Name: Misaligned Despite Our Best Intention. How to fix the marketing and sales silos with ABM.
Uploaded: 2025-06-25T15:31:12.239Z
Duration: 1 h 6 min 52 s
Description: Misaligned Despite Our Best Intention. How to fix the marketing and sales silos with ABM.

Transcript for "Misaligned Despite Our Best Intention. How to fix the marketing and sales silos with ABM.": Hey, everyone, and welcome to the last webinar before the summer break. Today, instead of my cofounder Vladimir Blagojevich, I'm cohosting it with Mason, cofounder of Scrapa ABM. By the way, Mason, you need to click on go and stage the the green button to join me. And, as announced as announced, we are going to talk today about, marketing and sales alignment. So we had a couple of chats with Mason about what's going on, in b to b marketing space. And so August has spoke about the state of ABM and what makes ABM program successful and also what's the number one reason of failure. And what we have defined, obviously, analyzing our conversations with, prospects and Mason shared the same opinion is that, lots of teams, they define the current status of marketing and sales alignment as aligned on papers, but actually not doing anything in practice. And hence, this is the topic for our today's webinar, middle line despite our best intention. But here's a few questions, that I know you guys are going to ask us definitely. First, yes, the recording will be available. You can use the same login link. Basically, the recording will be here on this platform, and you can either rewatch it, slate, or you can share it with your team. And then the second question, you are more than welcome to ask questions. On the right, sidebar, you should have a tab called q and a. So feel free to post your questions there, and we'll make sure to cover all of them. And that being said, let's kick off. Nathan, thanks a lot for joining me and co hosting this webinar with me today. Absolutely. Super stoked to be here, Andrei. Just really appreciate, the opportunity. So I wanna go ahead and dig right into it and, ask the the question of just why are we misaligned with sales. Go ahead and type in the chat some of the things, why you are seeing some misalignment with your sales team. One of the things I wanna go ahead and call out is when we often hear people talk about misalignment, there tend to be one of two extremes that come out. So one is, sales is stupid, and evil, and we hate them. And then the other extreme is, marketing lives in a fantasy land where it's all brand and we never actually have a revenue implication. And those are often the extremes that I see. Our goal today is to recognize that, those are correct. There is a balanced approach on why we actually see a lot of misalignment between marketing and sales. So hopefully, as you're dropping some things in the chat, you may end up just seeing, like, we're going to directly work through, why. So I wanna go ahead and start to see that conversation so that we can all be on the same page around functionally what we often see. The next thing is I wanna flip their perspectives, and walk through what sales typically is actually looking for. I wanna talk through how we can balance brand building and sales activation. We wanna talk about how to operationalize your partnership. And the last thing that I always wanna dig back into is specifically sales compensation. So that said, here's how you get the most out of the session. For starters, we're gonna, here in just a moment, actually walk through the data backed reasons on why we're misaligned. So again, as you're dropping things in the chat on why you currently think you're misaligned, there may be one problem that as we talk through the data, you're like, oh, that super resonates with me. I do not think out of this session, it is reasonable to think that you can solve every problem in the next thirty days. What I would highly recommend is you write down the one problem that is the biggest hurdle for your success and then take specific notes on that. The second thing is you are here, and we're super thankful you're here. I can also guarantee that there are team members that are not here, and we do have time at the end for some questions. So go ahead and write a message to your team that just says, hey. I'm in a session right now. Would love to go ahead and also get questions from your team so we can answer everyone's questions. And the last thing is set a time blocking your calendar for next week, or if you're out of office next week, the week after, to go ahead and plan some things to actually go and do. I say this every time I get the opportunity to speak. Information without implementation is useless. So we really want the session to be useful for you. So if you actually listen to this whole thing and you change nothing, it would have been better if you have not been here. So make this worth your time and do something with the information. So, that said, hi. I'm Mason, by the way. For those of you that don't know me, I'm the founder of Scrappy EVM. Actually, in the past three years, I've sourced about $25,000,000 in revenue. Typically, for boutique and bootstrap businesses, our organization has sourced about a 100,000,000 for a lot of vertical SaaS companies. And then we try to build repeatable programs, teach you how to own them and pass them back to you so you can run this in house. So that's what we do. Andrei, you've got a really, headshot. Didn't dig I have the first one. It's probably an AI prototype of my, let's say, face and Vladimir's face merged together half half. But jokes aside, I don't know what has happened with the heads up when the slides were uploaded here. But, I'm Andrei. I'm cofounder of fullfunnel. We are a full funnel B2B marketing consultant company for, B2B tech companies with long sales cycles and high SEO products. And I have spent so far eighteen years in B2B market or more precisely an enterprise B2B marketing and sales. So we have lots of things to share today with you guys. And by the way, quick question. Where are you all joining us from? Type in the chat, I'm broadcasting from Superhot Spain. Yeah. I, I'm I'm jealous that you're in Spain. I'm in Indianapolis, which if you follow US sports, my entire city is depressed because we lost, the NBA finals, I think, Monday night. So, anyway, I don't follow much on the sports front, but everyone that I talk to is really sad right now. Anyway, speaking of sadness, one of the things that makes marketing and sales teams incredibly sad, see that seamless transition, is the lack of alignment between marketing and sales. And that's why we actually titled this despite best intentions. And when we've looked at the data, it typically comes down to one of three core reasons why ABM programs and why typically marketing and sales teams are misaligned. So the is, miscommunication. I always love to do this exercise whenever we start to talk to new clients, is just ask really basic questions like, so what is a lead? What is an MQL? What is an SQL? And, we actually have a separate meeting with marketing, a separate meeting with sales, and we ask the same questions and see how their definitions are different. So as a result, we actually say the same words but mean different things, and, functionally, we're speaking a different language. So that's challenge number one. It's really hard to communicate and get on the same page if you don't all mean the same things. Second thing is just different goals. So, we've had plenty of clients that had marketing goals that weren't made in tandem with sales goals. So marketing celebrates while sales didn't hit their pipeline goals. Really tough. And the last thing is compensation. We'll talk about this a lot more, but, the same sentence that I hear often from marketers when they go to build an ABM program is to get sales bought in. They're like, we're gonna make our sellers way more money. Challenge is they don't actually know their sales team is compensated. So we have actually seen situations in which the ABM program made sellers less money based on the