How Some Conversational AI, Supply Chain & ITSM GTM Teams Create, Capture and Expand Demand Using ABM
Kristina Jaramillo
President of Personal ABM and Host of the ABM Done Right Podcast - I Enable GTM Teams to Land and Expand Key Accounts with the Right Account Intelligence, Content, Messaging & Conversational Support
This week, I am speaking to the SVP of Sales and Marketing at a SaaS B2B startup that focuses on applying conversational AI to the supply chain industry to remove the gaps between planning and execution that leads to stock-outs, higher inventory costs, and reduced "on time-in full" service performance to customers. While the company has some competitors in the space, its main competitor is the "status quo" as 80% of business decisions are made without insights. The supply chain industry is used to dealing with distributed teams, disconnected systems, and manual reporting and the industry as a whole resists change even though supply chains around the world faced unprecedented disruption in the last year.
78% of Challenger sellers feel their toughest customer objections are status quo objections. Status quo objections = customer resistance to changing their current approach to solving a problem.
To accelerate growth after the company's recent $4M funding round, the SVP will need to strengthen the GTM strategy, improve the customer journey and implement new processes. His team will need to capture demand for their one-of-a-kind solution that received a patent last year and have a process in place to accelerate in-market accounts to revenue. He'll need a process that enables the GTM teams to create demand and a buying vision with those accounts that are stuck in the status quo. And, he'll need a process that increases deal sizes, provides margin growth, and creates more profitable revenue growth with existing accounts.
Too many organizations put ABM into buckets vs. using it to create, capture, and expand demand and revenue growth across the buyer's journey and customer lifecycle.
For example, Rand Fishkin?at?SparkToro?recently posted:
"Executives—you've got two options for marketing strategy:
#1 - Serve existing demand (SEO, PPC, sales outreach, many parts of content, SMM & ABM, etc. are all tactics here)
#2 - Create new demand (brand awareness marketing, PR, guest contributions, marketing through sources of influence, etc.)
In the digital marketing universe, I see WAY too much focus on #1, and almost none on #2."
I completely agree with him on this point but I do not agree that?#ABM?is just about serving existing demand. In fact, I tell my clients that it's a mistake to use ABM with just in-market accounts that may be identified by intent data platforms like?6sense,?Bombora,?DemandScience,?LeadSift (a Foundry company),?Intentsify. In-market accounts lead to quicker short-term growth but it also tends to result in smaller deal sizes as teams react to predefined needs,
Teams should be using ABM to align with the 60% of the market that is stuck in the status quo. If you put together content, digital strategies, email outreach and an account plan that aligns with the status quo's strategic priorities and their unconsidered gaps that can impact their strategic vision, you can create the buying vision. And, when you create the buying vision vs. responding to intent data, you can drive larger, longer term deals.
So, I agree completely with Rand that teams need to put a greater focus on creating new demand vs. serving existing demand but do not agree that ABM only serves existing demand. I talk about this in my?ABM Done Right Podcast?where we recently discussed how?Latané Conant (she/her)?is wrong when she says to only focus on in-market accounts with ABM.
Other GTM teams are using ABM mainly to source the pipeline but then they are challenged to drive stage progression and win with high-value deals. Marketers need to focus energy on driving the fundamentals of revenue: sales velocity, average deal size, win rate, and sales cycle time. When marketers start talking about these elements, where/how to move the needle, and the result on revenue – you will get the attention of leadership and boards.
But we can’t be talking about where and how to move the needle and result on revenue because we’re not tying ABM to business challenges that are tied to revenue. Most ABM programs are still focused at the top of the funnel, even though analytics show that ABM can have the greatest impact at the middle and bottom of the buying journey. In the podcast linked below, you'll hear why:
Below, I share how some conversational AI, supply chain, and ITSM clients are creating, capturing, and expanding demand with ABM.
