Name: Sales in ABM: The good, the bad and the ugly
Uploaded: 2025-10-22T15:16:06.379Z
Duration: 1 h 12 min
Description: Sales in ABM: The good, the bad and the ugly

Transcript for "Sales in ABM: The good, the bad and the ugly": Hi, everyone. We're back finally with the full final live with the new season. In q four, we are going to have, eight, sessions. And the first one for the new season, the first topic that we have selected is the role of sales and ABM and the account based sales playbook. There's a specific reason why we have selected this topic. This year, we have observed, a huge increase, spike in demand for account based marketing. But when we were speaking when we were talking to account based marketing leaders or to the piece of marketing, etcetera, quite often, they shout out to us that, sales assume that it's just 100% owned marketing motion where sales can do some standardized engagement or they will just receive enterprise sales. Basically, enterprise sales opportunities coming inbound way from market, and then they will work on the deal closer, which in reality is, absolutely wrong. Sales, sales active participation, so it can either make or break your program. And that's why, we have invited Elric Legloire, our friend from Canada, founder of Outbound Kitchen, a person who was behind the scenes of Chili Piper's ABM campaigns on the sales side. So it will be a fantastic experience for us to share our perspective as, let's say, account based marketer of myself and sales, and, Eric from the sales side as account based sales rep. So this is our agenda for today, but before we move forward, let us know, guys, where you all join us from. I see already 30 people online with us. Let us know in the chat where you all join us from. I'm broadcasting again from hot and sunny Villareal, Valencia Region in Spain. Eric, where are you based? I'm based in Mexico City in Mexico. So Well, Connor, Colorado. Good to see you. Private, India. Paul, London. Good to see you. Hope the weather is still good there. Gaston, Ireland. Nice. Jay, Chennai, India. Neil, Dartmouth. Nice. Again, good to see our international community back. Erica, Austin, Betty, Singapore. Cool. Good to see you guys. As always, whether this podcast for our community, you are very welcome to ask any questions. And by the way, I would love to thank everybody who shared the questions upfront when you guys were signing up for this session. So that helped us to kinda make the right narrative and prepare lots of relevant examples to answer your questions. So anyhow, you're very welcome to ask your questions in the chat or better in the q and a section so they won't lose them in the chat. But again, we are doing this for you. So in any format that would be real and would be working for you, just feel free to type these questions. Cool. That being said, let's dive in. I would love to share this slide as just a kickoff for today's, episode. It's obviously not my picture, but I just found this one as, as a funny one. I started my career, almost, twenty years ago, and I started not many of you probably know this, but I started as sales rep. I spent about five years of my career in sales. I started as what you'll call today business development manager or sales development representative. And I was field as the other, I was working for Kimberly Clark. So we were doing lots of field sales, visit in retail chains, pharmacies, etcetera, where we have live meetings with the, with our target accounts. But the entire point was, like, aside from, let's say, when I was in there, aside from having a quota, we had, targets of acquiring new logos. And we had broad segments to target. Again, as I said, small retail chains, groceries, pharmacies, wholesalers, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And basically, the approach was very simple. You at the at that time, as you guess, there are no zoom in for no clay, no technology that would and even Google Maps were in the very early stages. You won't see all this kinda potential customers, on the Google Map. There were no, like, databases. So you need to kinda do a manual investigation in different regions. So it took us literally investigating, the area, and then when you find the new logo, you kind of your new potential customer, you just try to book a meeting with the depending obviously on the structure of that organization, either with the founder of the grocery shop or with the purchase manager or in bigger, let's say, retail chains with the category manager, etcetera. And it was that way of how we did the sales. Right? Come and visit it, knocking, etcetera. But guess what happens nowadays? It didn't drastically change in 2025. The only difference when we look at the sales process is that the technology replaced the door knocking. And the typical sales process, which is, why I recently published that post on LinkedIn that the old school sales playbook is absolutely that. It it it it what is kinda driving me nuts is that still lots of companies are running it. Automated sequences, send connection request, which one connection is accepted, follow-up with emails, cold call, rinse, and repeat 21 times. So what are the best practices when it comes to setting up the cadences? And that's it. Right? And the problem is that most companies never question this. Why? Because, again, it tries some pipeline or at least it drives some meetings. Right? And there is always an argument. Okay. But, we have generated 44 meetings from outbound so it works. Nobody pays attention on the efficiency of the process, how many accounts or how many contacts from accounts were approached by this. And nobody pays attention to the close one conversion, right, and the pipeline value. Everybody tries to secure it and then nowadays, we see a huge spike in kinda different technology solutions like AI agents, etcetera, that promise to automate and kinda run these playbooks on autopilot. The problem is that when we are automating what is already programmed, it doesn't yield better results. Right? That's the key. The such reality of what we have seen is that, this is the analysis done by backlink, if you know this company, Brian Dean, who is kinda well known as CEO expert. They analyzed 12,000,000 outreach emails, and they have identified that only eight of 5% receive a response. It doesn't mean that this is, a response to book a meeting, just generally getting any reply in a format. No. I'm not interested, etcetera. Right? So this is the set reality. And now how it reflects the current, sales status? So, I recently read, interest in the product from the company called Emergence Capital, Beyond the Benchmarks. The name of that report, They have surveyed 560, venture backed b to b, tech companies, and they haven't covered that in 2025, and we're just past three quarters in 2025. Right? Most companies fired or laid off their sales reps and the number one function that was laid off, 36% were SDRs. Why? Again, the simple process that the playbook that they were running for years is not efficient. The only way to kinda improve it is adjusting the sales processes to the modern buyer journey. Right? The way how customers become aware of different products, the way how customers, make, or let's say, more precisely, B2B virus creates their consideration set, the way how they evaluate different vendors, the way how they make internal decisions and come to internal consensus. And this is kind of the way how you need to work with them. It's also, it also means that the length of this process should be aligned with the field by our journey because we quite often speak about sales cycles. Right? And company some companies measure it holistically and they can say, oh, our sales cycles are, like, eighteen months, fifteen months, etcetera. But a lot of companies, they just measure the sales cycle from, let's say, the sales opportunity was created till closed one. Right? So the procurement, legal, maybe proof of concept depending on the complexity of the sales process. But it doesn't reflect the length of the buyer journey. So this is the screenshot we often share. We want us, DreamData, the end to end analytics platform to give us access, just out of curiosity to measure how much time it takes fullfunnel, our company to generate, sales opportunity with our target accounts. Not even the sales opportunity, but the the first discovery call. And then out of curiosity, we have uncovered that this is kind of the typical representation. 