How Does ABM Influence Sales Success?

Benjamin Ard AI (00:00)
Here's a sneak peek from today's episode.

Christopher Collier (00:02)
I think that's really the biggest shift in understanding ABM is that it's not a lead generation tool. It's purely an influencer. And then once you do that and you realize,

I need to measure different KPIs against this for success necessarily the conversion of your everything along those lines.

Ben (00:45)
Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Chris. Chris, welcome to the show.

Christopher Collier (00:50)
Hi Ben, it's pleasure to be here.

Ben (00:52)
Yeah, Chris, I'm excited for this. I feel like I have a lot to learn today. I'm excited to dive into the subject, but before we do that, we like to ask our guests, what do you love about content and marketing and kind of catch us up on your career a little bit?

Christopher Collier (01:05)
Sure. marketing is one of those things where I don't like to use the passion descriptor when everybody says like, it's my passion. But you know, I actually, I'm one of those weirdos that I have a degree in marketing. I went to school for marketing. I knew I didn't want to go into sales because it was funny when everybody was graduating from Washington state university with our degree in marketing, half of them went into sales, which I, which I thought, yeah, okay. I mean,

I thought that was an easy way to kind of pivot in the career. I actually thought I took the harder way because I was actually having to work in my degree. From a content perspective, I always thought that how amazing is it that you're creating things that are meant for different audiences and it's across many different mediums. So it made it to where you didn't get bored.

doing one thing or the other. could, you know, you've got a whole toolbox and it's like, well today I want to work with my hammer. This day I want to work with my planer, you know, so on and so forth. And so, you know, I thought it was great to be able to find out who your ICP is and then create these different pieces of content that support their lives day to day. At least that's my philosophy with my team is, like you got to create content that helps your ICP, helps your prospects and your customers.

who I am, like I was saying, I, Chris Collier, I VP of marketing for EHS insight, been spending about 15, 16 years in the EHS industry degree in my marketing minor in sociology. Two reasons why I got the minor was one, I needed to raise my grades to certify in the business school at Washington state. but then also I thought, well, if I'm going to do it, cause I was close to getting a film minor.

probably do something that's gonna amplify my major in marketing. So sociology is studying a group of people, marketing, you're selling to a group of spent about 18 months in cybersecurity, but then was brought back into being in the environmental health and safety industry for me

validates my morals and ethics because I've always wanted to work or sell with products that amplify human condition rather than just selling another cog. There's something wrong. I mean, we all have things, you we all have watches and AirPods and iPhones, but I wanted to sell something that was actually going to help save people's lives or bring them home safely at the end of the day.

Ben (03:26)
I love that. That's amazing. And I think that as time goes on, more and more people have the same initiative to be able to make an impact with their job. And I think that's awesome when you can find that and actually do that. So I love it. So Chris, the subject for today is account-based marketing, ABM. And as time goes on, I feel like this is picking up more momentum. You see all sorts of tools coming up that claim that they can do ABM for you, things of that nature. But really,

Can you give us a quick breakdown of what in your opinion is ABM? Why would a business lean that way? And how does that differ from different kinds of marketing that you might see in a business?

Christopher Collier (04:05)
I think the biggest shift for professionals, especially for leaders, because we've always been trained that you need to have that MQL, that lead, that MQL, the SQL that turns into the opportunity. It's an attribution standpoint of being able to track the ROI. I think you have to have a mindset shift that account-based marketing is influencing prospect, the opportunity.

maybe even the customer, you're doing some cross-selling versus just, getting them to take action through a CTA, fill out a form, you know, as I like to say, you what's the carrot that you're enticing the person to, to take action with. And it's that air cover. It's providing that content at the appropriate times that they're having conversations or researching. think that's where intent data comes into play. But you know, I think that's

really the biggest thing is it provides an of detail of data to be able to even look at how the opportunities flowing down the funnel, how they're engaging with ads and or, you know, their, your website or some of your other channels that you're doing. But

I think that's really the biggest shift in understanding ABM is that it's not a lead generation tool. It's purely an influencer. And then once you do that and you realize,

I need to measure different KPIs against this for success necessarily the conversion of your everything along those lines.

Ben (05:30)
I love it. So based off of that, how do you measure success? Just to dive into that right there, if it's front of mind, how do you look at success and failure? How do you measure it, justify it? What's that process look like for any business that's looking to maybe have better metrics or even start doing this?

