Auto-generated transcript. Speaker names, spelling, and punctuation may be slightly off.
Mark Evans: Account based marketing or ABM is having a moment. It's been around for a while, but ABM is being enthusiastically embraced by a growing number of b to b marketers. Why? Amid a more challenging economic climate when marketing budgets have been slashed, ABM allows marketers to focus on targets that matter rather than using a shotgun approach. In theory, it makes marketing more efficient, focused, and successful.
In practice, ABM is complex and involves many moving parts. To provide insight into ABM, how it works, how to embrace it, and best practices, I'm happy to be talking with Paul Slack, founder and CEO of Vendi Digital, a B2B digital marketing and social media agency. Welcome to Marketing Spark.
Paul Slack: Hey, Mark. Glad to be here.
Mark Evans: One of the reasons that I'm excited to have you on the podcast is that I have many clients jumping on the ABM bandwagon. They see the benefits and they're looking for something new to attract prospects. So far, if I was being honest, I'd say the results have been mixed. They're seeing good engagement. So far, I'd say the results have been mixed.
They're seeing good engagement, but not many conversions. But they're learning and improving, so that's a positive. To start our conversation, maybe it's a good idea to step back and ask you to provide a definition about ABM, and why has it become so popular with b to b companies who have been using all kinds of other marketing channels and techniques, but have come around to account based marketing in the last few months?
Paul Slack: Yeah. I I think that's a great place to start, Mark. And, you know, because I bet if we were to poll all the people listening to the podcast today and ask them, hey. What is ABM or account based marketing? I think we'd probably get as many different definitions as there are folks that are listening in.
And, you know, the reality is, in my opinion, account based marketing is really just good marketing. Right? It it's kind of like what we should be doing in the first place. And what I mean by that is, you know, picking an audience that will resonate well with what we have to say, understanding their pain points, making sure that we have their the right messaging, getting it in front of them so that we can get their attention and hold their attention and ultimately make selling easier. So to me, that's what account based marketing really is.
Now I think one of the struggles that people have is they pretend account based marketing is something that it isn't. And this is, I think, gonna tie into why it's become popular so popular recently. There's a couple reasons in my opinion, but let's let's talk about what it's not. I don't think account based marketing is running display ads to intent data, which I think is what a lot of people are kind of thinking account based marketing is. And one of the reasons why it's become so popular is you've got all these martech companies out there that have the ability now to tell us, oh, company x y z, they're in market.
They're looking for something that you do. You really need to get in front of them. Let's run some display ads and give you air cover as a way of getting in front of those buyers that are in market. And, certainly, intent data is important. It has a place.
We can talk about that a little bit later on. But when you've got an entire industry mark that's focused on, hey. ABM is important because we can now get in front of those net, quote, unquote, now buyers and get your message out there, that's driving it. And then you touched on it, I think, as you asked the question, and that is we're dealing with different economic times right now. So all of us have limited resources.
We have limited budgets. How are we gonna get in front of the folks we need to get in front of? How are we gonna drive the goals and objectives that we have this year with potentially less budget, well, it makes sense that we need to cut waste. And so if we can focus on targeted accounts or folks that are in market, get our message out there, the theory would be that we're gonna be more effective, more efficient with the limited resources that we have.
Mark Evans: Let's talk about the different movie parts to ABM. Now, if we were to take a simplistic view of ABM, you identify the accounts that matter to you, you build out a list of all the potential contacts within those targets, and then a lot of people, a lot of companies believe that it's a matter of creating a, for lack of a better word, an email marketing campaign that is on steroids. So you're emailing people, but you're continually providing them with information, resources, access to thought leadership, checklists, all the things that they could find helpful to position yourself as this trusted resource. And if you manage to do that successfully, you'll drive conversions, which for many companies is demo requests, contact forms, that kind of thing. That's very simplistic, but there's gotta be more to it.
Paul Slack: In our mind, there's there's four pillars to executing demand or ABM the right way. One is, and you kinda touched on it, Mark, it's starting with planning. So we have to understand who is that target account list that we're going after. And so that's that should be a collaboration between sales. Right?
So on going to the sales department and understanding, you know, what what are their targets that they're looking for. Also, doing some research internally. A lot of people struggle with this part of it, the target account list, because they just go and say, oh, it's the f 1,000. We just wanna we wanna hit all the the top companies that are out there, and the reality is that's probably not the the best way to build a target account list. What you wanna do what I what we recommend is start with your customer list that you have today, analyze what industries and sectors and and roles within organizations that you serve the best that love you the most, and use that information to really inform, well, based on that, who should we go target?