compensation structure with was set up. So, again, these are three reasons on why these things are misaligned. So we're gonna dig a lot into that today. So that said, Andrei, I know you've got some really, super helpful illustrative slides for what typically happens. Yeah. Absolutely. If I would summarize everything that you have just said, respond well, I would call it silos. This is the most common and the root problem of all, challenges, not on the ABM related. Right? So, how typically marketing and sales alignment happens in the organizations. Right? Obviously, account based marketing as, we all know that this is a joint initiative. Right? And but typically, it's initiated by the marketing team. Right? What happens next, could be described pretty much well by the scene from the godfather movie. Right? When a fellow sales rep or head of sales, you know, talks to the senior leader saying, hey. Marketing said they want to work with us and run ABM. Fine. Let's do it. So what happens next is just sales. So at least of team accounts that are not qualified, there is no buying intent, there is no vendor awareness, there is no indication that these accounts are in the market, they are only nice to have logos or kinda team, in a bad sense of this team accounts of which we call wish list sync, syncing here. Right? So the accounts that would be nice to sell to, but it's extremely hard. Right? These accounts don't know you. You have no relationship, and they have, no reason to buy from you now. So what happens next? Next, marketing is supposed to create a classic ABM playbook. Right? They receive this wish list from sales. Typically, it's a big list with hundreds of accounts. Most of them, especially if I'm talking about going upmarket or enterprise by five generation, this will be Fortune 500 companies. And, obviously, there's limited resources. Nobody would reveal marketing from other responsibilities and duties. Right? So marketing should put it now on the full plate. And what happens next, right, obviously, you have no capacity, no resources to run personalized ABM or what we call one to one or even one to few ABM. All you can do in this case is just purchase ABM software or in the worst case scenario, just upload this list of accounts to link it in, run programmatic ads, LinkedIn targeting ads. Right? And then, basically, when engagement happens, sharing these engaged accounts with sales and sales, obviously, they don't have time to do anything meaningful in terms of account planning, right, or buying committee engagement. All they can do is just set an up automated outbound canons and just spend them all. Right? And expect that basically, if if I will summarize, this typical classic ABM playbook, it's just pay and pay. Right? It's not really different from the lead generation. You can still call it account based because you have the list of accounts. Right? The problem is that it's far from what real account based marketing looks like. And the second problem with this playbook. Right? That marketers, they're still supposed to hit their targets with MQLs. Right? So just to justify the investment in ABM, they continue running gated PDFs, etcetera. Right? Trying to kinda generate now MQLs from the account that sales, gave to marketing and share it. Okay, guys. Now it's your job to close them. But as I have seen in the chat, you guys said, some of you said that sales usually deprioritized marketing needs and, never do any full any meaningful engagement with them. And this is the real problem. Right? Everybody expects we call it ABM, but in natural, we're not basically, we all know that it is not ABM. It's just a targeted lead gen, and we just hope or pray that it will work. But in reality, we never saw it working to be honest. So most of the companies that we spoke to that tried this type of ABM always failed this program. And I added just a screenshots of some business cases that we were co created with marketing teams of our clients where you can explicitly see that this how this playbooks, actually end up. So if the question, is still the question you might have, why this playbook is not working, There are couple of things. First of all, the silos is still there. I mentioned in the beginning, right, that the silos is the root problem and the root issue for all, for all ABM programs, that's, failed. Next, sales, they don't understand that at all, and they expect that marketing will do all the work, and they will just, you know, put the last cherry on the cake, just showing up on the discovery calls of beta on on, just proceeding with the sales opportunities that are qualified by somebody and engaged by somebody. Next, there are obviously no clear playbooks on how to engage the buying committee. Everything should be automated. Everything should be scaled by default. And, there there are a couple of other things. Account based marketing means personalization. Right? But personalization goes way beyond, you know, liquid dynamic text that you put in your ads or in cold emails that you are sending. Personalization is understanding of having I would maybe rephrase it. Having in-depth understanding of account needs, account initiatives, then looking, into the buying committed groups, understanding the initiatives and the role of the this buying committed group in this key initiatives, understanding the associated challenges, as as, understanding the alternative they might be considered, understanding the current status quo because this is quite of maybe even the most common reason why enterprise pipeline failed because of lack of opportunity to challenge the internal status quo. Right? And plus the understanding the needs of everybody persona. Right? That's the key. And if you don't have this information, you will never be able to run a successful ABM program. So let's move forward to the, I know you you just summarized it with the root problem. So let's move forward and then present the solutions. Yeah. I mean that's yeah. This one. Yeah. So it's, if you're already still with us, we spent fifteen minutes telling you all the reasons it fails. I promise now we're gonna get into all the reasons that it you can make it successful. So, in short, again, we say the same words, but we mean different things. So, I have yet to find a marketing and sales team that I've actually met in the same room, and then everyone didn't all say, yes. We want more revenue. We want our target accounts. We like, everyone says the right things, but what we've often seen is everyone has a different picture in their mind when we outline what that functionally looks like. And you, as a marketer, went to sales and said, this is what I'm gonna go build, and I said, that sounds great. And you actually go build the thing, and you come back and present what you built. It feels like this is terrible. And as a result, like, everyone's just kinda confused. They feel misunderstood and they're frustrated. So one of the biggest things that we started to do, in the past two years is when we have this conversation, we have to align really past just the the words, the conversation. We actually work in specific tools that are visualization tools that are, like, actually shockingly inexpensive, but they allow you to live build. So Andrei already had some visuals, but a lot of people see, oh, this is what's going to happen. We've got more visuals to show you. But when you take the conversation and you visualize it, yes, it's helpful. The visuals are nice. They're easy to engage with. The reason they work is people all learn and understand concepts in different ways. So there are some people that are auditory learners. So you're just listening on this. You might be working on something else. You're grasping the information. Some people need to read it. Some people need to see a visual. So when you create these things in different assets in different ways, it allows you to have the most accessible approach for actually educating and aligning with sales. That's, I think, the key takeaway is if you're going to actually align with sales, yes, talk