How Schneider National Created Wins with Accounts That Were Previously Unresponsive
Like many other supply chain & tech firms, the sales team at Schneider was looking to marketing for more sales-qualified leads as they were only advancing 1 out of every 5 to 10 MQLs toward revenue. They figured that the more leads that marketing can deliver - the more revenue they can produce. This is a false assumption because the non-personal, volume-based approach that traditional marketing takes is limited to the 10% of the market that is already open to buying. It's the same 10% that the competitors also chase.
However, when a personal marketing layer is added, sales cycles are created with the 60% of the market that was stuck in the status quo. As Sirius Decisions teaches their clients, "After you gain interest and awareness, you need to challenge the status quo and then convince?prospects to commit. This requires a real connection beyond the brand as trust matters not only on a company level but also on a personal relationship level."
For more than five years, Schneider National pushed out generic messaging around “better people, process and technology”. Sygma heard Schneider’s story from the competition before and they did not see their gaps and personal impacts for them to want to change. They did not see themselves in the “story” that was being told, which is why they ignored all outreach (social, email, live, and phone conversations) by sales and marketing. The content and messaging had no commercial impact on the buyer.
Schneider had the right contacts. Schneider’s VP of Sales was connected to Sygma’s VP of Logistics on LinkedIn. But sales did not have the right content and messaging to make a human-to-human connection. The connection was unresponsive to general industry messaging. Sales and marketing were not making a human-to-human connection or demonstrating a competitive advantage that helps buyers think beyond price. Recent studies even show that 86% of the content and messaging has no commercial impact on the buyer - only 14% of the content and messaging is communicated in such a way to suggest a valid reason for a change.
It’s why Schneider needed to redesign LinkedIn profiles and content to show mid-market firms like Sygma how they were being underserved by their transportation management system (TMS). Schneider needed to show how Sygma and other target accounts were being treated like the “middle child” by their service provider. They needed prospects to acknowledge both their gaps and the impacts on operations across the supply chain, the P&L, employees, KPIs, service performance, and customers.
Ultimately, Schneider needed buyer-centric profiles, content, and messaging that spoke to the human buyers (vs. “at” them) within key accounts they wanted to win, protect and expand. You cannot speak “to” human buyers if you do not have industry, company, rank/role, and personal relevance. Unfortunately, most sales and marketing communications stop at the industry and company relevance and then we wonder why prospects do not respond. Once Schneider increased their relevance, Sygma and others started to pull business development through six-month sales cycles. Schneider was used to seeing 12–18 month sales cycles. Sygma became an account that will be worth $2M–$6M depending on how long Schneider retains them as a client.
This story and others can be found in our recent article on the Sales Hacker blog. You can continue reading at?https://www.saleshacker.com/win-key-accounts-with-abm/?|?Sales Hacker
How a Conversational AI Firm Will Capture Demand for Their Platform's New Use Cases and Drive Wins with Tier 1 Banks and Lenders
A call center conversational AI firm that has $500K deal sizes came to Personal ABM because they were building a pipeline of accounts using Demandbase but they are challenged with accounts going dark. When reviewing their content, we were able to see why they are not driving stage progression. You see they focused content based on the buying journey: (awareness, consideration, purchase) vs. what the GTM teams will need to do to win the account (create demand, capture demand, progress demand, convert demand a.k.a close deals, retain demand and expand demand.) ABM is not about building awareness. We need to create demand by reframing accounts that can provide the greatest revenue growth. We need to capture that demand and build a consensus. We need to accelerate the demand and drive urgency so we can move accounts to revenue. And, we need to close the deal.