And then work with your sales team and really understanding what are the key accounts that matter to them. Another big challenge that people have with that, Mark, is sales wants to change the list about every other week. So you've gotta work together on what the list is, and then you gotta kinda lock it down at least for a quarter. And so planning is a big part of it, as you said. But once you find kinda figure out, okay.
This is our target list, then you need to actually go in and look at that buying committee. So who are all the people that we're trying to to reach? You know? The average b to b sale today has a buying committee of at least four to five people, and it's getting bigger every single it's every time I see that data refresh, it's like a bigger buying committee, a bigger buying committee. So we have to target the account, but then we have to target the roles.
And then you touched on this too. Then we wanna think about our messaging, but we wanna think about our messaging from a segmentation perspective and a personalization perspective. So what messages are we gonna deliver to the different roles or potentially what messages are we gonna deliver to the different industries. Because the key part of making ABM work is when our audience engages with our content, whether that's an ad or an email as you said or blog on our website, they want to we want them to feel like that engagement, that piece of information that they're consuming was made just for them, and that's a key part of it. Right?
So step one is this planning phase that we just talked about. Then we move into the next pillar in our ABM framework, which is the activate your audience pillar. Once you understand, you know, okay. This is who we're going after. These are the logos that matter.
These are the roles within those logos. This is the information they care about. Where are they hanging out? Because in today's world, you know, especially in this post COVID era, we're all connecting to one another, and we're getting information in different places than we were pre COVID. And so pre COVID, you could have a lot of that information on your website.
Post COVID, your website is a great place, and we'll get to that in a minute, for for information to establish authority. But, really, we need to go where buyers are going to learn, where they're engaging with our peers, and we've gotta get that information out there to them. And that's that's building strategies to ensure that this target set of accounts and these people within those accounts are getting the right messages at the right stage in these channels other than our website. But the goal of that activate your audience phase is really to get them to the next pillar, which is establish authority. Pardon me.
And we believe that you do that on your website, that your website still plays a very critical role in the ABM process, but that's ultimately where we're gonna establish authority and trust and give them the deep dive. And there's a lot of ways that we can do that. We can talk about assets a little bit later on. But, well, one thing, Mark, I did mention, when you're planning, it's really important that you kinda tier out your list. So if you've got a large target account list, you might have your tier ones, your tier twos, and your tier threes, and you're gonna adjust the the assets that you develop and the way that you go to market based on the tier.
So if it's your top tier, these are the most important logos. That's gonna be a highly engaged, cooperative process with sales because you're gonna build very personalized experiences for those logos. Tier two may be more industry centric. So if I'm a tier two, I might be getting content about how you fix problems in my industry. If I'm a tier one, you're gonna be giving me content specifically about my who I am as a business.
And then tier three might be something different. But ultimately, we wanna get them to our website where we can establish authority and trust. You know, we have the saying at Vendi, people don't buy the best solutions. They buy the ones they understand from people they know, like, and trust. And so a huge part of what we're trying to do is get them to our website so that we can accomplish that.
And then the last pillar of our strategy is nurture relationships. And, Mark, this is where email marketing comes in. Right? We're all in the b to b space. In most cases, we're not gonna sell our product or service the first time they land on our website.
It's going to take an extended period of time. In fact, ABM is perfect for long sales cycles. So if you're a company that has a long sales cycle and you're not thinking about ABM, you really need to because that's where that nurture relationships kicks in and email marketing and events and things like that really are a big part of that keeping yourself top of mind so that when they are ready to buy, they think of your brand first. I don't know if you saw. There was a really interesting article that came out.
I can send you a link if you wanna put it in your show notes from Harvard Business Review earlier this year that said that a study that they did on b two b buyers that before they begin the research phase, they already have a short list of four to five vendors in mind that they're thinking about considering. So before they even begin researching, like, oh, I need a new CRM software or I need a new accounting package or whatever, it's they've already got four to five vendors in mind. And then when they begin the research process and complete it, this is the mind blowing part. They're gonna buy from one of those four to five companies 90% of the time. So if we're not one of the four to five on the shortlist, then we've we've got a 10 one in 10 shot at winning the business.
