Transcription: Precision Content: Building a High-Impact Strategy for ABX Success (Ash Kakhandiki)

Hello everyone and welcome to the Bay Area Content Marketing Meetup. I am Dennis Shao, the core co-organizer of this group. Today, we're here to talk about account-based experience or ABX. When it comes to ABX, content isn't king, relevance is. Ash will walk you through a proven framework for crafting a content strategy that connects with real people inside real target accounts. Ash Kockendicke is CEO and founder of Campaign Like a Pro. You'll learn how to uncover account level insights, develop personalized content that resonates with specific personas, and distribute it across the channels that matter most. Most importantly, you'll see how to integrate your efforts with sales and measure what's working and what's not.

Ash, thanks for joining and take it away. Hey, Dennis.

Can you hear me okay?

Yes, I can hear you.

Okay. And please tell me you're seeing my slides, but not my speaker notes. Correct. That was the first thing I had like to make sure. Okay. Are you guys seeing my speaker notes? All right. Give me one. Hey, everyone. Really nice to meet you. I haven't been that active about the Bay Area Content Marketing Meetup, but it seems like it's a really good forum. And although late to the party, I'm really happy, Dennis, that we connected with you and Rich, and hoping that this is a good use of everyone's time today. Let me get started, actually, just with one key thing.

Hey, Rich, I just saw that you made it. Nice to meet you. Nice to see you here. So ABX, right, the X is more like a variable, right? Just like an X in algebra, right? So AB typically started, you know what, 20, 25 years ago calling ABM, account-based marketing. Then as go-to-market teams kind of got more integrated and they started saying, you know, let's go after, we need a coordinated strategy between marketing, business development, sales development, sales. We need a coordinated activity between all go-to-market functions to go after these big whale accounts. These are massive, high value, high worth accounts.

So then the ABM became ABS, account-based selling. Then the SDRs and BDRs said, hey, why are you leaving us out? So ABM, ABS kind of became ABX. Right, so the ABXX is like you know marketing sales broadly any kind of go-to-market activity that you can think of is that X. So all right, let's get started. So I'm the CEO and founder of a campaign like a pro. And after many years in marketing, so I was previously the VP of marketing at LeanData and unboxed, spent a few years at Gigamon as senior director of their integrated demand generation, which is basically cross-functional between marketing BDRs and the sales team to really figure out how are we going to approach these really big accounts.

After many years in marketing, founded my own company campaign like a pro, which is an AI-powered SaaS solution that helps go-to-market teams build successful AVM campaigns. In today's call, this is kept it broad. I'm not going to go into my solution or anything like that. Let's get going. So let me start by saying what my goals are for this talk today. I'll probably take about 30, 35 minutes, leaving enough time for Q&A. But what I would like all of you to go walk away with today is like tangible assets and frameworks that you, if you are interested in ABX, if you work in marketing or sales, something that you can put into action immediately, right?

So a repeatable account insight process, a step-by-step method for mining, formographic, technographic, intent, human intent signals. So you're never gonna run dry on the right insights to guide ABX. Then tiered content frameworks for how do you map your top accounts to content approach, hyper personal for VIPs, cluster focus for priority segments, and programmatic at scale for broad account-based research. Then we'll take a look at a channel matrix that balances different goals between depth of personalization, the cost to reach your audience, the amount of money you have to spend to go after a particular broad audience.

So you can choose the right channels at each buying stage. Then finally, how do marketing and sales team collaborate and have some detailed cadences complete with triggers and ownership? So marketing, sales, SDR, BDR teams can act in lockstep. then what do you track? How do you know your ABX program is on the right track? What are the core metrics you should track in real time as well as post-mortems? And then after the session, we'll also follow up by, I think, Dennis and Rich, you'll send out the recording. Plus, I have a handy customizable ABM content plan template.

This is, after all, the Bay Area content meetup. So content is going to be absolutely center. central to everything that we are doing. So hopefully with all these tools in hand, you're gonna be able to think about ABM and go away from this webinar having learned something new. All right, this is kind of a teaser title, I think, especially to say at the content meetup, right? We have all heard content is king for so many years. And I think these days probably relevance is king. I think content, especially with AI, the cost to create content and broadcast it has become so cheap now that the throne, I think, for the last few years really belongs to relevance.

So imagine you have a target account, and I'm going to use this name a lot, Acme Corporation. And imagine the people at Acme that you're trying to reach out to, right? These are like enterprise leaders in sales and marketing or security or finance. And if there are anyone who is a senior director and above, I guarantee you each of them is gonna get 100 plus emails, LinkedIn in mails and phone calls every week. And there's a lot of research that actually shows up these numbers. So the number of inbound emails, LinkedIn emails, things like that has really gone through the roof.

