demo and book a meeting. So like, marketing stinks and we don't get a credit for that verse in this world. That just never worked for me because it's like, man, let's just not even think like marketing and salespeople for a second to actually take the time out of your day to reach out and say, hello, I would like a demo of your product. Like, I recently bought a new car. I did all my research upfront. I did not go to that dealership until I was like, no, I know this car.
Dave Gerhardt [00:25:44]:
This is the one I want. I don't want to do with all these questions. I just want to make this as easy as possible. Most normal humans are not just going to like fill out a form to get a meeting from sales because they know what's going to happen after that. But at the same time, the marketing team is only credited when someone actually goes through and book a meeting verse I'd rather want to show like, hey, look at all these interesting accounts and relevant people that we've brought back to our site. And now I know there's a whole world out there. People who don't like marketing, like influenced revenue. But isn't that how marketing influenced revenue? Like, we drove you to our website, you did stuff on a bunch of our properties, then weeks or months later, then when you were actually ready to buy, then you contacted sales.
Dave Gerhardt [00:26:25]:
We don't need to worry about getting credit for that specific form. Phil. We've got you on our site, in our store, you've walked around, you've sniffed around a bunch, then you're going to book with us.
Mason Cosby [00:26:33]:
Trey. Yeah. One of the best things that I learned from a CRO that was responsible for marketing is he said the first year we launched an ABM program, I did not put a revenue goal on marketing. I said I want all of our revenue to be influenced by marketing. And the end of the year at a 90% marketing influence pipeline. And what that showed is, wow, we saw pipeline increase, which is great. We saw sales velocity increase. We saw deal values increase, largely because what's the correlation? Marketing was more intentionally focused on influencing the pipeline holistically.
Mason Cosby [00:27:05]:
Whereas years prior when marketing wasn't given credit for anything that wasn't marketing sourced and it was just purely, if you don't source it, you don't get credit. They weren't focused on pipeline acceleration, they weren't focused on increasing the deal sizes. They weren't focused on pipeline expansion of the account. It was only focused on how do we get more things in the pipeline? And then it sales problem. That's when alignment challenges start to come in. There's one other d that's really important in our 4d frameworks. I'm going to rattle it off really quick of data. Again here you're going after why we're reaching out.
Mason Cosby [00:27:34]:
How do we message them? Distribution, where your channels destination, what are you sending them to? Like what's the content asset? Which again that's where the account progression model comes really important because you have to send right content based on the account progression model. And then lastly is direction. So how do we track any of it? So that's why I love tools like rB2B, apparently like everybody else in B2B right now. But at the core you don't have to get a form fill. You can see some form of de anonymized website traffic where you can then see from a direction component they hit the site. We know that they're aware. Awesome. Now how do we go to the next stage? So again, how are you tracking to then progress the account to the next stage of the account progression model?
Dave Gerhardt [00:28:11]:
And how would you show this data to somebody? So like if you're a marketer listening to this and you want to show you have your weekly meeting with the sales leader, you're in marketing, you want to show that we're, we haven't booked meetings at any of these accounts yet, but I want to show you some type of here are our goals, here are our metrics. I want to show you that we're making progress with these accounts. How would you guide somebody to show that?
Mason Cosby [00:28:32]:
I know I'm going to throw us a curveball mid podcast episode, but I would actually, before you go build an ABM program, started a website re engagement playbook or a close loss program to prove out the model in the first place. Because if you start with close lost or website re engagement, then the actual clear metric of success is meetings booked and pipeline generated based on those that are brand aware, problem aware and solution aware so that you can more easily get sales stuff to work. And then when you've got buy in on that as a program, you then go fill the top of the funnel, but they've already got stuff that they're working and then you can essentially from there. If you really think about the concept of website re engagement playbook, once that's built, the more traffic you drive to the website, you then already have a process for sales to then reengage those accounts. So I would not recommend starting your ABM program at awareness.
Dave Gerhardt [00:29:22]:
But like you're selling 50k acv, you're not necessarily driving it through like high volume content. Is email one way that you're driving people back to the site because you might be emailing them like a useful resource. They're going to click on that link and then go read it on the site.
Mason Cosby [00:29:34]:
Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:29:35]:
Okay.
Mason Cosby [00:29:35]:
It's that exactly of, hey, you were engaged in this content asset. You were checking these things out. I think of it just like what's next step content. So if you were reading a blog on all the ways that community is the future of marketing, then maybe the next step content would be how do I build a community based on where they left off in their journey? What's the next step that they should be taking? And you just follow up with that next step content.
Dave Gerhardt [00:29:58]:
So you're saying for anybody that wants to do an ABM program before going and doing new stuff, let's see what we might already have based on close lost and re engaging people that have already visited the site. So then we can figure out the motion a little bit versus trying to measure too many new variables. Is that why?