So a huge part of ABM is making sure that we get on that short list. And so that's the process that we walk our clients through.
Mark Evans: I want, and I need to take a step back here because I think a lot of companies understand the email marketing part of the equation. They likely understand the fact that you need to identify your targets and the people within those target accounts. But what happens between pillar one and pillar four, because there's there are activities like retargeting, advertising to drive people to your website. There's it's all part of a marketing ABM mix. There's assets that need to be developed, a library that needs to be tapped to feed your advertisements, to feed your marketing.
Can you walk me through some of the things that are involved in the actual tactical execution of an ABM campaign? And if you've got a client that you could reference, that would be awesome as well.
Paul Slack: Yeah. So I'll give you I'll I'll try to explain it. That's that's great. We can do a deep dive on kinda activate your audience, and then how does that align and move people into that established authority phase. And so let's just start with what we're trying to accomplish.
So once we understand who our customer is and the tiers and and the buying committee, now we need to go and create information that's designed to help them understand the problem that we solve and what we call the plan forward. So here's the problem that you have, and we figured out how to solve that problem, and we've come up with a plan forward that's gonna help you accomplish and overcome that problem. And then what is our point of view as it relates to that, and how does that tie to our unique selling proposition? So we figure those things out, and then we build assets designed to communicate that, and then we craft those assets based on where our customers go to go to learn. So let's take social media.
So in today's world, social media is absolutely a critical place for us to activate our audience. And so we have what we would call a cold audience, which are the people that we're trying to target that don't know that we exist today. We wanna craft content that's going to that we're gonna share to that cold audience, that's going to make them aware that we exist, that's gonna communicate what we want them to know, that's gonna tie to our unique selling proposition, and we need to set it up in a way that as people engage with that content, we are capturing you mentioned retargeting, capturing them into some way to retarget so that we can now show them different messages. And so let me let me tie that to a client example. This hopefully will help.
And so we have a customer. They're a big high-tech company. Their average sale is probably a quarter of $1,000,000. The sales cycles are pretty long. Primarily, they've traditionally grown through just client, you know, land and expand.
So they've got their sales reps that are constantly in their accounts trying to grow more technology acquisition within the logos that they already have. And so about a year and a half ago, they decided that they really wanted to go after some new logos. They brought us in to help them with that, and we walked them through the process that I just walked you through, Mark. And so how that worked is we crafted these messages, and we started presenting them to their target audience in various places, primarily using LinkedIn. And so we were running LinkedIn ads that communicated clearly about how our client could help them overcome a challenge that they were having as it relates to the technology that they provided.
And then as those people engage with that content, we put them in two different retargeting pools, a what we call a sub 30 retargeting pool. So these are people that, you know, as soon as they engage with the content for thirty days, they're gonna get a pretty strong message about, hey. Do you wanna talk to a sales rep? And then once that thirty day period is over, they go into another retargeting phase, which is more of a nurture retargeting phase. And the the idea is at the top of the funnel, we wanna answer the question, what do we want them to know?
And then once they engage with us, the next question that we have to ask is what do we want them to do next? And so the idea is that that message that happens in the middle of the funnel is really getting them to take some action. But in the world of ABM, that's not necessarily raising their hand to become a demo. That may be, hey. Come to this event or go read this white paper or go to this page on our website where we've got a content hub going on a deep dive related to this particular topic.
And so I'm kinda covering the marketing side of Activate Your Audience. There's a huge sales side of this too. And so a big part of making account based marketing work is we've gotta partner with sales. And so once we identified this target account list, we started working with the sales team, educating them on exactly what we're doing, and then asking them to start building connections with people that are on the target account list, but also becoming active resources within the market on social media. So what I mean by that is we targeted influencers that have the ear of our target accounts, And we had our sales reps start going out and responding and engaging with comments to comments on posts on LinkedIn where to with these influencers.
And the whole idea was we we call it we wanna be seen as a peer, not a peddler. That's something that we say all the time when we're training sales reps. It's like, hey. Yeah. Guess what?
This is an influencer in your space, and they get a lot of likes and a lot of comments on their posts. We want you to start engaging with them, but this is a this is a sales free zone. Just go out there and share your thought leadership, your knowledge, and, of course, we help them craft those messages. But that's that's how to do it. You you gotta create the information that matters to them, that points to your point of view and your unique selling proposition, and then you gotta slice that information up in the channel appropriate ways and then push that information out there.