through it, work through it, define your terms, make sure you're actually saying the same things, and then visualize it before you go build it and then end up coming back doing exactly what you said you were going to do that everyone agreed to, and then it's not what you end up looking for. So that's the high level. I think we just covered off of miscommunication. Now I wanna dig directly into goals. So, go ahead and drop in the chat when you think about the goals for sales. Like, what are sales goals? This is not a trick question. It's actually shockingly simple. So go ahead and drop in the chat, what are the goals? Yes. We've got revenue. We've got thank you for the thumbs up. What else do we have? Revenue. It's a big one. Pipeline. Conversions. Yeah. Alright. Alright. We're getting it. So in short, I'm gonna make it really simple. It's meetings, disqualified ops that move, opportunities to close. It's about it. I present this to many sellers and they all applaud. And they're like, that's all we need. That's all we look for. And the other question I always like to ask is, like, well, what's the time horizon for sales? Like, how long do we have to get those meetings, and those opportunities? Yes. Someone already put now. What else is there? Yeah. This is true. Quarter or months. Yeah. So I'm gonna go ahead and outline it. It's days, weeks, and quarters. So as an example, actually, right before this literally right before this, webinar, I hopped on our daily stand up with my salesperson and I said, what meetings do we have today? And, like, what support do you need to push those meetings forward? We have a pipeline review every single week where I say, how do we move each of these deals to the next stage this week? And then we're always looking at the quarterly goal. Some months will be a little bit lighter, some months will be a little heavier. But if you think about getting these meetings, these opportunities that move, these are close, the best salespeople that I know maybe think one year at a time, but often it's how do I close this quarter. So that's the time horizon, which then begs the question if we're talking about aligning with marketing and sales, we just think slightly differently. So I wanna show you you can see the, like, the blue color. That blue is all of the sales meetings in all of the time spent building proposals. So this is a calendar from, like, last week. I don't know the word we got cut off. But, like, last week, when I took the screenshot or maybe it was two weeks ago at this point, but I took the screenshot, and this was my calendar. So super packed. Like, as a salesperson, this is like the dream calendar. But then I actually took a screenshot two weeks out from when I took these screenshots and, I had one meeting on the calendar for forty five minutes. So when we talk about building a program that's gonna deliver pipeline two quarters from now, sales thinks that's great, but, like, I don't have meetings this week. So when we think about the priorities and the time horizons, sales just generally thinks differently. So that begs the next question, which is, well, what's the time horizon for marketing? So go ahead and drop in the chat, like, the time horizon typically for marketing. Yeah. Sixty days is a good answer. So we've got sixty days, we've got one quarter, we've got quarters, weeks, months, years. I think that's great. What I've generally found is it's typically months, quarters, and years. Only budgets approved. Oh, so sad. When I have been so, again, I've I've been both marketing and sales for the past five years and kinda bounced between the two roles. Often, the most urgent request that I get as a marketer is end of week. Sometimes there's the occasional, like, end of day thing, but it's mostly like, hey. Can we get this by the end of the week? Whereas for sales, it's typically, like, end of hour. It's like 11:55, and it's like, hey. I need this by noon. It's like, awesome. So think about the time horizon. Things are just compressed. So it it creates different pressures that sometimes I I have found especially when I show the calendar, that's one of the most helpful things for a lot of marketers because when a marketer looks at their week and they see an empty calendar, they're like, yes. I get the time to actually create and, like, build things. When a seller sees an empty calendar, they're like, got it. I'm not gonna be able to feed my family. And, like, same calendar, different roles, radically different perspectives on the outcomes. But that also begs the question, what is marketing doing? Like, what all is marketing doing? This is your time, marketers. Go ahead and drop in the chat all the things you're doing. If you think it's everything, you're gonna love the next slide. So go ahead and drop in the chat, like, what all are you guys actually working on right now and are you all doing? Aligning with sales. Love it. Working middle funnel increase. So you're the global head of of marketing. So you're focused on, like, everything around the globe. We've got demand gen, brand, customer advocacy. Yeah. It's like a lot of stuff. You're doing, like, all of these things. So, like, you're working on social and email and events and search and, paid and podcasting and webinars and influencer programs. You're also, like, focused on the brands. Like, we want good vibes. We're set like, all this background is just, like, vibes. Like, I don't know what the revenue implication is of this, but, like, I know that because I have a real, like, neon sign, and I have, like, nice lights that, like, it puts a vibe out. That's a good vibe. We're doing SEO. We're trying to make downloadables. We're trying to do sales enablement. We're, like, focused on everything it feels like, which is super reasonable. And as you look at these things, like, what do these actually contribute to sales goals? When I ask marketers, carrying the whole organization. When I ask marketers, marketers are like, well, all of this. Like, if I didn't do my job, like, sales would be, like, super without pipeline. Like, I know that this, like, massive brand play is gonna pay off three quarters from now. So when we talk about alignment, like, we view all of these things in such high regard for contributing to sales goals. But if you ask sales, what contributes to sales goals? It's like, well, maybe email, maybe our events, if we, like, did a good pre event thing, maybe paid search, if it converts instantaneously, maybe paid social, maybe webinars, if they're a product demo. If we just, like, did a demo every webinar, that would contribute to sales goals. For sure, our referral program, that one gets me meetings. For sure, the sales enablement that accelerates my pipeline. For sure, you writing my outbound sequences for me and loading them into our outreach software so I can just press go. And then for sure, managing the website with good content that answers all of my prospects questions and makes it easy for me to get inbound meetings. Like, those four, love those. These other five, they might work, and everything else, I don't really care about. Because their perspective and their time frame is days, weeks, quarters. So we talk about programs that deliver in '26 or '27. It doesn't register because they don't care. I wanna be super clear here because some of you may hate me for that. And I do think that marketing should think long term. 100%. Challenge that I I think some marketers sometimes miss is that the long term doesn't actually get here if we don't have pipeline today, we don't have meetings today. So when we talk about building these really long term programs, they're great. I love them. I'm a big fan. If we don't deliver now, like, we don't get there. And from my experience, I have done very large brand plays. Like, Andrei, you guys do the fullfunnel summit. When I worked in a in a past agency, I actually did a a day long conference similar to fullfunnel that was called the ABMathon. And I put it together in, like, six weeks, got 700 people registered. It was great for us. It's like