Mason Cosby [00:30:17]:
Yes, it is exactly that. The goal going back to the 4d framework, if you look at that idea, the question would be how do I stack the deck in my favor. Where do I have the best data? Where do I have the best distribution channels for an intended audience? Where do I already have the best content and where I have the best tracking capabilities? This is why I love close lost, because they're already brand aware. You already have a very unique distribution channel that is a seller that they're already got some form of relationship with. That's a leg up in that context. From a content perspective. Generally speaking, people have pretty decent sales enablement, product marketing type content. So the goal here is again, re education.
Mason Cosby [00:30:57]:
And when you go to build a closed loss campaign, if you're focused around what's the reason to reengage? What's changed in the past six months? Prime example, if you're a staffing firm with the FTC, changing regulation around non compete agreements, that dramatically changes the industry. So that's a great reason to reach out of like hey, six months ago you couldn't poach from your direct competitors, now you can. How are you staffing your team with the best and brightest? That could be a great close loss campaign. So what's the reason to reengage and then building programming around that? That shouldn't be a super heavy lift, but proves the model and then allows you to get further buy in to reinvest.
Dave Gerhardt [00:31:33]:
This is why everything in marketing, like the tactics aside, everything in marketing to me just comes back to positioning, messaging, the company narrative, the company story period. Whats our point of view? What are we selling, whats our point of view? Why should someone care about this? Why should they care about it now? And where companies struggle is if you have a stale, if youre in a very crowded industry or you have a stale point of view, you dont have anything interesting to say, its tough to go out and do that outreach, I think who owns that? Thats got to be CEO. CMO level messaging is going to drive. You can't be successful with ABM without a strong story and a strong hook. And that's how we're going to get in here. It's like the creative matters, all the stuff you mentioned, account progression, distribution, all that stuff matters. But nothing matters without the story.
Mason Cosby [00:32:21]:
Yeah, I mean I couldn't agree more. If you don't have a good reason to reach out, and that's why we always come back to it. That's why sellers like working with us is we don't just pass you a list and say good luck. Like we're always focused on what's our reason to reach out and how do we message those people like, that's the data piece. And most people don't put messaging and data. But for us, if you don't have a good message and a good reason to reach out to even a right fit audience, then it's a non starter for everything else.
Dave Gerhardt [00:32:45]:
What else are we missing? As we wrap up talking about ABM.
Mason Cosby [00:32:48]:
What should we hit on last piece here is, again, just the, at the core, if you think about what we talked about as the 4d framework, the 4d framework are your tactics. So again, what's our data source? What are our channels? What is our content? How are we tracking it? At its core, those are tactics. You can live there for a little bit. That is crawl stage ABM of how do I use things like, again, website reengagement, close loss programs, cost for win back programs, customer expansion programs, pipeline acceleration programs, all of those are signals, and you can use those to build really small playbooks. And once you've built a series of playbooks again, you actually essentially create processes for your sales team. And you can, for lack of a word, trick your sales team into building an ABM program. Because if everything for the sellers is signal based and it's trigger based programming, then when you fill more accounts into your triggers and into your signals, sellers follow the same process. So it actually becomes a lighter lift for sales in the long run.
Mason Cosby [00:33:54]:
And the core difference is then how we reach out. So the messaging will be different, but the process should largely be the same for your sellers, which makes it more enticing for them to actually buy in.
Dave Gerhardt [00:34:04]:
What are the ABM myths that you see most people will be listening to this. One of them that I like, which drew me to you, is that you don't need 200k in tech spend to go and do ABM. So that's one. What other, what other myths, soapbox issues do you have?
Mason Cosby [00:34:16]:
People will push back on the ECV like we talked about at the beginning. It's the tech stack, it's the channels. It's a lot of these different components.
Dave Gerhardt [00:34:23]:
Oh, that's your decision. Like, I think this is what, listen to what Mason says. Listen to what other people say. Like, you need to make your own conclusions and build your own playbook for ABMD. You should listen to this episode. Just because Mason has an account progression framework in this 4d thing, use your own brain. Think about what you're trying to achieve at your own company. I'm not even joking.
Dave Gerhardt [00:34:42]:
You need to make this up. Everything is made up. Somebody made it all up at one point, right? This is why I. Yep. I hate positioning and messaging frameworks as a thing. What if you and me can just, like, write good copy into Google Doc without a framework? We can get it done. Use your own brain. What is our business? We sell this.
Dave Gerhardt [00:34:58]:
We need to get meetings with people to do this. And. Okay, cool. What are the steps? How can we connect the dots? Okay. And soak this in. Like, I listened to this one podcast with Mason. I read this other thing, like, build your own listen what great marketers do. Take little ingredients from everything and build your own playbook here.
