Host:
Alright. So good morning. Good afternoon, and good evening. Depending on where you are in the world. Today’s webinar is about Metrics that matter: Measuring ABM Impact. Today we have our host, Stephen Banbury, and he’ll go ahead and get us started. Thank you.

Stephen Banbury:
Yeah, thanks, BreAnne. And thanks to everyone who’s made the time in their busy schedules today to join us. Today, I’m delighted to be joined by ZoomInfo’s VP of Emerging Products and MarketingOS, Ben Daters. Ben, perhaps you could just take a moment to introduce yourself.

Ben Daters:
Yeah, thanks for having me, Stephen. Good to see everybody. Welcome, very excited to speak about ABM and the Metrics that Matter today. Just a quick, brief introduction and background on myself. I’ve been in Martec for about 15 years now with ZoomInfo, heading up their ABM practice for a little over a year and a half, almost 2 years, and prior to that I helped start my own company called People.ai, which is in the AI sales and marketing analytics space. Prior to that I did 6 years at Marketo, where I grew up as a true ABM on the front lines making phone calls, and, interesting enough, sat right out in front of John Miller’s office. He actually hired me. So I had to interview with the godfather of marketing automation and one of the the thought leaders in the ABM space so really excited to talk about my experiences over the last 15 years, and where ABM going, and some of the very exciting things that we’re doing over at ZoomInfo of you know. Go to market collaboration and bring AI to the go to market.

Stephen Banbury:
That’s awesome, Ben. Thanks for the intro. You’re perfect for this session. Delighted to be hosting you. So let me just quickly recap what we’ll be going over. So we’re gonna be decoding ABM in today’s marketing landscape, pinpointing metrics that measure real success and peering into ABM’s future with technology, and if we have some time we’ll do some Q&A. If not, please do put your questions regardless into chat. Our email addresses are going to be on the last slide, so feel free to reach out to us if we can’t get to those in the time that we have today. So I know I’ve been talking about 15 years of marketing experience. So not to date myself. But I’ve been in marketing for over 20 years, and when I think about ABM, I think back to what I really call targeted marketing whether that’s one to one, one to few, or one to many, and essentially going from the most personalized outreach to leveraging common characteristics. I know Ben is someone who is spending a lot of time with marketing leaders across multiple companies. When you think about ABM, what’s your perspective on what ABM means in today’s context, and how it is shaping marketing strategies?

Ben Daters:
Yeah. Talking to CMO’s or Revenue Leaders, I think diagnosing the challenges that they’re facing today is most important to figure out what our approaches are and where we’re going. So time and time again on every conversation that I’m having with CMO’s or Revenue Leaders. But two main problems, everyone’s struggling to create pipelines and drive growth. And when you mix those two elements of growth and are struggling to create a pipeline in a constrained budget environment, it becomes really difficult. So historically measuring lead volumes has been top priority. Everyone’s all in on top of the funnel, lead gen and driving a ton of leads over to sales. But today that’s not yielding the right outcomes. And I think most CMO’s will agree with that. That you need to consider new approaches. The market, I think, is really warming up to this is maturing around this evolution of ABM and how to appropriately implement it. So the emphasis that I’m hearing and seeing being implemented is really starting to identify hyper target accounts, so not as much as targeted marketing, but hyper targeting the right accounts that are in market for your products and services and getting laser focus to engage buying groups and personalization towards the personas that need to be involved in your buying cycles and in your deals. So as companies think about that the data first approach is crucial. To start with the data signals to action and really start to align all of those different elements around your strategy. I think you’ll see that within kind of as we go through today’s presentation, a lot of those elements will define more closely and really start to get in the weeds a little bit more around those metrics, and how to define those strategies.

Stephen Banbury:
Yeah. And when you think about a company’s approaches, is there like a targeted account list that they’re really going off? I mean? Obviously, we put kind of one to one. But when you think of a targeted account list, do you see people going after maybe like the top 2,000 accounts, the top 200 accounts? What do you do? What are you seeing and hearing?

Ben Daters:
Yeah, I get it.

Stephen Banbury:
Increase a lot from company to company.

Ben Daters:
Yeah, it does. I think you know, as an account based marketing account, based experience gains momentum. The shift and the bulk of marketing technology spend is actually moving away from the how, which is historically marketing, automation platforms, email services and more towards the what of targeting, qualifying and winning accounts. And which companies are actually looking inside of their CRM for more accurate data on how to properly describe the targeting aspects of what you’re talking about Stephen. So I think you know, as we go through this, it’s not necessarily about a hundred accounts? Is it? 2,000 accounts as much as it is about the exercise with sales to define the targeted accounts, and ensuring that we have full agreement from the top down on who and what we are going to target and agreeing on that as part of our strategy.