a year one type experiment and had zero revenue implications. It was entirely a brand play because the pipeline was full and we had other things that were already delivering pipeline. So, like, you can do cool stuff, but you have to have a full pipeline. And this is my perspective. And, again, some of you will hate me. I promise I'm on your team. We have to acknowledge that the lack of alignment is marketing's fault. Let me if you came here hoping that I was going to say, here are all the reasons to get sales bought in and, loving your programs, I don't have that answer for you because I cannot change someone else's mind. What I can do is acknowledge the things that I can own in the situation and change those things. Because when something is our fault, that actually means it's within our control to fix it. So I'm gonna go ahead and feel like the curtain for a moment. It actually doesn't matter if it's your fault or not because who you point to has the control. So if it's all sales fault, that means you have no ability to fix anything and you're screwed and you can't do your job and you should probably quit because if you can't figure it out, you're probably gonna get fired anyway. So, like, if that's the alternative, I'd rather accept fault and fix it. You know? So that's that's my perspective on it, and it's been a massively beneficial perspective because it's shifted the game into a very practical framing through which we actually solve the issues. So I also wanna give you some data. This is one of my favorite, pieces of data that outlines the actual appropriate balance of brand building versus sales activation. So, go look it up for yourself, considering the book The Long and Short of It, which was written by, Peter Field sorry. Yeah. Peter Fields and Lesbonette. And now I'm saying the appropriate, budget allocation for brand building versus sales activation is actually 60% towards brand building, 40% towards sales activation. And, again, as I talk to lots of marketers, they're either, like, fully focused on, like, how do we generate pipeline this quarter or they're typically focused, like, two years out, and it's a blend. It's a balance. You need both. And as we then think about using this data and saying, hey. We can generate some pipeline, but it's, like, super volatile. Like, you the red line for those of you who can't see it super clearly is the activation piece. And the other thing, if you go look at the data, it literally says, short term effects dominate in a six month time frame. Like, the actual language from researchers that did this research was dominates. So if you need pipeline, activation quite literally dominates on a six month time horizon. But if you don't build the brand, you only live in pipeline volatility and you're only as good as your last sale. So that's typically our marketer's focus. We don't focus on the well, how we make it through the next six months. So, that said, I'm gonna actually give you a script. If you wanna drive alignment, here are the kind of main characters or the main points you wanna hit on. So, like, one, we will build pipeline today. If you go to sales and you say we're gonna build pipeline today and not say, we're gonna build this program that will generate pipeline six months from now, but you say, we're gonna do things right now that will actually get pipeline moving. Typically, people perk up a little bit. Once you build pipeline, that gets you breathing room to build the brand. Because when you have pipeline and repeatable pipeline programs, you can then go build brand because you actually have breathing room to do so. The other thing I wanna outline is you need to communicate timelines and consequences. There is no perfect solution. This will have some repercussions, but so will the alternative. So just outlining these are the timelines, these are the consequences. Don't throw blame. Specifically, accept fault. So, it's been really helpful. If you are ever in a conflict, go into the conflict first by saying, hey. These are the things that I know I can own. What it does is it's actually, like, largely diffuses any conflict. If you just own everything that you can own, then they don't really have anything to throw at you. You just, like, called it out upfront. So it really helps to diffuse conflict. And the last thing is just categorize problems versus opportunities. The biggest reason I outlined this is as a quick well, let's say you have an overall, 30% close rate. Actually, I'll make it 15. That'll be easier because that's more realistic. You've got a 15% close rate, and if you look at the stages from one stage to the next, you see a significant drop off after call two. So it's like 90% move to call 30% move from call 2 to call 3, and then 80% move to call 3. The problem is clearly whatever we're doing in call two. Like, call 2 needs to be fixed. Whereas, if we say we need to go get more pipeline, what if we opened up a new channel and invested $300,000 in events? If you've ever done events, events is an unproven channel. That's an opportunity. Opportunities could propel the business forward. But if we solve the problem of call two, that will definitely grow the business. So outlining those two things and categorizing them allows you to have a more intelligent conversation on what to align with from a sales perspective. So here's the exact script for how to have this conversation, as a mark lots of words. People have already asked, will we send the slides out? We absolutely will. DM Andrei or myself, and we'll get you the slides. But, if you're a marketer, go to sales or executive leadership and say this. I know we need pipeline right now. Marketing has been focused on primarily brand building. We can do things that will build pipeline right now. P s will give you the list of examples of things that you can go build literally right now using your current CRM data. Like, it's actually shockingly simple. Here is my hesitation. We will damage our brand. We will weaken our audience trust, and we could actually be super successful in the short term, but that short term success will create pipeline volatility and then create unrealistic goals. What we're trying to prevent by communicating this is we actually shoot our shot and we hit the quarterly goal and give ourselves the breathing room, and the next quarter's goal is raised. And I was like, well, I can't. Like, I shot our shot. This is what we had that we was short term results focused. And if we just continuously raise the goal every quarter, we never actually get the breathing room to truly build the brand that will deliver for years and years to come. So if we're all aligned that we're gonna do some short term programs to build pipeline, here's what I'd recommend. The next six to nine months, we'll have pipeline volatility. But if we can actually build the pipeline, we can then transition to a more balanced approach, and that's needed because long term, brand building is crucial for sustainable growth, easier pipeline generation, pipeline acceleration, and close rates. So we then move into here's what I need. This is your ask. I need a consistent pipeline goal for the next eighteen months. With a consistent goal, we can dedicate 60 to 70% of marketing's time and budget directly to building repeatable sales activation playbooks in in the next six months. These playbooks should be always on programmatic playbooks that should then prioritize outreach for sales. I'm gonna be super clear. What I'm outlining is not necessarily ABM fully. This is what we do as, like, a transitionary period to help align marketing and sales because ABM will totally fail if you have no sales buy in. And, Ahmed, when you ask what do I mean by brand building, it's a great question. I'll give you an example. Right here, right now, Andrei and I, we've got some slides at the end. I'll go ahead and outline, that are like, hey. If you need help, like, we can help you. But most of this right now is actually brand building. Like, you're not gonna get a bunch of DMs from SDRs afterwards that are like, hey, you