At best the company's awareness content was thought curation and at its worst it was thought regurgitation. There was no clear POV. There was no teaching for differentiation. There was no driving change with status quo accounts. It didn't align with the GTM team's target accounts. One of the tier 1 banks has a huge IT team that developed, integrated, and is now expanding the capabilities of its AI virtual assistant system (Erica). They received hundreds of patents this year that focuses on AI. Awareness content and generic "consideration" content will not move the account forward. Our client needs to show the gaps in the bank's current system and how it's creating challenges in the use cases that our client is focusing on: collections, complaints management, and compliance. They need to show the bank that they understand:
When it comes to status quo accounts, we need to drive greater personal relevance. teach for differentiation through stories (vs. making baseless claims), make an emotional connection, reframe thoughts and ideas and show a new way. Unfortunately, most content does not do this and it's why most content does not support ABM nor the selling conversations that GTM teams need to have with specific accounts.
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How an ITSM Firm Accelerated Accounts to Revenue & Became an International Player That Positioned Itself for Acquisition
Sales and GTM teams at an ITSM discovered that 4 out of 5 targeted companies outside of the financial industry lacked senior executive understanding of the business issues that the ITSM firm was trying to solve with their on-demand cloud-based capacity planning subscription service. Senior executives did not see how their IT teams, the business, operations, P&L, and customers were impacted by their infrastructure visibility gaps, manual IT processes, homegrown technologies, and inadequate tooling like VMWare that only looked at "current" infrastructure performance issues vs. where infrastructure challenges will lie in the months ahead.
More importantly, they did not see how the business "issues" were related to them because content and messaging focused on general industry assumptions and pain points. Their one-to-many and one-to-few campaigns missed the personal relevance needed to win over IT teams, the C-suite, and the CFO that did not see a reason to change.
More Personal Relevance Was Needed to Move Accounts Forward
As Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson mention in their book, "The Challenger Sale," in most cases, buyer unresponsiveness is not because you failed to make a logical argument. It's because you failed to make an emotional connection. It's not that buyers didn't believe your story. It's because they didn't see it as "their" story.
The sales and marketing team did not align their content and messaging with the specific retailer, airline, and online service accounts they wanted to win. As Doug Landis mentioned in a recent Forbes article: “When selling to larger companies you must come to every social, email, and live conversation with a point of view about their business...You have to know what they are focused on as those strategic initiatives for the business will trickle down to every department across the organization.” They needed more than persona-based content and messaging.?The airlines, retailers, and online service firms needed to see their specific gaps and how they would impact their strategic initiatives' success. IT buyers need to see that you understand their business landscape, their company, their needs, and what they will need for each stage of their buying process,
The ITSM Firm Needed Greater Customer Alignment
As Richa Pande (Global Head of ABM and Content Strategy for HP) mentioned on LinkedIn:
ABM demands absolute customer obsession. Demand gen and strategies are pursuit-led, whereas ABM is customer-led. This means value props should be designed by customer needs, not what's available in solution stable to sell. Value props should be custom designed to the unique opportunity in each account.
The ITSM firm needed to look at profiles, content, and messaging on all communication channels and ensure that GTM teams were relevant at each touchpoint and with each interaction. They needed to go beyond "pushing out" content based on intent data and what potential customers engaged within their Demandbase campaigns. They needed to uncover "why" there was intention or engagement in the first place so they can align with the target account's strategic vision and put a plan in place to get to the C-suite since the VPs and above are not the ones showing intention within enterprise accounts.
I discussed this ITSM client in greater detail during my recent B2B MX - Next Level ABM Strategies Summit presentation that you can view below. You can also click here to read the case study vs. watching it.
How Ascension Logistics Expanded Demand and Created Greater Margin Growth with Sephora
Only in rare instances, sales, marketing, and customer success teams work together with shared common goals and metrics and execute jointly to win, protect and expand specific accounts. This provides a great growth opportunity for the teams to work together to not only identify the best margin and revenue growth opportunities but also help named customers “see” how you help them solve business problems in a way that increases their loyalty. In the mini-case study below, you’ll see how a client changed Sephora’s buying behavior.