Christopher Collier (05:49)
I know for me, you know, I've, I've used two platforms in, in my experience with ABM. and it's not actually demand base or six cents, but it was terminus was the first one. And with terminus really the only way that we could show a positive influence on these opportunities is we measured deals that didn't have, ads being shown deals that did have ads being shown.

And the only way we could really show that we were influencing them was we shrank the amount of days it took to close. So sales velocity was increased and the amount of days was closed. With Enrich, who I've recently been flown to London to speak on behalf of them to British business professionals, very easy because out of the box, especially we use HubSpot.

And there is, there are ways to get around it. Like if you use Salesforce, you know, but, know, and having that bridge with maybe HubSpot or something else, but since it's a native integration with HubSpot, it's easy to show the influence based on the or apps are being shown to, you can see the influence pipeline, the influence close loss, the influence close one. those are just a couple of the KPIs that have been really easy for us as we can see, like, okay, well, here's the influence.

Pipeline and here's the influence close one. We're already in the black. So let's just keep doing more of what we're doing I think engagements so instead of you know Enrich calls it engagements you could look at as impressions or clicks or you know, you shouldn't measure clicks but I think How Enrich has shown up or how it shows up its data as you can you can look at? Well, how many times has the video been viewed?

How many times is the article, the long form article that's kind of like in an iframe, how long has that been read? You could measure clicks, but I think you gotta look at engagements and like have people resonated with that. Now, that's the thing that goes back to the equation. It's like, well, not getting any engagements. Well, okay, is it the wrong ad copy? It's a wrong visual copy for the ads. Maybe it's the wrong videos. Okay, well, I'm not.

They're not staying on the page. They're not doing anything. Okay, well maybe you're serving them up the wrong page, but then that also goes back to the original, the original piece. don't care if they come to our Lenny page. I only care if they see the ad and we stay top of mind. One of my mentors, Dave Tolliver, he and I discussed this, about display ads in general with Google display ads with, with ABM. Think of it as like a billboard.

and you're going down the freeway at 70 miles per hour and you're seeing these billboards on a plumber and a dentist and another plumber and you're like, well, I don't need a dentist or a plumber. But that one time that you're like, my gosh, I all of a sudden have a toothache and I need to go to the dentist. like, I don't have a dentist, but I saw this billboard, so I'm gonna go to it. So it's that air cover and that constant kind of

reminding of folks from brand awareness that we're there and this is what we do.

Ben (08:48)
I love that. So for the theme of this podcast, we obviously talk about content and how businesses can get more value out of their content. What role does content play in account-based marketing and how do you look at that in general and how can businesses maybe get some more mileage out of it?

Christopher Collier (09:05)
I can, so I can speak to like what we've done and we've aligned our campaign stages with what I like to call two, two kind of forts. You've got your intent campaigns and you've got your deal stage campaigns. And we've done one of two ways. One we've done our due due diligence of, at each stage, what are people wanting to see? What are some of the things that they would want to look at to validate?

the fact of coming to look at us more, research us know, the evaluating the awareness, decision negotiating, et cetera, et cetera. matched our research with meeting executive vice president of like, what are your reps saying at these different stages that we match the content that we already have?

in order to kind of fill those buckets. And so we built these campaigns and based on, you know, it was evaluating, deciding or negotiating, dropping these pieces of content that we'd already built in there. If we had holes, that told us we need to make, we need to create that content, whether it's either video form, graphically writing it out, creating solution briefs, et cetera, et cetera. So I hope that answers your question.

Ben (10:16)
Yeah, absolutely. love that. So personalization is kind of a hot topic when it comes to ABM and content and advertising and generative AI, all that fun, you know, I just used about a dozen buzzwords. I feel like in one question, but how do you look at the technologies and things like that and ABM and where do you think they provide value and what's maybe a little bit too much hype right now with all of the stuff going on in your opinion?

Christopher Collier (10:29)
You

I do wish that they had a capability like in Google ads where you can have the dynamic keywords thrown into the headlines and into the verbiage, know, something similar to maybe with a, with an ad campaign where your, your headline has a dynamic in the company that you're targeting. All of a sudden shoves in there. Well, it's not there. Cause I mean, it does come down to, especially when it comes to ABM, you know, you've got to, you're one to many, one to few, one to one.