should buy our stuff. Like, we wanna help you build the brand for both of us, and then we trust that over time, if we have educated you long enough that when you actually need help building an ABM program, you'll probably call one of us. Like, that's brand building Versus sales activation, which we'll walk through a bunch of examples, is like direct outbound, two booked meetings, two closed deals. That's how I think about the difference. Andrei, do you have any perspective on, like, activation versus brand building? I think you pretty much nailed it down, but, the key point is that brand is I would maybe give, if I will try to connect both, portals, activation and brand. Right? Brand is being considered as a strategic solution or a priority solution to the challenge that you experience right now. Right? So Yep. Typically, whenever you experience any challenge, the first vendor that comes to your mind was actually able to build a brand. Right? That's that's the key. So from the activation perspective, it also means that when, the brand when that is, brand actually sells, we'll see higher apply rates, better engagement with the buying community group, and, hence, more pipeline and, close one deals as simple as that. Yeah. I love it. So that said, once we've actually gotten some activation playbooks running, we're then gonna rebalance marketing's budget to focus 60% on brand building. So, essentially, that's to Andrei point, being top of mind, being helpful, guiding your audience for sometimes quarters or years at a time, and 40% will be focused on brand sales activation. Another way of thinking about this is, like, demand generation versus demand capture. Demand capture is, like, how do we get people to book meetings now? Demand generation is how we build demand for our services over time. Through this transition, sales can actually start to own and maintain and optimize their playbooks. And then the goal of marketing is to build educational programs that shift perspectives, frame the problems, and position the brand as a solution. So I think about brand strategy, it is typically that. Like, how do we actually create thought leadership and educational programs and help people, actually think through their problems differently? I'm gonna get a lot of kudos to to fullfunnel. You guys do a great job of building your brand. So, like, when you do the fullfunnel summit and you how many people did you have registered, Andrei, for fullfunnel summit this year? If you ask me, it was my ballpark, sort of 500. So 3,500 yeah. 3,500 people registered for fullfunnel summit. Andrei, I I don't think you had the goal of converting all 3,500 people. But what you did have a goal of is you wanted to be viewed as a thought leader in the space that knows ABM program and ABM strategy incredibly well. And as a result, you got a bunch of other experts together, and that that just association built your brand. So, Amanda, that's a great question as well. I'll actually walk through here in just a moment where to make the transition. But in short, we wanna do this in such a way that we playbook's running, so we can make that shift. And then inevitably, sales only reaching out to warmer and warmer audiences, as Andrei already alluded to, which is we came top of mind. They probably came to us. They actually go ahead and loop in all the right decision makers on that first call, and then it moves a lot faster versus when it's a cold audience. They typically gate keep because there's not trust yet though. So at a high level, this is the scripting and what we're looking for is how to actually align sales. So, Andrei, you have got some great thoughts on specifically how do you identify the right audiences to focus on. Thank you. So quick note guys, if you don't mind, I saw a lot of questions about trend but this strategy sorry. This session is about different topics that we can talk with Mason about trend for many hours. But otherwise, we won't be able to finish what we have planned for today. So if you don't mind, if you have these questions, feel free just to DM us on LinkedIn or email us, whatever you prefer, but we'll stick to the collateral. And also, feel free to post the questions in the q and a so we won't lose them in the chat. After this point, probably if you agree with us, you might be thinking it all makes sense. But where and how should we start then? Right? So a few, steps for you how we typically solve this challenge with our clients. The first thing that you need to do is you need to find your Alice inside your company to form a change management team. You want it or not, you need to initiate the change management. You work in Silas, you have all of these problems. You are misaligned. Right? Could be your fault as Mason said. Could be whatever. It could be an organizational problem. That could be multiple reasons, but it doesn't change the fact that you need to initiate the change. Right? How can you do it? You can't come to sales and to your leadership and say, hey. You know, from today, we all need alliance. We work in silence and we are going to change it from today, so we are going to do this and that. It never works like this because you first of all, no no change should be a revolution for a team. Nobody likes revolutions. Right? That's the first thing. The second one, most people would be, like, resistant. They are not willing to change. And, obviously, like, we spoke about different KPIs. The first thing that sales will ask you, okay, guys, but how it's going to, help me to hit my revenue and pipeline targets. Right? So if you can't, present meaningful forecast, and honestly, if you don't have if you have never done ABM and you don't have benchmark, you will never be able to present accurate forecast. It would be just an assumption out of thin air. So never do it. Instead, what you need to do is to find people who are willing to change this, the existing status quo. Right? The challenge it. So this could be a sales rep who understands that the current process is not efficient enough because if it's efficient, there is no way that you can change it. Right? And then it would be a sales rep organization. They would be hitting their targets and that's it. But then probably you won't be sitting on this webinar, I guess. So you need to find somebody who is, not satisfied with the approach, who understands that, the things should be done, differently. Right? And then you need to find a subject matter expert, a person who deeply understands your primary buyer persona. Right? So this would be the people with whom you need to talk about your current approach, your go to market challenges. Right? What's inefficient? Why? What are the root reasons? That should be a friend conversation. Right? Not just pretend that they're talking about high level stuff, but it should it should be a practical discussion and then defining these challenges and identifying solutions, how that could be changed. So if, I mean, if you don't have this practice and you don't have framework for this, one of these things, would be, audits in your go to market strategies for fullfunnel lenses. I'm not referring to our company. I mean, that you look holistically at all stages of the buyer journey. From awareness, how these buyers become aware of vendors or products like yours, till the expansion. Right? Because a lot of companies, they think only in terms of awareness to acquisition or most common just acquisition. Right? And then what happens next, nobody pays attention to client success and expansion. But the two the simple truth is, if you want to build a long term strategy, which Mason mentioned a couple of times. Right? You need to think holistically about extension of the relationship, which means when you sell especially if you sell enterprise accounts, when you mark your deal as closed bond, the real relationship just starts. And from this point, you need to deliver. And the faster you'll deliver, the more opportunities you'll have for upsell or cross sell to this account. Right? So you'll be able to grow your value of