Stephen Banbury:
Yeah, I think that a couple of really key things you mentioned was alignment with sales on targets and working hand in hand with sales. This really is a joint effort between those both. I think that traditional marketing often focuses on broad metrics like lead volume and pipeline, web traffic and conversion rates, and in my experience the metrics to measure success for ABM campaigns are necessarily different. From your vantage point what are the key metrics that we should be focused on to measure the success of ABM campaigns and programs in general.

Ben Daters:
Yeah, I think you know, starting with kind of what, how and why. You go about this process to define them. There’s tons and tons of metrics.

Stephen Banbury:
Right.

Ben Daters:
You know, businesses and marketers are looking at that constantly. But what are the right ones? I think that comes back to kind of the strategy right? So highly recommend that you get in the room. You lock yourself in a room with your go to market stakeholders, and you define that together for your business. Each business is very different and should be measured so as to define and set the right target. It’s the right expectations and the right metrics. So whatever the ultimate target or the objectives are working backwards, to fall into those is really important. So if your business is heavily saturated down market and you’re looking to move up market. Traditionally, you probably rely heavily on lead volume and your initiative to fill the top of the funnel. But as your initiative is to move up market, that is going to mean a lot of new changes and a lot of new things for your business. So the first and foremost thing is to set the right expectations that this isn’t gonna happen overnight. And so the time element is really important. So it takes time, money, and resources. Once things are actually starting to run and operate, the expectations that you’ve set up front means that all of the leads that you guys used to be getting are filling the top of the funnel. Those are gonna decrease. Those are. You’re gonna see a dramatic shift in the amount of volume that your sales team is getting. So setting those expectations upfront is really important. But in return, what will happen is the amount of qualified buyers within your hyper target accounts that are the right level, the right executive level within the buying groups will actually increase. And so you should see an increase in the qualified accounts of the qualified buyers inbound to your sales team. So as you think about account success and defining what that means, really start to figure out the resources, the time, and the spend behind these programs, and the really, really crucial one that I love to talk a lot about is the spend per account. So this is why having a list of 10,000 target accounts probably doesn’t make a lot of sense, because if you have 10,000 accounts and your budget is, let’s say, a million bucks. Your spend per account is very limited, and so interesting enough if you look at how ABM providers have historically charged or licensed their technology. There used to be no caps on the number of accounts, or the number of campaigns that you can create within these platforms. However, what we were seeing is that the spend per account was extremely low, often south of $1 per account. So if you think about moving up market in the enterprise, how can you expect to see results spending less than a dollar targeting a large Enterprise corporation. So by limiting the number of campaigns and the number of accounts that are
within your ABM program, you should see the metric that we’re talking about spend per account actually increase which should yield better results. And so, thinking about that as a North star is a really interesting benchmark as well as things like return on, and spend very similar. So if we spend a dollar, we get $3 back, and really thinking about that as an ABM strategy of return on and spend should be very, very heavily focused on brand and content marketing, because as you move up market in this theme that we’re talking about, you’re going to need to educate buyers and really provide a lot of thought leadership and brand marketing. So your buyers are aware that you do offer products and services that they might not have been aware of before.

Stephen Banbury:
Yeah. There’s that spend per account is a really interesting metric, and one that I haven’t really spent a lot of time thinking about, but it’s completely intuitive there’s a couple things you added around, not just account engagement, but also exec engagement as a metric. It does seem that there’s potentially quite a lot of change management that you need to bring to the exercise as well. In terms of setting expectations. What? Where have you seen this sort of success? And or maybe don’t have to talk about where it hasn’t worked. But you know what? What are the keys to bringing along those people on that journey when you know, telling someone they can have less leads. Or you know, whatever that message might be. How’s that? How’s that working?

Ben Daters:
I think I think it comes back to results right? And I think you know you can either have a hundred leads, and you know, 2 to 5 of those leads might be qualified and they might turn into 25K deals. Or would you rather have 25 highly qualified executives, where 40% of those turn into 100k deals in your pipeline. And so the quality of your pipeline and the size of those deals coming into the pipeline. Things like average time to close all of those things will start to improve by getting more qualified buyers at the right executive level and departments and levels into your pipeline. So those will speed up other conversions that sometimes need to be improved. So as you think a lot about those types of setting expectations. I think again, it all comes back down to the data. And so, looking at your current metrics around average deal size, time to close. How many people are in a buying decision and starting to? Really, look at, what does it mean on the up market motion and being able to see. Well, let’s take a couple of deals that we know we’ve made that are kind of the gold standard and start to look at why those deals close what their makeup is, and start to mimic our success after them. So again it comes back to the data and uses that against the rest of your coverage in your ABM, making sure that you have the right buyers for all the coverage. The third party data that you need to fill a lot of those gaps in this strategy.