Another component of it was, obviously, we wanted to run IntentData. I mentioned intent data at the top of our podcast, but we we used it in a very specific way. We almost think treat intent data, Mark, as like retargeting data. So we're still gonna go after a cold audience top of the funnel. These are the logos that we want and the folks that we want.
And then, you know, they're gonna engage with our content. They become they get into our retargeting pools. Well, we just use intent data like retargeting data. If I know that they're in market because they're throwing off signals, intent signals, I'm gonna run that mid and bottom funnel messaging to them.
Mark Evans: So I just treat them like a retargeting pool. Does that make sense? Yes, it does. But can you take a step back and define intent data?
Paul Slack: Sure. That's great. So intent data, there's a lot of different ways to get intent data today, mostly from Martech vendors, and what these Martech providers, Sixth Sense is one, Bombora is one, Info USA is one, I mean, gosh, even LinkedIn is kind of a a low tech cost effective way of doing intent data. But the idea is we want to understand who is in market by their behavior that they're doing online. And so, for example, if somebody's on your website and they're looking at certain content on your website, if it's been crafted the right way and you can see them, in a way, that's intent data.
And so one of the things we recommend for our clients is that we we get data that it's basically IP reverse lookup information. So as people are coming to your site, you can see what logos they are, and then we align that with the target account list that we're going after. And that shows us that here's our list of a thousand accounts, and we did we ran these campaigns, and we're seeing these 10 companies coming to our website engaging with our content. That's an example of intent data. But then you've got companies, as I mentioned earlier, that are out there looking at their behavior across the entire web, not just your website.
And as they're looking at content online, they're that's throwing what we call signals or they call signals that indicate, hey. This logo, this company is probably in market because they're consuming information on the web that would indicate that they might be in market. And then, of course, they resell that information to us, people that are trying to run ABM campaigns, so that we can then present those in market logos with our information. And that's why we treat it just like retargeting. Because if I find out from Sixth Sense or any of these MarTech companies that, hey, x y z company is in market, then I'm just gonna show them my mid and bottom funnel ads when they go to LinkedIn and places like that.
So another key point, Mark, around intent data is once you get the data, you can you can present your ads however you want. And so what we found the most effective place for intent data is primarily in how we present content on social media. So we'll take an intense signal or information that says that these companies are in market, and then we show ads to them, for example, on LinkedIn or Twitter or Facebook or whatever we feel are the right places for our customer.
Mark Evans: And you can target those ads based on IP info. So it may not be this specific person, but maybe that the fact is the company itself is interested, so you just make sure that people within the company see your ads, see your content.
Paul Slack: Right. Exactly right. I'm so glad you brought that up, because even when you build out your target account list and you identify the people that are in your buying committee, you still don't always know exactly who they are. There's some tools out there today that will help you understand that. And certainly, you can do searches on LinkedIn.
But from a marketing perspective and pushing information out, you're really targeting a company and titles or functions within that company to show those ads. And then when those individuals interact with that information, you're now showing them new information based on their behavior, if that makes sense.
Mark Evans: Yeah. I'm glad we talked about intent data, and I'm happy that you provided an explanation, because I think one of the things that people think about when it comes to EBM is it's about collecting email addresses from downloads or demo requests or contact forms. So you guide your list, you send out the evals, you look for engagement among that list, people who opened your emails or downloaded something. And a lot of people look at their ABM campaigns, and they define success by how many email addresses were submitted, and that's the primary way to quantify whether an ABM campaign has been successful or not. What you're saying is that there's lots of different ways to skin a cat.
It could be, I want a demo, or please contact me, or I'd like more information, or I downloaded this ebook, but in many cases, many other ways that you could realize that your target audiences are interested in what you're saying.
Paul Slack: A 100%. I'm so glad that you brought that up, because one thing that we try to communicate to our clients when they're thinking about running ABM is we have to remind them that, okay. We've got this target account list, but on average, three to 5% of this list is gonna be in market at any given time, which means that 95% of the logos that are on your list, the companies that are on your list, they're not in market. So maybe maybe 5% are, maybe 5% are not happy with their current vendor, and we're gonna make a change in the next eighteen to twenty four months. That's, like, 10%.