share, which means that ABM, as you already guessed, it's a cross functional collaboration. Right? Where you need to involve a couple of people, or a couple of roles. So we have, once created a slot, so I mean, my cofounder, document with 20 questions that you can use to audit your go to market strategies. So if you want I mean, we can see the screenshot on this slide. So if you need slides, feel free to DM me or if you want just to have this document again, feel free to email or, send me a message and link it, and I will send it to you. And then just, go through these questions. Maybe you don't need to answer all 20 questions. Right? But just feel free to select those ones that are most important or those ones that's, resonate with your current go to market challenges. Hence, define areas you need to improve. Right? Because the change management starts from accepting the problem. Right? This is the first thing that you need to present to your stakeholders. And the second, question that you might be receiving from your stakeholders and sales leadership as well. Okay. But why change it right now? Right? So you need to present the cost of an action. So what happens if you are not going to do anything? That's why when you do this analysis, you don't only need, answers to these questions. For example, we don't have, enough replies to our outbound. Our cost of acquisition is growing. This won't be helpful without data. So the next thing that you need to do is you need to back it by data and also look at where if you are going to change, where you are likely to have success. The first thing with the change is trying on the pilot program. It should be small scope program. Sometimes it's just enough to involve three roles that I have mentioned, US Marketing Person, your subject matter expert in sales. Right? And it could be very light version of APM, but you do, in with this program, you develop the prototype of your product, sorry, program. You need to create proof of concept and you try multiple things without involving all other resources. You don't need to officially, you know, announce it as an ABM program. It would be just as an experiment at this moment, but you need to prove that it works. And to make sure that it works, you need to identify areas where you are likely to have success. Right? So it's always good to see what verticals, you have success, what verticals and what verticals you are probing the revenue. Or, quite often, we'll look at the same data, by from the use case perspective. Right? Because if you have multiple use cases that belong to multiple verticals, it's much better to focus, let's say, on your flagship, use case and create a program around this. Next, define key improvement areas. Right? As we spoke, when you identify what you want to improve, we want to improve reply rates. We want to improve personalization. We feel we never do we never did appropriate personalization. We want to improve the quality of our content. Our content, let's say, is just product oriented, like, heavily vendor oriented, and we want to make educational content to create awareness, among our target accounts. Right? So you'd build these requirements for your program. Next, reasoning. That's really important. I have already highlighted this. Without reasoning, your program is likely not to be approved. Right? And the sales leader because anyhow, you would say, okay. I'm going to run this experiment with this as their account executive. Right? Still, you need to get the approval. And without giving the reasoning, it's likely not to happen. And last thing that you'll see, it's, the last question that you'll hear, okay, but how will know that we actually improved it? So you need to define good measurements here. Right? So how do we know that the improvement actually happened? That's the key. Next. Yeah. I mean, as we think through someone asked a question earlier, like, how do you know when the to strike the balance from enablement back to brand building? And we've got a list of examples. I'm gonna go ahead and just jump to the top recommendations, that I would make because I think everyone has this data in their CRM. So one would be website engagement. So if you already cookie people and you've got a basic integration set up between your website traffic and your CRM, you actually see who's already on your website. So that are already on your website looking at high intent pages, surfacing that to sales typically results in a higher level of conversion. Additionally, looking at champion tracking. So, the idea of champion tracking comes from the idea that you have customers that have moved from one job to another. You can actually see this, through some relatively duct tape ways, but an easy way to do it is if you're sending out a weekly or monthly newsletter to your customers, you looked at the bounced email addresses, and then you compare bounced email addresses up against, LinkedIn changes. Regardless of whether or not you use that for outbound, to surface that for your customer success team is also massively beneficial, so they can even see main forms of contact that may have made a move. Additionally, event activation. I am shocked by the number of organizations that don't do some form of a pre event outreach. I try to get 50 to 60% of my anticipated meetings before I even take off on a flight. That way I know that my events will always be ROI positive, and that still leaves room for serendipity. And the next thing is just missed meetings, like reengaging with marketing programs, missed meetings. These people showed specific intent and opportunities, and they didn't show up for some reason. How do we reengage that audience in that account in and of itself? I'm not gonna go through all of the opportunity bucket, but in short, deal stages can function as triggers for marketing programs. And the example I would like to give is I've had 300 sales conversations in the past eighteen months. I have spoken to three CFOs, but in every single one of my sales conversations, the CFO or the board is involved. I just don't get access to them as a seller, but I do get access as a marketer. For some reason, the camera has decided to quit working on me, so we'll keep rolling with it. But in short, that is opportunities. And then lastly, would just be customers. What I have found is that more often than not, my target accounts are friends with my target accounts. So if I can engage specifically, people that are already customers and get them to make introductions to my target accounts, that typically is a win for me. And that is not created difficult to actually identify. You just go through their LinkedIn connections, and then as a result, you can more easily find people that you actually wanna speak with. So there's my camera back. Alright. Continuing to roll with it. Goodness gracious alliance. Gotta love technology. Here's how I think through specifically structuring these programs. So for starters, it's data. So data is just simply who we're gonna plus why we're reaching out. Then it's distribution, which is how to get in front of them. Then it's destination, which is what are we sending them to you. And then lastly is direction. I have a lot more content on this. But first is the time. Here's a TLDR version of it that I think makes it really easy to understand. If you want more, we've got some templates. Feel free to shoot me a DM. And the last thing is when you marry the activation playbook. I think of those as the tactics. And then you've many of you have already asked, like, okay. Where's the appropriate balance and blend here? I think of a lot of these activation playbooks at that sales enablement stage as wait later stage of, like, reengagement, MQA, SQA. So if you build a lot of programming there for good fit customers that, if you use Andrei templates or we've got some of our own on how to identify good customers, if you can go ahead and convert those good customers into pipeline today, you can then go build brand programs that connect into those same playbooks. So essentially, if you think about