Dave Gerhardt [00:35:12]:
There isn't one way to do it. And so if you're listening to this and you're like, we're at ten k ACv, and we want to do ABM, heck yeah, do it. It's just about, can you make the math work? Does it make sense for you to spend time in this area and to create these resources? If you can do it, doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if you spend a dollar, right? Make it up, please. Somebody made all this stuff up. At some point, you got to do it. You got to figure out what's going to work in your industry and for your company.
Mason Cosby [00:35:36]:
I love it. The biggest final soapbox that would be separate from anything we've already talked about is just, like, timeframes. So I really live in the crawl walk run thought process, and, like, the framing for scrappy ABM is we are the only avian service provider for the crawl stage. Whatever. At the core, though, if you follow me on LinkedIn, I have nine month old daughter. Like, she is literally actively learning to crawl right now. And I think it's time frames. So, again, with the 200k tech stack that's generally purchased, there's this promise of we can build ABM in no time, and you'll have this full scale program that's just as good as snowflake, when in reality, an infant takes anywhere from seven to ten months from when they're born to learn to crawl.
Mason Cosby [00:36:15]:
It's a seven to ten month timeframe that is the average. And, like, heaven forbidden. You don't have an above average child or an average child, like, some organizations are underperforming.
Dave Gerhardt [00:36:25]:
My daughter, she didn't walk until she was, like, 18 months.
Mason Cosby [00:36:28]:
Yeah, that's the back end of the average.
Dave Gerhardt [00:36:30]:
So, like, crawl, walk, run. Well, I think there's an important lesson there, which is, I think we try to jump right to the scale. And I've written about this recently where, like, I've made mistakes in hiring, where I've been like, oh, I got a great idea for something that I want to do. Let's go hire someone for this role. And then we mess up because we actually don't end up proving it out or we didn't learn to. Now, you can be on this podcast talking about what works in ABM because you've done it and you have experience and you've learned what works and what doesn't in the hiring example, I'd have an idea for hiring somebody. Hire them without proving it out at all versus now what I've learned is, okay, we might want to do x. Let's have someone do this as 20% of their job in the meantime.
Dave Gerhardt [00:37:08]:
Okay, we're going to do an event. So, like, dan is doing a ton of event stuff for us right now. He's learning a bunch of that. Then we're going to have proven it. We're going to do a 200 person event. We're going to learn. We're going to learn what we like, what didn't like all that. Then we can make a better decision if next year we want to hire a full time events person.
Dave Gerhardt [00:37:24]:
It's no different when you're building out a new channel or a new program. So I'd love the go back to basics crawl, walk, run. Simplifying ABM. How's that? To put a bow on this? All right, this is great. I got a bunch of different notes simplifying ABM. Signal based go to market. I love the signal based go to market as a wrap up. Just like I like the idea of let's incentivize marketing to get people back to the website, not necessarily to like, they only get points.
Dave Gerhardt [00:37:50]:
The MQL form is on this page. And marketing only gets points if someone fills out that form. No, we drove people into the store. Let's keep driving them back. Let's keep getting them back to consume more information. They listen to our podcast. They view this content on our website. Let's get to that model.
Dave Gerhardt [00:38:04]:
I love the signal based intent stuff. I like talking about highly specific, personalized content. Your four ds was really good. And then the account progression. So this is a jam packed 40 minutes for people on getting smarter at ABM. Mason, thank you for doing this. I appreciate you coming and hanging out. Go to LinkedIn.
Dave Gerhardt [00:38:20]:
You can find Mason. He is there. Mason Cosby. Not to be confused with the legendary NFL kicker Mason Crosby.
Mason Cosby [00:38:27]:
Thank you.
Dave Gerhardt [00:38:30]:
Which is fantastic. You'll go find him on LinkedIn, send them a message, connect with him there, start engaging with him. Stuff that's another great way to learn. You find somebody interesting on the podcast, connect with them on LinkedIn, like a bunch of posts, and you start to get that stuff in their feed. Mason, we'll do more stuff together. I have no doubt in the future we could do a whole other episode on, like, a podcasting as an ABM strategy. But we'll get there. But you'll appreciate this.
Dave Gerhardt [00:38:52]:
So we're doing an event, all of eight or ten speakers that we have. This isn't really an ABM play, but they're all people. For our first event to the crawl, walk run point of this. All the speakers that I source for the event were people that I've already had on the podcast. I know that the audience likes their content. I know that they're good speakers. They're engaging, they're interesting people. They already know me.
Dave Gerhardt [00:39:12]:
So if I go and ask them to speak, they're going to most likely say yes, like small things like that. And I know you have a whole playbook with, with podcasting for ABM. So, Mason, good to see you again. Thanks for coming. Hanging out on the podcast. Go and check out scrappy ABM and all Mason stuff.
Mason Cosby [00:39:25]:
Thanks for having me, Dave.