87 touch points that were, tracked and uncovered by digital analytics coming from different, let's say, platforms, LinkedIn engagement, there's live podcast sign ups, newsletter sign ups, and some web website visits, etcetera, etcetera. And that was a constant flow of nurture. And if you look back at the previous slide where I was talking about the, about the demand generation from buyer perspective. Right? That first, most of the buyers are not actively buying. They're just they're just looking for content that helps them to become better. Their jobs to be done. The intent is to learn. Right? How I think it's true. It we we can apply to it almost everybody who came for this, podcast episode. Right? Not to listen to the sales pitch, but just to learn something new. And then you can see that nothing happens in between. But then, again, there is slight spike of engagement, and that basically means that you are getting into the consideration set. And when a company starts talking about solutions similar to yours, right, you start seeing the spike in, engagement where this basically, the company starts more engaging with different vendors. And at the end, you see the discovery call common. I love a lot this report from Hochistech, that they did together with, Cognism. They, again, they tracked across 50 different bit to bit tech companies how long basically, not how long, but how many touch points and impressions it's required to create sales opportunity. Right? And if we'll just make a simple mess, it takes 221 value added touch point from the first impression from to closed one, which means that we can't just send 221 generic, call the mails. Right? Call the mails that I wanted to follow-up. I wanted to check-in. Any interest? Should I close this thread? This doesn't mean that we need to run generic, kind of demand gen as a go and book a demo with us, etcetera, etcetera. It should be something that helps us to influence this entire buyer journey. And sales are active part of this. Right? Again, the typical playbook that I shared at in the beginning, it's completely misaligned with this reality. It completely ignores what how the modern buyer journey looks like and how many value added touch points are actually required to create sales opportunity. So, with that being said, we need to kinda think about how the role of SDR should look like today. What is the efficient model? Again, I'm might be a little bit biased here because I'm just talking about our experience, but that's why I wanted to bring Elric to share his. We are talking and just to make it clear for everybody, we are not talking about SDRs for low ticket, let's say, mass market products. Right? If you are selling $15, I don't know, product, there is maybe lots of things that I'm talking right now won't be relevant. Why? Because this could be an impulsive purchase. Right? It's just there is no risk to spend $15, $50 to try a new product. Right? Get one month and then unsubscribe if you don't like it. We are talking about enterprise deals starting from 50 k and above. Right? So from that perspective, we always think about account based sales reps. Why account based? Because they need to work together this market and on certain set of accounts where they holistically create awareness, engage with the buying committee, run-in-depth account research to understand the needs of this account, understand the needs of specific buyer persona, their jobs to be done, understand what actually could be helpful for these companies. Right? Engage with them in that way because the first point that, you need to achieve is to raise curiosity of the brand committee members. Right? And that's the entire point of this, what we call account based sales reps or a b s r's. Right? The abbreviation that we use. When you find five typical or let's say five categories of activities that are essential for these sales reps. They're in charge of account qualification and account selection. They are in charge of account research and further personalization. Account research also, involves the entire buying committee method. It also includes account nurturing, not only marketing is supposed to do this, but also sales. Regular buying committee engagement and profiling. By profiling, I mean, collecting additional insights that are not that you are not possible. That basically, you can't collect via public desk research. Right? Something that helps you to really personalize your further engagement and activation in a sense creating this fully personalized solutions for these accounts. So that being said, what we are going to share with you today is just highlighting each of these, categories and feel free to ask us any questions. The first one is account qualification. As we spoke, Before, the key point here is defining together this marketing. What are our segmentation criteria? How we define that how can we define that this is tier one account or tier three account? Right? Quite often, these decisions are made on the gut feeling or basically just looking at the company's revenue or maybe, team size, and that's it. But you need to have, what we always say, you need to have tangible criteria that anybody in your organization can apply and easily qualify and segment this account. The next part is that you need to move beyond the, let's say, pharmacographic criteria. You need to speak together with sales. What actually makes an account perfect fit for us? And quite often, you can hear lots of deep insights where they would share, specific, characteristics. Like, in our case, we know that we always prioritize accounts that have regional teams because then, they often work in silos. They work in silos in HQ, right, between marketing and sales, but regional teams often work in silos with the central office. So for us, we're all we have good frameworks for this. We know how to solve it. This assumption that we use as prioritization criteria. Then you need to define the buying committee structure because quite often the buying committee ends as we sell to VP of IT, VP of market, and VP of sales, and that's it. Right? But you need to define the actual roles and make the breakdown, by buying committee role. Who is who could be your champion? What specific titles? Who are the decision makers? Who could be the influencers? Who could be the blockers? Because if you want to holistically engage the account, you need to engage all of these roles. Right? And lastly, what is essential here is to define this qualification criteria because some of these companies could fit your qualification criteria. But what can tell you that this account is not a perfect fit for you. So that could be a location in certain region or maybe they have, legacy technology that's, your product, can be integrated with. Whatever. Right? So that could be multiple factors. And these insights are usually common from in-depth deal analysis, with sales. And this is the prerequisite for successful account selection. If you don't have if you don't nail down this account qualification criteria, let's put it like this. It's likely that you'll end up targeting a wish list or a broad list of dream accounts without any intent and with very low probability of conversion into sales opportunities. When