And if anything, AI has made it worse, essentially by giving everyone a content microphone. So getting heard for companies about the noise has been especially challenging. And the stakes are high. People increasingly have become risk-averse. No one today says, I need one more tool or one more solution in my stack. And there's a lot of research coming out for the last two years that says that even small deals, like 3 to 5K ARR enterprise deals, they often require CMO or finance approval with a very clear expectation of ROI. So we all know this, that the size of the average buying team in an enterprise has gone up from, it used to be about four, 15 or so years ago and it has gradually increased to now it's more than 10.

So there are 10 stakeholders from different functions that you will need to appeal to and you'll need to talk to. And some of them will be influencers, some of them will be users, decision makers, some of them might even be blockers. because they don't see the point in why you are evaluating a new solution. So all of these moving pieces basically means that marketing and sales has become more and more convoluted over the last decade. So the only content that these people I think respond to is something that is laser focused on their world, right?

Their KPIs, their tech stack, their specific industry pressure. And I think that's the promise of precision content. So again, we'll jump into the blueprint of how to create precision content for ABM, ABX programs that works. So if you think of ABM really as a closed loop system, every high performing ABM program I have ever worked on, it really succeeds or fails on how well it moves through this five step signal chain. And how well can you move things along between these five steps. So the first thing is, What signals, what information do you have on your target accounts?

So of course, remind your internal signals, your CRM activity, your product telemetry, open opportunities, website behavior. There's external signals given to you from intent vendors like Sixth Sense or Bombora, job postings from Indeed and LinkedIn, funding rounds, tech stack changes, and things like that. I mean, here's a very good example, and this is based off my own experience, right? A sudden spike in API security related page views from Acme Bank's engineering team. This tells us this sudden signal from the last two months will tell us that they're evaluating build versus buy frameworks, right? So it's definitely if you have a solution in the space, this is your time to mobilize.

So these are signals that you can actively use on your target accounts. So from signals, how do you go to insights? How can you turn data or turn that noise into narrative? So you've got to ask yourself, what does this industry, company, and person care about right now? You've got to layer in macro trends, which are like industry-level trends. Meso trains, which is like mid-level company events, and micro trains, which is specific to that person who's occupying that role right now. The triggers you are looking for are like, where are they in a budget cycle?

Is there a compliance deadline coming up? Is this company looking at an M&A cycle? Is there a restructuring going on? Because all of these things influence and change Porsche's behavior. So for example, if the CISO, the Chief Information Security Officer, if the CISO of ACME just presented a zero trust mandate during their earnings call, that's definitely a not star for messaging. Step three would be generating messages. How can you position your company with purpose? You ought to craft a why now, why us narrative. Of course, we all know as marketing people that we need to always differentiate on outcomes, not features.

But here, you've got to align your product, your messaging to the buyer maturity. So, for example, there are people who will respond to a visionary message. They want to be first and help new technologies find seed. There are other pragmatic buyers who don't want to be first at anything. They just need a different level of proof. So, how can you align your messages to buyer maturity? And the fourth one is build content. How can you package your story and match the format to the funnel stage and the channel preference? So if it's early stage content, you need to have interactive benchmarks, short explainer videos.

As you traverse the funnel, late stage content wouldn't be a pure case study, a pilot proposal deck, and things like that. And you got to carefully align with what the person is expecting from this content. So for any kind of IT or security architects, even a basic schema diagram is always going to beat out a glossy marketing brochure every single time because they are actually interested in those kinds of details. Last but not least, how do you do outreach? How do you kind of piece all these steps together and actually do the outreach? So what do your call to actions do?

What can you A-B test in terms of subject lines, send up personas, asset thumbnails, things like that? And how do you get that tight feedback loop between sales, marketing, look at that engagement data and feedback into your signals? So when each link in this AVM chain is strong and connected, you're going to create a flywheel. And these richer signals are going to give you better insights, clearer messaging, higher value content, and ultimately outreach that lands deals faster. I hope this makes sense so far. But I can't see anyone commenting, so if anyone has a question or anything, feel free to interrupt me.

Dennis or Rich, please just chime in and ask me to stop.

Sounds good. No questions just yet.

I'll let you know. So this is kind of, so to personalize, especially to personalize at scale, we have to first know the account, right? And that typically means stitching together like five distinct data lenses into one actionable insight screen. So the first is formographic, right? What is this company? And the basics like revenue band, employee count, location, year over year growth if it's a public company. And this tells us if they can buy and whether the deal belongs to enterprise, mid market or velocity team. In the context, I think of this presentation, mostly ABM is for large enterprise accounts.

So a quick check would be a fast growing series C in fintech is likelier to adopt cutting edge solutions than a slow growth utility company. So what is the level of formographic information that's useful for you? Next is what the company runs on. This is your technographic layer, right? So stack Intel, like cloud providers, security platforms, ERP, things like that. Renewal timelines, right? Upcoming contract expeditions are really great moments for displacement campaigns. I've used many of them in the past. A use case could be, hey, this company is using Splunk and CrowdStrike, and typically, they both renew in Q4, which is perfect timing for our analytics POC in Q3.