That means 90% of your audience is probably not in market. But if we're gonna be effective with account based marketing, we have to have a long term vision and realize that we wanna market to all of our buyers all the time. It goes back to what I mentioned at the top of the podcast, and that is that that Harvard Business Review report. We gotta be on the shortlist. We gotta be one of those four to five vendors before they go on market.
And, you know, you tie into you were asking me how do we kind of go from the plan to nurturing relationships. You know, we talked about activating your audience. The next piece is that establish authority, and we wanna do that on our website. And a couple of things that are really important there is hyper personalization is key. And so when they're engaging with us, we want to engage with them in as personalized and segmented a way as possible.
And so going back to those tiers that we talked about at the beginning, if I've got a tier one target that comes to my website, I probably want to build for them a a content hub that's designed for that logo. You know? If I'm going over going after company x y z, I'm driving them to a landing page that has their branding, that talks about what the problems that we know that are unique to them, content that's gonna help in the sales process. And so we're driving them to very hyper personalized information. If they're tier two, then I'm still gonna have content hubs, but those content hubs are gonna be industry specific.
And so I'm not targeting you the x y z logo, but I am targeting the industrial sector or dentists or whatever the case may be. And so you're gonna get a very hyper personalized experience around your particular industry. But remember, the goal at this pillar is to establish authority. And what we mean by that is we wanna communicate to our customer, we are qualified to solve your problem. We absolutely have figured this thing out.
And if you've got this problem, we've made it easy for you to get it solved with us. And number two, that we have empathy. We actually want to solve this problem. We're so motivated to solve this problem for you. We created a personalized landing page just for you.
So, I mean, I think that's a big part of establishing authority is every time they engage with our brand in a place that we can control it, that it's very personalized, that
Mark Evans: they feel like that information was designed just for them. We've talked a lot, or you've talked a lot about best practices when it comes to ABM and some of the things that companies should focus on, and as important, the four pillars that matter when it comes to the ABM journey. Why don't we switch gears a little bit and talk about the mistakes that B2B companies encounter when they're embracing ABM? A lot of companies are obviously very enthusiastic at this stage in the game. They see ABM as maybe not a game changer, but certainly a way to drive leads in a new and different way.
But what are the biggest mistakes that companies make when they throw themselves into ABM?
Paul Slack: Well, I think some of the biggest mistakes are they don't start with a good goal in mind. Like, what am I actually trying to accomplish here? Right? Because you can you can run an ABM campaign campaign to get expansion within a current with your current clients. And is that the goal?
Is it to try to get more use or more people to use our product? Is the goal to get new logo acquisition like I was mentioning earlier with that one client? You know, we were very successful, in just going and getting in front of them and moving them through the process. And, ultimately, I didn't tell you this part, but we were able to generate $5,000,000 in net new revenue from net new logos they'd never done business with before. So it absolutely does work, but we started with a goal.
And the goal was new logo acquisition. These are our current clients. The sales reps are gonna handle them. These are clients we've never done business with before. We wanna go after them.
Okay? And so having a good goal and understanding that is really important. Also, having a good definition of what account based marketing is. For example, Mark, at the top of this call, I said it's not running display ads to folks that are in market, and you said it's not just email marketing. Some people think it is those two things.
Right? And so I'm gonna run it. I am running ABM. I'm I'm working with this Martech vendor, and I'm running display ads to people that are in market. Well, that's not really fully ABM, or I am running ABM because I'm sending out emails, cold emails to people that I'm trying to, you know, open up our you know, open up conversations with.
And so having a good definition of those things. And then the next one is obviously marketing and sales alignment. You know, literally, people think they're running ABM, and they never talk to sales. Sales has no idea what ABM is or why they're doing what they're doing or how they can how they can partner with sales. And so, you know, one thing that I recommend when companies are thinking about trying ABM and they've got a limited budget, we know a lot of people do this year, is start with one SDR.
Go or one salesperson. Go find somebody that's interested in partnering with marketing. Go find an asset that's doing really, really well on your website. Maybe it's an article or a white paper. Go pick a target account list.
Try to personalize that article for that sales rep or for that particular set of customers, and go run a pilot and really figure out what are all the things that you need to understand and what are all the the the wrinkles that need to get ironed out before you try to do something across the entire company. Because that kinda ties to the last issue I see, Mark, and that is, hey. We're gonna do ABM. Okay. Great.