you nail it down, the next step is basically moving to account selection where I would love to pass microphone to Elric finally. Yeah. So, actually, file transaction is pretty aligned with what you just were talking about. And I'm going to share a few examples on why it's super important, before building the list. In fact, what you need to do to to to build the list, what criteria you can use because you are talking about not using just the firmographics. So, I think, yeah, you have, like, three criteria, to pick, your accounts, for for IBM specifically. First one is propensity. If this account has a high win rate, for example, for us? Meaning that are they in the right industry, the location of the headquarter, for example. So I'm going to to give you two examples. I I used to work with ABM teams for a good market work, so we were selling to chief revenue officers and chief marketing officers. And then I was working for a company. We were selling to technical leaders, mainly, CIOs and data leaders that were the the main focus. So what we did for for both companies, we were making a list of all the criteria we need to to to have first before saying, okay. This account is going to be on the list. The location was one, so, is there they have a headquarter in The US, for example. The second one was early adopter. So because we are selling a really, like, a new technology, so it was not like, we are not selling a CRM like Salesforce or HubSpot, for example. So we need to identify those companies who are early adopters of new technologies. So what we're for I think for both products, it was a bit different. But if, we are going after a chief running officer or chief marketing officer, for example, we were trying to to to find, do they use Outreach or SalesLoft, for example, because it means that that there are more early adopters that maybe other companies were not using those tools. So we are making a list of all the tools that they are currently using to see, okay, is this account willing to train new tools? That was one for business leaders. And then the example from the other company that we were some technical leaders, we were, making a list of we were integrating with, the the data warehouses. So Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, for example. But that was not enough. That was just the beginning, but we were trying to to find, do they use any other, data or business intelligence tools that are new or they those products are new, like, they create they created those tools, like, five years ago versus do they use, like, more legacy tools that if we know that they were using legacy tools, that, for example, that was not a good a good fit for us because if they are still using legacy tools that they are not going to try a new tool like yours, for example. And then, another one was the maturity of the team, super important because, you are we are talking about SDR. So we were selling, Chili Pepper. And if the company were using SDRs, for example, they have SDRs on the on the at the company, it means that they are more mature than the company with, sales reps, but they don't have, like, special specialization, for example. So we are targeting sales teams with an SDR team inside of it. That was for cheaper. And then for the one for their ideas, we are trying to find, like, the those new titles, because I think in each industry, you have, like, new jobs or new titles that I've created. So right now with that, you have, like, AI leaders, really specific on the use cases. But for data, there, we were tracking one specific title that was analytics engineers. So those and, those titles, basically, they are pretty new. So the the job was pretty, like, two or three or four years ago already. But it means that if they have those title inside the team, it means that they would be more mature versus a company with yes. They have a data team, but analytics engineer were like a title we are looking for. And then the last one for and we we could have, like, a big list of all the things you can track, but that's the the the idea was to be, like, instead of having a list of 10,000 accounts, can we, have a list of early adopters, if this team is mature or not, for example? That's for propensity because that's how we start. And then you have the second step, the value of the account. And here I can share some examples, about that, because at CheetY Piper, when we we started, to to start when we started the enterprise team, and the ABM approach, we didn't have, like, an account selection process. So, basically, and, contact executives and engineers, they could pick whatever the accounts, they they want. But the problem we had was we have some, some accounts that, yes, technically, they are, enterprise. They have 2,000, 3,000 employees. But the sales team, they only had, like, 20 sales reps, which means that it's an enterprise account. We know that enterprise, it's long, long cycle, complex. But the value of the account was super small. It was, like, 30 k, just for to for to get 20 reps. So what we did and we stopped doing was okay. So now what we need to understand is, okay, enterprise for us, it's more than 1,000 employees, but we need to go beyond that. And we started to track the size of the end user team. So meaning that how many sales reps do they have? So for Cheaper, we started to track at minimum 300 sales reps, and so that was, like, the criteria. And, basically, if at the value of the account, we're increasing just by doing that. So it's super simple, but that's what we we started with. The second thing was also, because if you think about the value, yes, that's step number one. The second thing you can do is the growth of this team. In the past twenty months, twenty four months, you can track that with Cessnav. You can track that with ClearNow. But what you want to understand is, is this account growing? But beyond that, just the accounts, is the sales team growing, for example, if we are talking about sales. The I was talking about the data product. Same here. We are tracking how many data, people do they have, how many data leaders, and we are tracking that to understand month over month, if this account is going to grow. Because if this account is already the size of the team is big, plus the team is growing, that's, we know that this account is going to grow, month over month in in the future. So for new business, great. But also for if you think about, when they close and they are customer, you you will have, like, more expansion opportunities for for this account. Because, realistically, enterprise is not like just, oh, yeah. You start with, a 500 k ACV. No. It's you might start at 50 k, 100 k, and then year one, 100 k, year two, 200, and month over month is going to grow. So it's super important because it's I think you those two scoring system, it's, it needs it's going to give you a list of what you need to prioritize, for the list. And then the I think the step number three is, those accounts in buying mode. What I mean by that is, are they going to buy your solution in the next few months or next twelve months, for example? And here, I think it's really depends on each industry, but because here we're talking about autopilot, I think the step number one for this is to really, like, strategic initiatives, to track that. So you have different ways. If the company is public, super simple. Most of the time, you have, like, an annual report, earning course, and, it's basically public information. And you know what's already the plan for '20, 2026, for example, Are they expanding in a new country, for example, in a new region? Are they going to IPO, for example, if this is a private company, but there are already signals they can track to to show that this company is going to be public? They're buying another company. Are they merging with another company? So