And so a hundred percent like one-to-one personalization, you really have to have their names listed out. You know, like here's the target specifically made for Chevron Boeing or you know, whatever company you're targeting right I personally.

the fence when it comes to highly personalized stuff. But I'm also a weird marketing pro where I kind of hate when things are actually targeted to me, yet I'm on the other end of the stick where I'm doing it the same way. And so I tried to build my ads. like, okay, if I were floating around the internet and I know I was having these conversations or maybe someone was targeting me, would I actually want these ads shown to me with like,

my company's logo, would that actually pique my interest? It would probably pique my interest, but I'm not entirely sure that I would be on the phone and buy them right then because you maybe aren't in the market. And I think that's where intent data, doing your due diligence, maybe being realistic of like a sales cycle or like, they even interested? Or even if they're aligned with your ICP, maybe they're just, maybe sure you're just assuming that because, you know, we're heavy in manufacturing, they were just assuming because they're manufacturing, but it's, it turns out like

they wouldn't need our kind of stuff. Not the case.

Ben (12:21)
it's an interesting perspective because you're right. If I put myself in the shoes of one of my buyers and I were seeing advertising or materials online that had my name and my logo, I think I'd be more curious about how they're doing it and not as intrigued about who they are and what they do. Because you're right. Ninety five percent of the time someone's not in market.

Christopher Collier (12:36)
Yeah.

Ben (12:42)
And it is, how do I stay top of mind until they become the 5 %? So I think that that's a really fascinating point, putting your yourself, because eventually at some point in time, it feels like, do I not have any privacy anymore? You know, I think personalization can really feel like it's encroaching on that. And, I think that that's, you know, definitely plays a role. So one final question, cause these episodes go by really, really quickly. Intent data. You mentioned that a bunch. How are you using intent data with ABM?

I feel like there's like Bumbora is the source for everyone and anyone, like, how are you using intent data in a productive way? instead of, dunno, I feel like there's a lot of, a lot of buzzwords around intent data. How are you using it productively?

Christopher Collier (13:14)
Yeah.

I think for sure it's definitely a prioritization scenario. There's so much data that's coming in that it's not one of those situations where.

It's a sure shot, you know, like, they're, you in my case, they're searching for, you know, an EHS platform. you know, they could have used some kind of variation of a keyword or some, kind of an intense spike that wasn't necessarily true. How we've been using it is we actually split it up into three swings where you've got zero to 40, 41 to 70 and 71 to a hundred with different messaging and different budgets thrown at it. Really, you to go after the zero to 40. They're just getting their toes dipping.

They're barely looking. You're going to get in early on the conversations. Same thing with the 41 to 70, but they've started, they're a little more mature in their search and maybe they also have an 71 to 100 is actually kind of a, that's kind of a long shot. And if I were asked tomorrow, like, okay, well what, what campaign would you cut immediately to save funds? That would be the one. Because if they're showing intent of that, at that point, they've already made a decision or they already have an incumbent and maybe they're just doing their

their due diligence, which actually means they've already made a decision. And, know, one of the things, you know, this sounds rudimentary,

you know, setting up email notifications of like your prospect visited the website. You should stop doing what you're doing and pick up a phone and call them and or email them right now because you're top of mind. So, you know, one of the things is getting buy-in on the team as well. You know, you can have these great processes and tech stacks set up, but unless you've got the team drinking the Kool-Aid and seeing that it's working, which we're, we've proven and people are getting more and more into

then they're more willing to lean into that intent data and use it as a, you're still hunting, but now you're in the right field with the right projectile to hunt whatever you're hunting.

Ben (15:14)
Yeah, that's awesome. Well, Chris, we're out of time, but I really love this conversation. I think there's so much to ABM. So I think this is some great insights. If anyone wants to reach out and connect with you and further the conversation online, how and where can they find you?

Christopher Collier (15:21)
Agreed.

Hit me up on LinkedIn. I'm a big proponent of mentoring and or sharing of information. Even if it's a competitor, I'm not going to show you under the hood, but I'm willing to have a conversation because it's not necessarily me spilling the beans there's a lot that goes into any of these equations from a marketing perspective. So hit me up on LinkedIn. Connect with me. Just promise not to sell me anything. And we can have...

We can have conversations all day long.

Ben (15:56)
Love it. Perfect. Well, Chris, again, thank you so much for your time today.

Christopher Collier (15:59)
Thanks, awesome being here.

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