And then they they go buy some marketing tech. They spend a lot of money, and then then then it's a failure because they either don't generate the right leads or the sales team says the leads are bad or they weren't the right leads. So start small and learn as you go. I think that's really big part of it as well.
Mark Evans: I'm glad you mentioned the idea of a pilot because a lot of companies are dipping their toes in the ABM waters. Many companies, particularly smaller companies that haven't done ABM before, are now looking at it and wondering, is it something that's going to work for me? And they think that it does, but they have, as you say, limited budgets, limited resources. They may have limited marketing and sales assets that they can leverage for an ABM campaign. What does a pilot look like?
You mentioned the SDR. You mentioned that single piece of value month down. Valuable content. What are the other things that they should do to do ABM, but at the same time recognize that they've got some limitations? You know, I
Paul Slack: think to me, when I when I get that question, I always think about, and I I communicate this to the client, it's like, how can we get some quick wins? So what are some things that we can do that take limited resource that we can run for a short period of time? And when I say short period period of time, Mark, I'm thinking like a quarter or two quarters. So I'm not talking thirty days, but something that we could run hard at for three to six months and get some quick wins that will show that we're actually moving the needle. And so I could give you lots of examples.
Probably the easiest one is is one that we like to run. It's a play that we like to run with companies that are just dipping their toes in, and that is take a target account list, and then go and have the SDR or the account executive start building connections organically on LinkedIn to the target accounts. We give them some scripting and training on how to do that. Okay? We create an event.
So let's do a webinar or some kind of really kind of a webinar or webcast focused on a problem that this target account list will care about. Make it a no sales zone, and let's try to drive these logos to this event. And then we set up a LinkedIn event page on LinkedIn, and this is a really critical part, Mark, because when when you set up a LinkedIn event, you can run ads to that. So I can take that target account list and I can run ads to that event, but I can also have the SDR go to that event, and they can invite their first connections to attend that event. And so if I've started by having that SDR go and build connections with the target account list, and now it's sixty days in and I say, hey.
By the way, we're gonna do this event on this issue. Please go invite all those first connections to this event. Then we host the event. Obviously, we bring in email marketing and all the other things that you do to run a good event. Then we can actually look at that event after it's over and go, hey.
These were our target accounts. Look how many people actually showed up to this event, and now look at how many people are active in our follow-up campaigns as a result of that. So there's an example of, hey. We wanna prove that LinkedIn works. That's a play that's really low cost.
It's it's mainly sweat equity, for lack of a better term, and a few dollars in ads. And you could actually see in in three to six months whether or not ABM's gonna really have an impact on your business. And you're gonna create some behaviors and an internal champion because that that account executive or that SDR is gonna go, holy cow. I actually went and followed some people or made some connections, and they showed up to my event. This is really working, and that's what you need to happen internally for more people to get buy in.
Thank you for providing that answer because I think
Mark Evans: a lot of companies are looking at ABM and wondering how do I start? How do I get some intel that will guide me in terms of whether it's working and whether it has potential? Switching gears a little bit, but going back to a point that you made that of all the companies in market, only two to 3% of them are actually ready to buy right now, and I think a lot of marketers are struggling with the reality that we are in a tougher economic climate, and that leads are tougher to get. There's softer demand. This compares to 2020, 2021 when sales were robust and Right.
All kinds of marketing worked a lot easier, and I think one of the things that marketers are challenged by is they have their CEOs looking at them, or the head of sales looking at them and going, you need to get us leads, and you need to get make them happen right now. And a lot of marketers are going, I'm trying this as hard as I can. I mean, I'm doing all kinds of different things, including ABM, but it's just not happening. And I think it talks to the economic landscape, is that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. Exactly.
Maybe you can provide some context in terms of what you're seeing in your own business and some of the clients that you're working with.
Paul Slack: Yeah, that's a great point. And, you know, I've been doing digital marketing for twenty three years, Mark. I know it's hard for me to believe that, but I've so as a result, I've seen a few of these economic downturns over the years. And and just like you said, we can't lead a horse to water, or we can lead a horse to water. We can't make them drink.
And and the this is where you've gotta have really good relationships with your leadership because at the end of the day, we can't control when somebody's going to spend money with us. Right? All we can control is that when they are ready to spend money with us, they think of us first. And so one thing that we're advising our clients I mean, we're certainly seeing this in our business right now. Last year, like you said, Mark, people were beating down our doors wanting to get us to do digital marketing for them, and the the the interest is not there as much because, quite frankly, the budgets have dried up.