those signals that can obviously it depends on your product, and you need to track because most of the time, you know, we talk about intent data, what you can track, but those signals also, they are the strategic initiatives that you need to understand, and how your product can help with. New regulation, that's another one because, right now, I'm working with some customers. They are working in regulated industries. And depending on the country, the region, or the state in The US, you have, like, different laws, different regulations. And in here, so it's a really good signal, for example, to to use, for for example, if an account is going to buy your solution or need your solution at some point. And here it's not like, oh, we need to educate them on something, but you have a regulation and they need to comply with this renewal regulation. So that's another one. Then you have Intendela, g two of Bombora. So those I know you need to buy them, but, basically, if I to give you some example with g two, I know on g two, if you use g two, and g two is really great about giving you to are they looking for a competitor, for example? So, for us, when there was a Chili Piper, we're using g two, and we were tracking if they're checking Calendly, for example. And then we are trying to understand because you can they don't give you the specific person on the team, but they give you the account. So we were tracking trying to understand who at the company is currently looking at Calendly and then going after this account because, that's a signal that they might be looking for a solution. Demo requests. So for us, it's and I'm going to explain why I put it here and that's a binding signal. It means that, for me and and and and this, yeah, it's not just outbound or versus inbound. Demo request for me, it's a signal that something is happening inside the account, that they are maybe they have an initiative, a project related to your product. So that's a signal saying, okay. Something is happening in this this account. Maybe we should focus more, our effort to this account, not just okay. Let's try to get the c CIO or the CTO, whatever you're going after. But demo request, it means that something is happening. So that's a buying signal, and we need to understand what's currently happening. And then you have a obviously, a lot of, other things, but website visit and and stuff like that. Love it. I think it's a perfect outline of the account selection process. And, basically, literally, I think it's a good approach when it comes to territory planning, right, that sales can take. And as was Paul, can you can see it on the slide. It shouldn't be a silent initiative. Again, often, sales build Samsung on their own market, and if they run, let's say, MQL playbook, they generate MQLs, and then they try to merge this list. Right? The entire plan, like you put the criteria here, there are multiple sources, that can give you good insights on what accounts you should actually prioritize or what accounts you should go after. Right? And these signals could be, coming from the platforms that are owned by market. And so that's why that process should never happen in silos. And the entire point is that everybody should, agree on that list. And then, we are not going to cover the marketing part. Right? And what marketing activities we should take, to help sales with, let's say, accounts, with account engagement. But the entire point is that we have this list and then we define the playbooks. One, one thing that I would love to mention and I think it's important, also to keep in mind that often when it comes to territory planning, we still can end up with a big list of accounts. Right? And that's, then that that is really an important nuance to account prioritization. So in our case, what we'll have to do, we have this, for example, the sales list from territory planning, something that Elric have shared. And then maybe there are some accounts that are marketing engaged accounts, and we can pick them up. And, the next step that we are usually doing, we put them into one of the three buckets. Again, basically qualifying them by the revenue potential, product needs, evidence of buying signals, relationship level, and vendor awareness level. So the biggest group of these accounts would be cluster ICP accounts. So these accounts that they fit your ICP criteria, this account qualification criteria, but they, they don't know you. You don't know anybody in this company, and you don't know if they're actually shopping. Right? So from the sales perspective, from the sales process perspective, what should be the goal with this account? Should we try to sell to them? No. In reality, the first thing that we need to do is making them aware of us, right, that our product exists, creating this internal awareness. So that's the key. Next. That was a question from, somebody from our community. What is, kinda engagement threshold when we can call a specific account engaged account or account that is vendor aware? And there is no rule of thumb. Right? So for example, like Elric said, so maybe they have signed up for your webinars in the past. Maybe you have met with them recently. Maybe there was a spike of engagement on your website or high end pages like book a demo, for example. Let us know rule of thumb, and the only right definition here is the definition that you make together with sales. You are okay. This is the behavior. This is the criteria that account should match. So we mark this account or tag this account as an engaged account. Right? So we can say they are aware of us. But we still have no idea are they in the market and what is the actual use case I need. So for this specific list, the key point is to validate their needs and understand, right, what should be our what should we offer to them. And the last list is the active focus list. This is where sales spend, or let's say, account based sales reps should spend 80% of their time. It's the active focus list. So these are the accounts that know us. We know them, and we know their needs. Right? We know their buying signals. We know, what are the initiatives they are currently running, what are some of their challenges and needs. And we work on fully personalized solutions for them. This is where two one to one ABM happens. Right? This is where we start creating this account plan and start thinking about how can we create sales opportunity with this account. Why does prioritization happens? Because then you can split, all the or subsegment all the accounts that you have selected initially into one of these three buckets, And then you know that you have different metrics. You are not expecting cluster ICP to be converted into sales opportunities immediately. While, then the the most important metric for that list would be account engaged accounts, the number of engaged accounts that hit your engagement threshold. While for the active focus list, your key benchmark would be the number of discovery calls booked or sales opportunities created. Right? That's the key, and that helps to prioritize all the accounts for one to one ABM, for one to few ABM, for both marketing and sales. But that actually leads us to the next point, which is all about account planning. So, Pat and Mike, back to you. Yep. And just yet talk about the complaining specifically, and because here we're going to, more like, download the the strategy or what you can do, for the SDR team. But if we just go back to the consolidation, I forgot to mention that the list, the criteria, the data points we're tracking, that should be the same list that Corina was saying in the chat that that should be the same list for the full go to market team, as the marketing and AEs because, I work pretty a lot at early stage companies, and most of the time what you have is marketing is running, they have a list. AEs