it as an account progression, build your conversion programming, and then go build awareness programs that drive more people in conversion programs. That is the high level. There's a ton of stuff, that we could talk through on this, but I wanna go ahead and, pass it back to Andrei. Yeah. Absolutely. Just want to make sure that we're finished at on time and cover a couple of questions. First of all, when you finish this strategic preparation that Mason shared, there should be two things in place. First, again, I would love to remind what Mason has already said. You need to co create it to the sales and make it visual. So they at least see the key stages. Maybe I mean, if you, if you are real north, you can dive deep and create super complex infographics, but sometimes it's just enough to keep it simple. Right? And, hey, the kind of the core stages and highlight and what would be the role of marketing or what would be, let's say, market and own activities and what would the sales own activities. Right? And the most important thing, like I said, in most cases, this change and this pilot, once, come as a substitution to your current duties and responsibilities and programs that you are running. Hence, you need to build on this. You need to incorporate your existing marketing mix. Right? You are going to run the webinar, think how to make it account based, think how to print the target account that you have selected together with sales to this webinar, and what would be the post webinar? What should be the pre webinar engagement? What should be the post webinar engagement? Just to keep it simple. Right? Don't try to create a completely separate silo program. You already have silos in the organization, though. Make it even more silos if you if you will. So that's the first thing. And the second one, when you co create this program, explain and decree on sales and responsibilities in the future pilot. Just make sure that they clearly understand what they are supposed to do and in ideal scenario, run a prototype of these activities. If they're supposed to invite, target accounts to the webinar, what would be the script? What would be the channels used? For example, email or LinkedIn or how that should be personalized. But, if you want, I mean, obviously, I'm not going to send standard emails. Right? How you're going to personalize? What data do you need for this? Whom you are going to reach out to? So make sure that you all are aligned on these responsibilities and activities without any so just avoid any surprises in future. Right? Keep in mind, the goal, I always share this quote. It's it was once shared by VP of Marketing of one of our clients. She said the goal of the pilot ABM program is an evolution, not a revolution in terms of change for a team. That's the key. Next, you need to craft a framework. Right? Basically, if, I mentioned a couple of times and with, Mason, Lucero that there there should be activation in place, there should be awareness, etcetera. I would love just highlight six essential pillars. We call it six a framework. So six essential pillars you need to include in your playbook. The first one would be the account selection. You don't, as we spoke, don't apply opportunistic or wish list building approach. Right? Define and best case scenario, analyze your best deals. Again, Mason just shouted this. I don't want to dive deeper. The analyze your best deals and define the patterns of these accounts. What make them a good fit? Right? What qualification criteria can you identify from these deals? And what would be the disqualification criteria? The key is just to make it tangible, avoid any ambiguities so anybody in the organization could apply this criteria and tell, is it a qualified or not qualified account without gut feeling? That's important. Right? This should be tangible. Next, account segmentation. Obviously, all of the accounts that you are going to select would be, on different stages of that buyer journey. Right? Some accounts might be in market, but they have no idea who you are and what you do. Right? And they might completely ignore yeah. If that would be just on the outage, they might completely ignore it. Right? Some accounts, might fit your qualification criteria. Right? And maybe some from the somebody from the bank committee engaged with you, but you have actually no idea what are their ongoing needs, what are their challenges. Right? And if they're in the market or no. So from this perspective, you always need to categorize your segment, your accounts, and where you prefer to segment them into three buckets. Basically, cluster ISFP the called accounts that fit your qualification criteria, but they don't know you and you have no idea what are their needs. Future pipeline are the accounts that engaged with you. Again, Mason shared a great slide on how to identify this, but you don't know if they're in the market and what are their needs. Right? Hence, here, you invest into a bank committee met on bank committee engagement and account research and active focus. These accounts know you. You know them. You have some relationship with the bank committee members, and you have enough product need evidence. You have enough insights that tell you that this account has a need in your product and you work on fully personalized programs to sell or basically to create a sales opportunity with this account. Next, account research. Obviously, it shouldn't be just a lot of companies think nowadays that account research is just, you know, pulling, the website URL of this account with the charge GPT and pass it around in-depth research. If that's it that you collect, then you'll be running on the same message and then the same outbound, let's say, emails as your competitors. Right? And, yes, it would be the same. So in-depth research is, happening on several layers. First of all, account research, and then you can collect the publicly available information. And then the buy and commit the research, which means who are the people who might be involved in the deal? What would be their role? What are their current KPIs? What their goals, challenges, needs, etcetera? You map it out to the organizational level to the strategic initiatives on this account. And what would be fairly important here? Aside from the standard information that you can get from multiple sources and today with AI, you can get it in seconds like team size or manual raise, whatever. Right? Open positions. This is today, it's more or less a commodity information to be honest. Everybody can access it. What is my essential is to sit down together with sales and identify what are the critical questions or what are the critical pieces of information that we must know about this account to be able to create fully personalized offer. And in most cases, these insights you will be able to gain only via direct engagement with these people, only when you hear from them. Right? So that would be the most essential, insights for your account research. Next, account awareness. How are you going to create awareness in these accounts? What are you going to do? Pro tip, display ads or programmatic ads on mail outbound or not awareness channels. Right? You need to define what will help to actually create engagement with the buying committee members, what will, educate them, what will nurture them, what will challenge their status quo. Right? Next, account development. How you're going to create, sales opportunities with this, accounts? How you're going to warm up the buying committee? How you're going to start the conversations with them? How you're going to collect these insights, right, that's, essential for you to create fully personalized offers? And plus the account activation, again, Mason already shared this. So how you're going to create fully personalized, let's say, offers, solutions, proposals, business cases, whatever you call it, to create sales opportunity with these accounts. Right? That's the key. The most important part, you won't be able to do it alone. You need to create a cross functional ABM