Stephen Banbury:
Yeah, I know we’ve got this as our next slide. Then I feel we’ve still touched a little bit on this already, just with the stakeholders. Is there anything that we need to add? I feel we’ve covered quite a lot of things like the stakeholders and the timing, and what’s required?

Ben Daters:
I think the message here is it starts from the top down completely. Buy in from the CEO and the board level down. If you don’t have that level of commitment from your CEO and board, then this is going to be very hard to change management and drive the type of behavior and expectations that you need within the org. So you gotta evolve the entire company towards this new methodology and account based approach, and everyone needs to be in lockstep with how this is going to be a company changing program, not just something that marketing is over here spending a ton of money on and hoping to see results and driving a strategic initiative for the business. And so, you know, it starts with the CEO down and then marketing, carrying the torch, but in lock step with sales and sales is tough to to get a lot of change management, and they’re gonna be victims of doing what is has worked, and be a little bit resistant to that change, and so bringing them into the conversation, and starting with some of the exercises that we talked about with getting them the power to select their target accounts. Sure, you want to give them the parameters the right data, but it should be sales who actually owns the selection of these target accounts and really start to give them a clear ownership of the program. And so we’ve seen a lot of value with our customers that have rolled out a similar approach. One of our customers tide rock their champion and an admin for marketing OS already on platform ZoomInfo said the greatest value ZoomInfo has brought us in is the opportunity for alignment. We’re all working off one data set. Our goals are aligned and our efforts are housed in one ecosystem that has made a significant impact. And so that’s an example of where sales marketing and the go to market comes together under one unified approach to yield the right results for the business.

Stephen Banbury:
Yeah, this is great insight. I do know, working with an ex colleague of mine, Brian Power, when we were looking at targeted account and bringing in a platform such as marketing OS and ZoomInfo, that there was a need to introduce the benefits to the SDR. The account reps the account executives, and walked them through the the tool that we were using to get that buy in so they could really see, kind of be aware of the signals, how they were different and the value that it was bringing. So it was quite a lot of change management in terms of your marketing operations, working with the sales teams and walking and stepping through, but incredibly well received.

Ben Daters:
My prior company. We had rolled out an ABMP platform, and you know sales have been banging on the desk. We want intent. We want to see where our accounts are doing on the website, what they’re researching. And they that we’re asking for months. We finally brought the platform in and took months and months to implement. Once we actually implemented it. Sales were really exciting for that first month and then they stopped looking at the information where they needed to. They’ve got back into different workflows. So really, looking at sales adoption and workflows of where they start and end their day is hyper critical to marketing success in this program and buy in, but also really understanding how they’re going to adopt and integrate this into their workflows is something that needs to be really closely monitored and brought forward with other stakeholders of the business, like sales enablement, and others that are responsible for adoption of sales.

Stephen Banbury:
Yeah I mean, we kind of like take us into sort of like the technology side of this a little bit, Ben, so, and of no doubt everyone attending this webinar is aware of the amount of marketing marketing technology that’s available to them. Now, I think I saw a stat of like, you know, enterprise companies have, like 121 subscriptions, or or something crazy. And on May 2nd, which I think’s been designated as international MarTech day. I think that started a couple of years ago. Hubspot Scott Brink, the latest addition to his marketing technology landscape. And so from just under 10,000 in 2022, the number of solutions is now over 11,000, and that’s like 7,000% growth over the space of like 12 years. So kind of like a mind boggling amount of technology out there.

Ben Daters:
Those are eye charts. Those are always fun. I feel like everybody, whoever looks at one of those immediately tries to find their own company. Never find your own company on those damn things.

Stephen Banbury:
Or if you do, it doesn’t seem to be where you think it should be. So it’s not in the category that you really wanna be in. So yeah, with so much noise and such diverse landscape, how do we cut through the noise, Ben, how can technology best support the measurement of ABM impact and then, not to throw 3 questions at you, but maybe then we can touch on what you. We see what you see as the future of ABM, and what’s coming down the road? And what we should perhaps be anticipating?