have another list, and then AEs have another list. So the goal with that is to be like, for example, if I'm going to talk about Cheeky Pepper. So Cheeky Pepper were, like, three enterprise account executives. So we are, like, one another accounts per enterprise a e. So 300 accounts, that was the list. The and that was it. And that was the list for marketing, ace, and it's the app. So, because most of the time, you will have, like, different teams working on different accounts. So that's, the idea with this. I have one question. So maybe we can immediately cover this. Let's just also apply to a software product that's focused on growing the network as fast as we can? Yeah. I just suffer, but let's focus on growing the network as fast as we can. That's a good question. What do you think, Andrei? Well, I would say it's it's it purely depends on the deal size. Yeah. So if, because the the context is unknown. Right? If it's, like, fifth $50 product, then I would say no. And then if you are selling to mass markets, then I mean, you can skip it and just stick to to to the traditional outbound with just better messaging, best better insights, etcetera. So you can create micro segments, both for your ads and for for your outreach, and that's it. And personalize on it. But if it's an enterprise product the the entire point is, if it's enterprise product, if it's all about, 6 figure deals, $5.06 figure deals, then there is no chance that, you can work or, let's say, create a constant pipeline growth without applying this framework. So these are my thoughts. Good. So the second part. Right? The first one, we nailed down the account qualification and, account selection process. Next one is account planning. Mhmm. So now that we already identify, the account, so now it's the the research, the what what's the plan for a five g account? Now with AI, I think you can do a lot, automate a lot from this. Obviously, you still have, like, a few things that can be automated, but first step, research accounts. I already I was already talking about the strategic initiatives earlier. So if the company is public, pretty easy to find that, 10 if you have annual reports, I said 10 ks, but, yeah, annual reports, and calls, press releases, you can use that basically to identify, what's the the account focus for the account. Because here it's, the if initiative is the big focus for the chief revenue officer, you know that's going to be the the focus for the full team below this person. Did they just hire, like, a new exec? Because most of the time, when they hire, like, a new exec, it's pretty big investment for the company. So this person is here to make changes, to improve, something. For example, if it's, they have you can track that in earning calls or annual reports if, one metric revenue was not meeting the go the expect insurance, or the goals, for example. They're going to hire someone basically for to fix that. So, that obviously is going to help you, and you need to to understand who is new at the account, for example. Text stack analysis, so it's pretty connected to the first one, the dimension area of account selection. You want to understand what do they use today, because I think Andrei was started to talk about vendor aware. If they are not using anything, for example, the your approach is going to be a bit different than if they're already using a solution. Because if they're already using a solution, they're already fixing, the problem that you can solve. Maybe it's not perfect, but they're already, solving it. But if they are not using anything, the the approach would be different. You need to talk more about, the problems that you can solve versus, hey. We are different than x competitor, and here are the strengths. So that's really something you need to understand first before, knowing what to say because you can't talk about for example, I'm going to give the example of Chili Piper. If they're already using Calendly, I'm not going to to talk about, what Chili Piper can do, the basic things. It's more focused on where Calendly is strong and Chili Piper is strong and the weaknesses of both. And now we we understand how we can help basically based on that. At this account, do you have past customers? Meaning, do you have, like, people who use your products or not, for example, because it's going to be easier or so to focus on those people, than focusing on trying to reach out to the CEO of a CIO, for example, and they never heard about you, your project, so it's going to be harder. But versus if you have previous end users, previous champions inside the accounts, that's, for example, an example where you you can, you you can focus on. Next step is building your point of view. So going back to what I was telling saying earlier, if they use a competitor, your point of view is going to be different than if they don't use anything, for example. What's and the point of view is connected to the strategic initiatives or other things that you you can find about the account. But, basically, it's, what what's the the goal right now, what's blocking them, and how you can get them, you can help them get their their first. So, basically, it's connecting the dots. So you find data online about the account, and then it's based basically, it's connecting the dots to your solution and saying, hey. Here's I've how we could have this account based on what we find online. Then, mapping, so pretty straightforward here, but what you want to to get so for enterprise, you have, like, three, I would say, levels. You have above the line, c suite with these, below the line, directors, managers, and then end users. After, we're going I'm going to show you a specific example of how you can approach that. But, basically, as, SDR or account executive, you have two approaches. You you can start top down or bottom up. The top down, obviously, it's better because it's quick. You can get a meeting pretty quickly with an account. But the problem with that is sometimes it done exactly. That everyone everyone is running this, so it's some for some accounts, it's going to work. Yes. You can start with that, I would say, if, with one unit one new account. But like you said, Andrei, it's most of the time, everyone wants to talk to the to the c level. And then you have the more long term approach, the bottom up approach, where, you start with the end user, and then you talk to the director or managers to understand what they're currently, trying to solve those issues, for example. And then you you you have, you can go, talk to the VP of C level because you already understand what they use, what's the problems, what they tried in the past. So you have, like, really information from the inside of the accounts, not what you can find online about this account. So and it's not like, oh, should I do this one or the other one? No. It's unfortunately, it's undervalued. Some accounts, the top down is going to work. You can stop top down, but some accounts is bottom up because, the c level, they are not going to take any meetings outside of someone inside the account is going to recommend you, and then they are going to consider you. So for each account, it will be, different also. Love it. And I think the entire point is, basically, outlining the value of account based marketing on the fundamental principle. It's all about creative personalized solution, personalized offer for a specific account. And you can't build it just using, you know, generic public insights. Right? No way that you can, oh, yeah. So you raised money. Let's book a demo because this is what we can help you. This is why you need to collect the insights from multiple brand committee members, then connect it to the key initiatives of that account, and this is how you come up with the personalized solutions. Just, before I move to the next point, I would love to share with