team. Again, and naturally, you need to define how much time don't, what my recommendation here is don't try to pretend that you'll have more time in future. That will never happen. Look at your current capacity. Identify what is realistic, how much time you all will be able to dedicate to this pilot. Because quite often, we hear a question, how many accounts can we engage in ABM? But when I ask how much time can you dedicate to it, it's done. You see immediate mismatch. So, identify what is realistic to be spent on this program. Right? And then what would be the key activities? That's the key. And then make sure that everybody accepts these responsibilities. That would be the key, to prepare your pilot program. And one thing again, just to highlight this, Mason already shared it, the problem with the KPIs. The key is that when you are going to present this program, fully designed program with the responsibility, right, with the timeline, with the key activities that you are going to run, Make sure that the there are right expectations and that, you are going to measure the right KPIs. As we spoke, different accounts would be sitting in different segments, right, based on the probability of creating opportunities with them. And you need to apply right KPIs to measure the progress with these accounts. If these are completely called accounts, right, who have no idea who you are, don't expect sales opportunities coming in if your sales cycle length, let's say, twelve months. Don't think that in the next quarter, magically, ABM will generate full pipeline with these accounts. Make sure that you define the right indicators again. That's the goal to define these indicators first would be sitting, with your, let's say, alias with your pilot team and discuss on the state guys with them and then present them to the leadership. And let's move to the last part. Yeah. Now we've got maybe thirty seven seconds. So, in short, when we talk about money, I always put this in quotes because ABM is a marketing program that aims to align people on the vision and the objectives of the business. And then when people build out a sales comp plan, we aim to incentivize sellers to take actions that align with the vision and objectives of the business. That said, many marketing programs and sales comp plans don't align. And forgive me for whatever reason, my camera just doesn't wanna work at this point. So I'll make this really short and simple and sweet. You have a comp plan that's aligned with business objectives and a marketing plan that's aligned with business objectives, but sales isn't incentivized to close opportunities that marketing is delivering. Either marketing or sales or both aren't aligned on business objectives. So here are the three questions to ask. One, do you know how your sellers make their commissions? It doesn't have to be exactly the dollar amount. But are they bonus based on a number of deals? Are they bonus based on the percentage of the deal? Are they bonus differently depending on different kinds of organizations? You just need to understand that. To the best of your ability, if you can do the math with them or develop a template for them that they can then plug in specific numbers based on that, can you actually show them how much more money they would make? And then the last thing is to the best of your ability, if you can get exact numbers, does the math actually work out? Because if the math doesn't work, why would you expect them to work with you? This is relatively simple. This both be a gift and didn't pan out, but just show me the money. Like, it's really easy to get sales bought in when you can show them the money. So if you've built sales activation playbooks that build the pipeline and you built targeted programs that further drive right accounts into your sales activation playbooks, but you still can't get aligned with sales, it's likely a problem that can only be solved by your executive team by shifting how they compensate sales. So at a certain point, if you've exhausted everything that you personally can do, there is a point where it is actually not your fault. But I don't wanna start there. I wanna start with all this other stuff. So, Andrei, where do you learn more? Yep. So just the last section because probably you guys all will have questions where we can dive deep into the stuff. First of all, we also spoke with Vlad. We see this, like in the first half of twenty twenty five. We see the continuous request with that's mentioned the same challenges. Unbound pipeline keeps declining, unbowed leads unpredictable, sales complaining about flow or failing the potential, marketing leads are difficult to turn into pipeline and win. The problem is the alignment, etcetera. So if, you're at this stage, where you want to initiate the change management and you believe that you can, let's say, find Alice inside your organization, but you need to, create the approach how to do this, with Vlad was told to provide a free set of sessions to these teams. So if, that sounds, interesting for you, feel free to DM me on LinkedIn or just reply to one of the emails, with the webinar reminder. So we are going to help you with, mapping out the, let's say, change management plan and, highlight, the steps for you and what data you might need to obtain on how to present it to your leadership so you'll be able to run the ABM program. And then just couple of things, we have our fullfunnel ABM on demand course where we are diving deep into all of the points that we were discussing today. So this the QR code if you'd like to learn more. Or if you kind of prefer free content, that's also fine. Feel free to subscribe to our weekly news letter on Substack. And, let's, let's, cover a couple of questions that, we have. I see you already answered them in the chat. Doing my best. This one Yeah. This one from Amanda. For Amanda, if you're still here, the long and short that I would recommend is you're not going to, you're not gonna typically, day one upon launching a playbook, see an immediate pipeline. We have had a couple of clients where that was the case. Like, they launched a playbook towards closed lost and, like, one email was sent, and then they got, like, four meetings. Like, that does happen. But what I find is once you've gotten four, five, six playbooks, this is intentionally a six month intensive. Once that's fully built out like, if you have a repeatable playbook for closed loss, event activation, website reengagement, referral programs, customer upsells, pipeline acceleration, those are all repeatable playbooks. If you have those things running, then you should be able to make that transition over back towards specifically sales or sorry, brand building because those things will can be run towards good fit accounts. So that's my recommendation. It's just get the playbooks running, and then over time, they'll be able to be continuously optimized. Awesome. I see we have covered it pretty much, Alex. And how did you like the webinar, guys? Let us know in the chat. Saw feedback from Daniel. Thank you. Amazing content. Thank you. Love the answer. Thank you so much. Cool. Appreciate a lot your feedback, guys. And, just to let you know, we are going to make a summer pause. We're actually scheduled how many more webinars, three more webinars with you. Right? So we're going to cost yeah. Three more webinars with Mason on different topics related to ABM. The next one would be somewhere closer to the September, if I'm correct, then, a new one closer to the Christmas Eve and one in q one of twenty twenty six. So stay tuned. There will be lots of things to cover. And in August, we're actually going to break the summer pause with with the new webinar. Appreciate your feedback, guys, at Nathan. Thanks a lot for co creating this with me and, for co hosting it today. I think it was an amazing experience. Yeah. Thank you, Andrei, for so much for for having us, and we're looking forward to the next one. Thank you all. Have a great seminar ahead, and stay tuned with the future updates. Cheers. Take care, everyone.