Ben Daters:
Yeah. Cutting through the noise is always tough, obviously. And then we talk a little bit about that. But you know, coming back around again like technology can support the initiative that a company is rolling out here as you make that shift towards ABM, but in no way, shape or form can be the crutch of the strategy itself. And technology is not the answer to this initiative. Again, go back to everything else that we’ve talked about in alignment and and bringing on stakeholders and following what you are trying to achieve with this technology is not going to be the answer. But it can definitely be a vehicle to really help take you there. I think you know the the reasons why technology should be part of that strategy, not because strategy is around third party data. You take a look inside of your CRM systems today and you only probably have 30, 40% of the total addressable market, let alone your IP and so, using third party data often leveraged with ABM platforms will help fill coverage gaps looking at things like intent buying signals, having the ability to create dynamic audiences and having a multi Channel orchestration to be able to fuel a lot of the automation of how this data will integrate through all of your downstream systems and over to sales. So I think, you know, as you look at technology like third party data coming back to the data is crucial. And then from a measurement, perspective attribution, flexibility, and reporting. All of that is table stakes from a marketers perspective. But I’ll be the first to admit technology today around ABM, that is from Gartner Forrester when we meet with them. That is still the most difficult thing that a marketer has trouble with ABM Platform doing is proving true. Roi, from the cost of the platform. And so I think it’s important to have access to the raw data right now to be able to leverage that within other VI platforms. You know, VI, anything like that, being able to have the raw data is crucial. So you can have that flexibility and or push it to data science so they can help. And then we’ve seen a lot of advancements with GPT. We have some really, really skilled and excellent delivery managers on the marketing OS side that are doing some really cool things with GPTs to actually input a lot of this raw data and start to suggest you know different analysis and insights based on things like, intend what types of campaigns you should be running. Spend all of those things. Now we can start to put in the models and get recommendations back from some of our bots that we’ve actually created within GPT, so seeing a lot of really advanced things that our teams are doing today that I think the rest of the market is still catching up on.

Stephen Banbury:
Yeah. What does the future look like then?

Ben Daters:
Well, if I had a crystal ball….

Stephen Banbury:
I should put some time in. Maybe, don’t say in 10 years, but maybe in the next couple years, I mean, when you think about even something like Chat GPT.

Ben Daters:
Yes, it’s back in the day.

Stephen Banbury:
November 22, right? I mean, it’s pretty recent, and you know I can’t remember. But you know, the quote around what you see today is gonna seem quirky in 6 months time, right? I mean, the pace of changes is really quite phenomenal.

Ben Daters:
Yeah, I mean, I think if you think about it as like self driving autonomous cars and like, think about that in the lens of marketing and marketing capabilities. So the emergence of true self driving, marketing, capabilities function like large language models, instead of predicting the next word, they will actually predict the optimal interaction of each buyer. So marketers, and what role you will play in this is a pivotal focus and ability to train and tune the models and set the strategic goals and constraints of those models. And so fundamental differences in marketing, automation and account based marketing. I think it’s gonna radically transform how technology plays into this. And so I think things like co-pilot, which ZoomInfo is announcing, are true AI powered solutions. That’s like unifying the go to market data. Applying this Gen. AI to sift through the noise identify the inside sellers want and then provide this level of self driving decision making behind the channels that we’re operating in.

Stephen Banbury:
Yeah, yeah, it’s been fascinating Ben. I know we’re coming up to kind of the last 3 min or so so we had a couple of questions in is there anything you wanted to share before we go?

Ben Daters:
I was gonna make a bold prediction.

Stephen Banbury:
Good, do it.

Ben Daters:
Take any acts on this or anything as an investing advice, or anything like that. Just a bold statement. But I think growing up in marketing automation as I did, that’s a must have, and I think it will continue to be a must have. I think marketing automation has tried to incorporate some account based marketing technology capabilities. But they failed, quite frankly. And so my bulk prediction is that account based marketing technology is actually going to acquire and consume marketing automation. And instead of ABM consuming or sorry, instead of marketing automation consuming ABM, we’re actually gonna see the shift and the backwards happen where ABM is gonna consume marketing automation.

Stephen Banbury:
Yeah, that’s well, we’ll see if you’re right. I’m sure you probably are. Thank you for the time, Ben. There’s one of the questions we got, which is kind of broad. Maybe we can take it back to ABM. What metrics would you suggest for the SAS companies?

Ben Daters:
Yeah, I think we talked about you know some of those around account spend. But I think pipeline attribution, not necessarily defined to sales, led pipeline attribution or sales source or marketing source, but get behind one pipeline goal and stop fighting amongst sales or marketing, led pipeline and have the company run towards one pipeline goal and everyone work towards that is crucial. And so I think that is the North Star. Pipeline cures all, and that would be the major one that I would focus on.

Stephen Banbury:
Yeah, I might throw in a sort of net retention rate, sort of like, customer lifetime value as well. Just as you think about measuring the effectiveness long term as of your ABM programs. Especially for a Saas company, too. So yeah, this has been fascinating. I know we’ve got a bunch more questions, but I think we’re out of time. Ben, I want to thank everyone that showed up today. This has been extremely insightful, Ben. Thank you for the time and look forward to maybe hosting another one in the time being. Let me just put up this slide. So if people wanna contact you or me after this. Please feel free to do that. So thank you very much.