everybody, guys. I dropped the link in the chat. If you are not subscribed to our podcast, you can subscribe, to it, using our link fullfunnel.io/podcast. We have this podcast distributed to Spotify, iTunes, YouTube. Basically, the most favorite platform. So do give us a favor and also give us five stars there. And a few points just to add to what, Elric just said. What is really essential here, right, is create a streamlined process where you create the account research. Right? You you need to have you need to have to nail it down. Quite often, companies just have an ad hoc approach. Okay. We'll research Samsung, and that's it. But you need to nail down what exactly should be researched, how that is, how this will be used, and where that should be stored. This insight should be cross shared with marketing team as well because how you're supposed to create, let's say, marketing content, or support sales if you don't get access to this insights. Next, as Elric spoke, we need to run-in-depth buyer research. Understand the key case of our target buyer persona. Jobs to be done, challenges, they're all in the strategic initiative that we haven't covered. Right? Basically, also starting from the end users just because these people quite often, they will be the you if you are selling technology. Right? If you are selling the product, these people will are supposed to be the users of your products. So you need to understand what value actually you will bring to them and, use their intel, right, to sell to their, let's say, decision makers. And the last point is personalized offers. Right? A personalized account plan solutions, whatever you'll call it. So the entire point is that you move from the traditional, like we spoke. We saw that you raised money, you are likely to have this challenge and we can solve it. So this is what we know about you. This is what you guys are working on. These are the inconveniences. Right? This is what, the cost of an action looks like. So basically, what will happen if you are not going to do anything about this product. These are potential ideas that can help you to solve this, and these are kind of the expected outcomes of this solution. Memorable or maybe quality, improvements, whatever. This is this is the entire idea, right, of the fully personalized approach where sales, runs an actual, kinda active active, part of it. Next, the third, basically, step is the regular account nurture and engagement. As we spoke, there are multiple touch points. Right? That's basically necessary to generate sales opportunity. And, quite often, we hear from sales that the number one complaint they share with us about marketing is that their accounts are not aware of them. It also leads us to the first point where we have discussed why you need to prioritize the account by the level of vendor awareness. But the second point is that sales are actually a part of print awareness and account awareness processes. This is the truth. Right? Quite often, we're saying that awareness means running ads and sending emails or link plus LinkedIn messages. But this is not how we're creating awareness. We all know if I will ask you in the chat, you'll immediately share that you become aware about different vendors by learning from the podcast, chatting with peers in the community, so at industry events. Right? Colleagues that are sharing or mentioning specific vendors or products or sharing specific content. So these are the actual sources. And the entire point is, that sales, they usually build this network of people, but they rarely build relationship with these people. Right? So how sales can create awareness? We have defined eight typical solutions, and then Elric will share one of the playbooks. We won't have time to kinda dive deeper into all of the eight. But the entire point, if I will categorize this, and this is what we ask account based sales reps to do during the, when we run the ABM programs. One is meaningful engagement. Meaningful engagement means commenting on their posts, engaging with them and the community, just answering their questions. When there is a relevant piece of content, sharing this relevant piece of content with them. When there are there are some, news that were published about that specific account, using this as an opportunity to ignite the conversation, etcetera. One on one content distribution. If well, think about the best channels when it comes to access to specific buyer persona. Who has that access? Right? These, are sales inboxes, both email and LinkedIn inboxes. So that's why it's so important when marketing supports sales with or co actually, co creates with sales the content that they can use for the buying committed nurturing. Right? They can easily distribute it one to one to specific buyer persona if that would help them to move the needle. Next, personalized solution. Samsung that we have discussed. Account, love letters, and curation. This is, Samsung that I will share with you guys. I'll show an example a little bit, later, just in a few minutes. The entire point is that we're right, fully personalized content that we can share with the strategic accounts. One on one event invites engagements and follow ups. Usually, marketing kinda is responsible for bringing people to the event. But again, if you are running webinars, round tables, business breakfast, or dinners, again, this is a fantastic opportunity for sales to connect and engage with these folks and collect lots of additional insights. Right? So so the engagement with these people, that's why they should be an active part of this. And also progressive profiling. So progressive profiling, what Elric actually mentioned when you're told, for example, to end users and to collect the insights about their challenges and you connect the dots to the account initiative. So you start understanding what's actually going on in this account. And lastly, the content for creation with your buyers. I wrote today post about selling to technical audience quite often. This is the only way how you can make them aware. When you make them heroes, when you start featuring them, when you co create Samsung with them because this is the easiest way to build the relationship. I know it's not, obvious, and it doesn't look transactional in a sense. Okay. But how can we move here from that engagement to, sales opportunity? But better to me. The entire point is just to build that relationship and awareness. Right? So, again, passing back to you. I know you have prepared a few playbooks, so good luck for your thoughts for sure. And I know we are almost on time, but, if you want, I already started talking about that specifically, the top down versus bottom up approach. But if you want, we we can go straight to the playbook, the last one, or what you want to Let's do I think this is a great starter why that you that you need to share about Snowflake Snowflake's the So okay. So yeah. The here, if I if we go back to the bottom approach and why you should consider it and add it to your Playbooks, for enterprise account, it's here. That's the perfect example why, sometimes it's better to do the bottom up approach because some VPs are c level. They are not going to take external meetings with a vendor because they they will trust what the team is recommending. And when I say the team, the end users, managers, or directors because they they trust more, who is inside the company more than the vendor, for example. So that's, what exactly why you you should be doing that. And example on what you can do with end end result, basically, it's getting informations, what tool do they use because sometimes you don't know online, but I'm not going to share online what they use internally, what they tried. So talking to end users, that's pretty, also easier to get some some advice from them. So and then you use that to talk