I'm gonna try to do this in house versus hire an agency because I just don't have the money to hire an agency. Well, the the reality is if you're in b to b, whether you're a digital marketing agency like mine or you're a software company, you're still gonna be struggling with the fact that all of our budgets are getting pulled back, and they're looking for different ways to deal with the issues or they're deprioritizing issues until they've got budget to deal with it. And so all we can do is make sure that we're doing a great job of getting on that short list so that when those budgets do loosen up, they they start talking to us. Though and I really wanna make this point, Mark. Do not double down on trying to get people to buy something now when they can't because the that's so your boss is gonna say, get me leads now.
Get me leads now. And you're like, okay. And I'm gonna start running campaigns to get email addresses, and I'm gonna send out more cold emails. I'm gonna do all these things. And all you're going to do is really create a bad taste in your mouth in the mouth of your prospect if you're forcing them through a funnel that they don't wanna go through.
And the reality is there is no marketing funnel anymore. It's about buyer enablement. And if you try to force somebody through your funnel, you're gonna they're you're gonna leave them with a bad taste in your mouth. I would encourage you not to do that. Let's lead with value.
Let's help them in this journey. Let's give them information that's gonna help them. And then when they're ready to move forward, they're gonna go, you know what? I'm gonna call Mark. Mark's been great.
He's been got this great podcast. He's been helping me with really good insights on LinkedIn. When I need help and I've got the money, I'm calling Mark.
Mark Evans: Great answer. That lends itself to one of the things that I'm struggling with with right now is that a lot of companies are focused on tactical execution because there's, in theory, a correlation between tactical execution and lead gen. If I do x, y will happen, that's why a lot of companies are leaning into that recipe for success. But I think one of the things that they're ignoring is the value of brand building, and establishing yourself as a thoughtful, trusted, go to resource. It's a slow burn activity.
It's not going to generate instant results, and I think it's why a lot of companies shy away from brand building, especially when budgets are tight. It's almost like cutting off your nose to spite your face when you pull back from brand building or you don't do it at all, and I think that's one of the biggest mistakes that a lot of companies are making right now.
Paul Slack: A 100%. Donald Miller, I love this quote from him from Building a Story Brand, his book, and it is, Marketing is an exercise in memorization. What we're trying to do is get them to file away in their brain, This is the problem that we can solve. Because when, at some point, they're gonna go, I need to solve this problem, and they're gonna go back to that file and go, oh, that's Mark or that's Paul or that's somebody that's listening to this podcast. And I wanna paint the the counter picture to what you just said for all those that think they're just gonna have to double down on lead generation right now, remember that Harvard Business Review article that we talked about.
If you're not on that shortlist, they're gonna buy from somebody on that shortlist 90% of the time. You've got a one in 10 chance of selling to somebody that's in market. And so if you put all of your resources in there, you're gonna be fighting with everybody else that's also going after that same person, and that is a bloody red ocean and a race to the bottom in price. They're not gonna buy on value. What's great about running DemandGen and ABM together is that when they do raise their hand, you've got a much higher probability of winning the business.
Often, you're on the shortlist. There may not even be other vendors on the shortlist, and you're gonna command a higher price because they already see the value in what you can bring to the table because they've been consuming your information for an extended period of time.
Mark Evans: Well, for anyone who was exploring ABM or interested in embracing it, think we covered a lot of ground. I think we've looked at the fundamentals, explored the best practices, and as important, things that you shouldn't do when it comes to ABM.
Paul Slack: Where can people learn more about Vendi and you? You know, first of all, find me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. In fact, that's how Mark and I got together. I cannot emphasize enough, just be active on LinkedIn.
It's a great it's a great place, and you're gonna meet great people like Mark. So it's just Paul Slack on LinkedIn. You can visit our website, vendidigital.com. Learn more about our services there. Also, we've got a webinar coming up in May that's gonna be focused on account based marketing.
Hit me up on LinkedIn, and I can tell you more about that. Well, thanks, Paul, for great insight, and
Mark Evans: thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of Marquee Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, rate it and subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. To learn more about how I help b to b SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic advisor, and positioning and messaging developer, email mark@markevans.ca or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll talk to you soon.