Sephora’s warehouse and DC were not scaled to meet the needs of a fast-moving operation or the needs of their 2300 global stores and their e-commerce customers. For example, the manufacturer’s tech did not enable the warehouse to prioritize replenishment, which led to delayed orders, waves, and carrier moves. They weren’t engaging in planned distribution where the warehouse knows how products will ship to stores even before it arrives at the warehouse. While they implemented automation for expected volumes, the company lacked fulfillment automation for surge demands caused by new, hot lipstick colors or holiday demand.
Driving this, most tech implementation consultants functioned like the manufacturers’ line workers: reacting, not proactively strategizing. Our client, a JDA implementation firm, kept receiving a shortlist of 30 pain points needing coverage within six weeks to go-to-market causing our client to build for “wants”. Because our client was not having the right customer discussions, Sephora would treat our client as technicians and pay for man hours vs. strategic value that has higher profit margins and revenue growth. And Sephora would try to penny-pinch and negotiate the number of hours and resources that would be needed for different projects.
There was no conversation involving our client in the go-to-market planning of new products or lines. They didn’t have the content, stories, and messaging to show how building for 30 software points, only seeing 5–8% of the entire picture is leading to missed details and requirements as there’s no visibility into pipelines, growth plans, customer-driven needs, and current/future operational bottlenecks. They weren’t able to show the impact and how it delayed retail/e-commerce presence, wasted marketing dollars, increased days in inventory, slowed cash conversion cycles, missed customer shipments, and created out-of-stock conditions. They weren’t able to show Sephora how the current reactive IT approach was allowing Ulta to beat them in customer loyalty and for Amazon to make inroads with the high-end beauty market as GTM time for new products and shades was increased by six months.
Ultimately, they didn’t have messaging, content, and support for the “why evolve” conversation that needs to happen to change buying behaviors and expand profit margin and revenue growth. Once the client was able to shift the customer conversation with profiles, content, and messaging that was designed specifically for the why change or why evolve conversation, they were able to change the client’s perception of the firm from “technicians” to “strategic partner”. Our client joined leadership in the planning stages. They added value with processes that will show how changes would impact the warehouse, distribution, and transportation under different scenarios and allow the beauty retailer to adapt and scalably align with new system changes without disruption to stores or customers. With this added value came more profitable revenue growth that was stronger than trading dollars for hours.
To create, capture, progress, retain and expand demand -- Teams need to change the experiences they deliver and the interactions they're having...
When you think about the case studies I shared above. you'll see that ABM is not about pushing out content and messaging to more targeted audiences. Teams are not seeing expected returns from their ABM programs and investments in Demandbase, Terminus, 6sense, etc. because they are still taking a spray-and-pray approach -- just now to select accounts and select decision makers and influencers. They're not changing their interactions and experiences to ensure that the messaging sticks as teams are not aligning themselves completely with future and existing accounts (which is what ABM should be about!) In the podcast below, you'll see why Tyler Pleiss from Clari is starting with a 1:1 ABM approach as the team looks to penetrate 3 new markets that are years behind when it comes to RevOps.
In another ABM Done Right Podcast. Davis Potter shares why he's starting with 1:1 vs. focusing on scaling ABM for Scale.AI. Click the image below to listen to his podcast episode.
To get started with a 1:1 ABM approach that creates, captures, converts, retains, and expands demand...
If you'd like to discuss the specific growth opportunities within your ABM program -- or how you should get started, schedule a free lunch and learn ABM strategy session. When you go to schedule your strategy session, scroll down and watch the video. You'll see how Personal ABM helped the former CMO of Apptricity drive the company's largest deals.
MD |Yale Certified in Wellness |MBA Healthcare Management |Health Tech
1 年Wonderful. To stay ahead of competition, we should use the blue ocean strategy. This involves taking action that is unique to your business and that no competitors could possibly duplicate. Aim to think outside the box. We tend to let fear keep us in our comfort zone, but most times our greatest life is on the other side of fear.