to managers, directors, and then, you can build your case basically on how your solution is the right solution for, for them, for them. And, just to share maybe a few examples of this playbook. Right? Account nurture examples. For example, you can see Maxine Castellan, the post about specific account part of Antwerp and Bruja. The entire point is that, it's it's another Karina. Just to be honest, I see that. You see the screenshot, not me and you, not Karina Owens. But, the entire point is, we have, for example, the account love letters. Right? We did the account research as the sales reps. We uncover specific insights. Why not using this for creating fully personalized content that we can share on social? Obviously, this is not the content that looks like a sales pitch. Hey. This is what we have seen about you. These are all of your challenges. You guys are doing so bad. And the only way to solve it is if you hire us. Right? Or if you'll buy our products. Obviously, not like this. But you find nice initiatives. So for example, like, look at this post. They know why the part of Antwerp, Bruja punches so much about its fate. Basically, sharing the story about the strategic initiatives and how they invest and to improve on the logistics capacity on bandwidth. The fantastic info or basically, the the biggest benefit of this approach is then you can take it and distribute it to all the buying committee members saying, hey. This is what we have published about you. Hope you enjoy. Would you would you add anything else? Did we cover it well, etcetera. So the entire point is to attract the attention and also using the account as such that you are anyhow will be doing. Right? Another point is, like, for example, you a person signs up for your event. Right? Quite often, what sales are doing, they receive the list of all event sign ups from marketing. They put it into standard outbound cadence. Hey. Thanks a lot for signing up for this webinar or whatever. Would you like to book a demo with us? That's it. Right? But the entire point is that, first of all, you can always segment people by the start not always, but you must do it, actually. Segment them by the status, attended, not attended. Right? Because not all people who sign up actually attended. They went for two days. Podcast episodes, we had, 200, 10 sign ups and, whatever. There were, like, 55, 60 people results online. Right? So the majority will, watch the recording of this episode. The same is here, but the the entire point is that you can't just pitch these people. If they didn't attend, the first thing is that you can, share with them the recording. And then, for example, if you were able to collect any intel, for example, in this case, Karina was two ants. She mentioned that, they are considered launching ABM, when, she signed up for for the episode and asked the question there. So I'm just simply following up with, like, one minute to share guide about ABM strategy and pilot product development. Why this? Because this is the way how you can ignite a conversation and move forward. Right? Another example is, the buying committee engagement. When you start, literally talking with these people, replying to that when they publish Samsung. Right? Commenting on their post or feature. And if, for example, you have listened to the podcast, where, let's say, key executive shared some initiatives. You can write a summary of this post and tag this person like you can see on one of the screenshots. Right? Again, leveraging this opportunity and the entire point is what you are doing here. You, make your x your buying committee members as heroes. Right? Sharing tagging them in the content and using this as an opportunity to engage them. And the dinner's playbook that you have executed successfully so you can share. Yes. So I'm going to talk about this playbook specifically, and you can run that for dinner. So, right now, I'm running this with a a customer. So it's not focused on dinner, but it's more like mini event with 58% invited. So it's bigger than the dinner, but that's the same approach. Because if you think about enterprise, most of the time people are just focused on when we can make the list of everything you can add into the all the channels you can use. But if you think about this, yes, most of the time people just think about email, call call, and then LinkedIn, and that's it. And they just think about booking a meeting. And this playbook, basically, it's to increase, the changes of starting a conversation with an account, or create opportunities. So here, what we were running at Chili Piper, basically, we had I don't remember how many dinners per month, but maybe four, I think, in different cities in The US and Europe. And what we were running is, after making the list of the accounts we want to go after, we were using LinkedIn, Sales Navigator or whatever you want to use. But, basically, what we want to see is who, from our accounts are in New York, San Francisco, Austin, London, for example. Because you want to see, who's from your customer and in the cities, but also prospects. Because the goal is gathering prospects and customers in real, like, industrial end. So prospects, they can talk to existing customers and, basically, together, they at some point, they will start talking about your solution and start you can start the conversation. The the goal with those, you know, serves having one topic. For example, we we we set the topic before, the dinner, and then at the dinner, that's that will be the main topic, for the conversations. How we were running this? So SDRs at Cheaper, we're running this, but we were not using the name of the SDRs to invite those prospects. So, we were using, SalesLoft for Cheaper, but you can use whatever tool you want to use. And we created, like, specific email inboxes. We were sending on the behalf of the founders or the, sales leaders. The goal was to basically if you talk to a CRO CMO, you want to send the invite from the founder of the company or this VP of sales, for example, for us because, you have more chances that they you will get a reply than if you are sending it from an ASR. So because he's super targeted, that's why we are doing it. The and, basically, we were so you can see the template here. We say, hey. We'll be in New York on October 0, '29, for example, and hosting a small dinner with specific we are naming those customers to talk about, inbound pipeline, for example. We'd love to have you join us. And that's what we were using as that was super effective, to to start conversations with, with new accounts. And because what was happening in those events was, like I was mentioning earlier, you have, like, some point you have one existing customer who is going to talk about how they use the solution to the rest of the of the team, for the the the prospects, the dinner. And that's, I think, another channel, I would say, on top of everything you can try, that's perfect. And I know you can run that, like I said, so for eight, ten people, I'm running that right now with 50 people. So it's a a bigger it's not like a dinner, but it's more like a a bigger one. But I know as a company, they run that just, one by one dinner. So they have, like, one customer with one prospect, and that's basically what they are running. So it really depends on one, but it works, super. Love it. And I know we're almost out of time, so I will just maybe take the next three to four minutes, to share the last part of, account based sales rep. Let's say, responsibilities and then, answer the most popular question. It all makes sense, but what can we actually expect out of it? And our sales team will definitely ask, about this. So let me quickly share with you the, last part. So the last one is personalized account plans as we spoke, right, and activation. So that could include multiple activities, but, maybe just to share a few of them. What is really essential here is making sure that in your, let's say, activation process, you deploy so called breach activities. By breach activities, we we mean something that helps your buyers to connect the dots between their challenge and your product. This is not quite obvious. Just to share our example, lots of companies know that we provide the company's marketing consultancy. Right? But often the question is, I totally understand this, but I don't see how that would tackle my specific challenge because my challenge is not in ABM, but let's say, getting buy in for, let's say, solving the attribution problem where we can't, let's say, demonstrate marketing impacts on pipeline. Right? Well, ABM obviously solves this and we do this, but for many people, there is no kinda connection between this challenge and ABM, which is fair enough. Everybody comes from different background experience. And the same when it comes to imagine what happens when you are selling, let's say, to the technical audience. Right? Or when you are selling the complex solutions. So preach activities are kind of complimentary activities treated as like free strategy sessions, all this, snapshots of specific data or product where you help your buyers to connect the dots. In our case, what they'll have to do is, suggest on one on one, free strategy sessions. And it's not about it's absolutely not a pitch in session, but the entire point is to understand the context, the needs, and the goals, and then brainstorm together the possible solutions. And obviously, out of this session, the person who joins us for the session comes up with the actionable plan and at least understand on what would be the right, let's say, solution for them. Another option is creating personalized content hubs. Right? Because different buyers might face these challenges. Like I shared it, for example, somebody just says, yeah. But my biggest challenge is that we can't really show the marketing influence on the deals, and that's why we can't launch ABM because everything is attributed by the last click, for example. So in this case, we can create personalized content hubs on how to fix this, how to present this to CEO and CFO. We have a nice exercise called CFO quiz for this. So this are an example. And lastly, this is obviously optional. Let's say, it's more advanced tactic, but we'll have to deliver this. Whenever it's possible, we'll do it obviously for tier one accounts. We'll have to send fully personalized, offers via direct mail with not just generic box of cookies or, I don't know, chocolates, but we always research the, let's say, hobbies, interests of our target buyer persona, try to uncover it beforehand, and then send Samsung, that is, highly personalized to them. So the last question is basically what you guys might be wondering. Okay. How, let's say, all these activities help to impact sales targets and KPIs. First of all, if your sales reps would be maintained this five categories of activities, they will always see the improvement of the KPIs like increased connection request acceptance, reply rates from the target accounts, number of discovery calls booked, as their productivity. One of the metrics that, you know, most companies are not taking, but it's essential for ABM account to pipeline ratio. How many accounts that you selected for your ABM program actually became sales opportunities. Right? This is the this is the metric that helps you to evaluate the efficiency of ABM and enterprise, pipeline coverage. This also might require you to create a new dashboard with weekly and daily KPIs for your sales reps. But in terms of results, just to show you. So this is, one enterprise is they are selling custom software. So the contract value from varies from 500 k to 1,000,000 contracts, selling to supply chains. And you can see the improvements even in one quarter, right, for that sales rep. Starting from zero meeting booked, this is the real project that we have done, in q one of this year. Starting from zero meetings booked, before the pilot ABM program, moving to 17 meetings booked with the strategic accounts. Or another kind of retrospective which we did with enterprise AI, selling background check software to the leading tech HR teams. Again, the entire point is where the AE reflects on the, expansion opportunities book, connections with the buying committee members, the progress that they are making in terms of moving accounts from being completely unaware to accounts that, become aware of you. And one of our favorite stories, we have two live, podcast episodes, which again, I dropped the link in the chat. You can subscribe it. You can find the episode number 151 account based journeys. We have interviewed, enterprise AE of another, clients. They are selling LMS software to global FMCG companies. You can, listen to the entire playbook and, actually hear from the sales rep who, were executing the activities that were shared today with salary, how that impacted, the ADM performance. And another nice playbook, we have this on our substack. We have interviewed again on one session, three enterprise sales reps. Again, unfortunately, all of them unfortunately, maybe because in this case, you can say we are biased because but that's only the experience that we can share. All of them are working for our clients and they again share it on that session how, all these activities drastically improve it. But if we'll kinda make it as a summary, the key metric that we are seeing the, for the companies where they make the shift from being let's say, from running generic as their playbooks to, turning the SDRs into into account based sales reps, we see that, the typical account to pipeline ratio is five to 15%. So basically, the, conversion of all accounts that they select for the ABM towards sales opportunity. And, obviously, everybody is welcome to select own path for 2026, but the entire point is what we wanted to share with Elric. If you have long sales cycles, if you are selling high ACV products, right, if you run enterprise program, unfortunately, the old playbook would be just going down. Even if it would yield some meetings, but it will perform worse and worse with every single quarter. Right? Could you try to automate and figure out the way how to make it better? Yes. You can still hire trades, outbound coaches that could maybe improve your messaging, but this would be kinda put an additional bent aid on the bleeding neck. Right? Not solving the fundamental problem. And another one is when you start prioritizing together with marketing, which accounts we are going after, how we are going to engage with them, how we are going to warm them up, how we are going to build our point of view, what Andrei shared. Right? And how we can connect the dots for them from the challenges and initiatives they are running into our solution. We shared lots of examples and, probably guys, you have seen our announcement. But from this quarter, we stopped selling individual on demand courses. So we have, now everything packed. All these, playbooks are now packed in our FullFunnel Academy. So if anybody would be interested, you can scan this QR code or just visit fullfunnel.io/academy where you can learn account based marketing with us and implement all of this playbooks. Thank you so much. Hope we have covered all of your questions. Alex, thank you so much for sharing your experience and for sharing your actionable, playbooks for account selection, account engagement, and the dinner. That was awesome. And thank you guys for attending, for sharing with us the questions. It was fantastic. And happy to kick off this new season with you. Next week, we'll be broadcasting together with Splat on fullfunnel fundamentals. See you soon. Wishing you a great rest of the week. Cheers. Thanks, Andrei. Thanks, everyone.