So this would be an example of using technographic information for your campaigns. Intense signals is typically SixSense, Bombora, and other similar technologies such that this company Acme is doing a dramatic lift in research around zero trust architecture or AI model evaluation. This helps you understand whether someone is in an early research stage versus a late stage in terms of researching a particular topic. It gives you information about how we want to structure your ABM there. Trigger events like fresh funding. I mean the number of signals or the number of salespeople that actively are looking at LinkedIn constantly for looking at new companies who raised a fresh funding round is always super high.

New CISO hire. As soon as a company gets a new security officer, that's a massive signal for a lot of security startups. Any M&A mergers, acquisition announcement, a looming compliance deadline, especially if you are in the federal space or the healthcare space. Compliance deadlines are always really, really interesting. So these are triggers that basically help you answer why now? Why you? Why now? Because they help to create urgency and budget reallocation. New execs are always a fantastic trigger. They have a 90-day mandate typically to make an impact. So how can you be in their inbox on day 30?

Last but not least, human intelligence. This is stuff that bots just can't read. These are actual pain points and prospect's own words. I have a real life example. I was at a trade show at RSA in San Francisco last week. The number of conversations I had and the number of people who told me, for example, that they are using one or other marketing tools in their stack that they are not really getting full value out of. And if you get them, go either tell you exactly when the contract is going to end, when I should reach out, and things like that.

This is fantastic stuff that I'll just not get on LinkedIn or Zoom info. So human intelligence and closing the loop, making sure that your SDRs, your sales team is gathering all these data points that's visible to the entire org. I think this is fantastic. So when we layer these five data types, we move from interesting data points to actionable insights. This is, I won't go through the entire thing, but this is like a detailed account insight card that tells you everything from business context and trigger events to technographic snapshot. At the bottom you see here a table on key contacts and personas.

the names, titles for the two to three primary stakeholders. And this really helps you multi-thread, right? Because ABM is all about, you can't be just reaching out to your champion at the target account. You need to talk to 10 plus people. So you know exactly who to loop in, the executive champion, the technical decision maker, the procurement gatekeeper, all of them, right? So it helps you build this account specific card that you can use. It's just another example of what an actual account inside card may look like. This is actually something from HubSpot. And with this card in hand, whether you are an SDR, a marketer, or an account exec, you always know what to say to whom and when.

I hope this makes sense.

All right, let me ask a quick question on that. Yes. You said it's from HubSpot. Does that mean the HubSpot team was using it or is it from the platform itself that generates it? You can actually generate these from HubSpot now. That's all. That's excellent.

Cool. Many of these. I mean, most CRMs, you know, what the name HubSpot Salesforce, they can help you figure out like the the UI of the account insight. What's really important is what actually goes on there. And this has to be very company specific because what's an insight for a security company may not be the same thing for a marketing company.

If I can ask a follow-up. We're doing a startup, but our startup is a little different because we know that we're working with finance companies and we know who they are. We know there are about 120 of them and we can list them. So we would be dumb not to start out with ABM, right? Because we have a lot of account information on day one. What are the simplest and cheapest and easiest to use tools that a small company can use that still have this level of sophistication?

In general, your stack, if I could ask, what are you using for CRM? Are you using HubSpot? What are you using?

We're pre-funding and we're going to be making these decisions soon as we get organized.

got it i mean i can i can if you don't mind let's take this offline because it's not an easy even five minute answer to be honest and there are multiple trade-offs between like completeness versus you know getting you going like right now okay right it's it's it's a great question though but to be honest i don't think i can do justice to it in like two minutes okay thank you the the good thing however is that i think there's a lot of inexpensive platforms available now because of AI, where you don't have to shell out like 35 grand for, you know, zoom in for something else like that.

So I think you can easily scale up that which is a good thing.

Okay, good. Thank you.

So, okay, hey, thanks, Dennis. And I appreciate, you know, interrupting me so that if I can ask, if people have questions, they can ask. So, here's what. So, ABM, definitely not one size fits all. It really scales across three tiers, and each one of them has its own playbook, right, and personalization depth, success metric. First one is hyper-personalized, which is like, This particular set of content, outreach, messaging is just going specifically for one person. And even if that one person leaves and there's another person in that same role next week, it still may not work because it's very relevant to their challenges, their background, their experience, and so on.

So hyper-personalized outreach, which is like one-to-one. This is five to 20 of your highest value target accounts. So content examples could be like custom microsites tailored to each accounts, brand pain points, overall pain points that you're targeting, and executive brief highlighting how your solution maps to their strategic goals, direct mail, things like that. These are the content types. These are the types of outreach that really work here. Here, the key tip is you have to invest in handcrafted assets, one-to-one touches. Think bespoke relevance instead of speed or cost. This is costly. The second tier is one-to-few.

This is focused cluster-based engagement. This is typically, in my experience, I've seen like 20 to 150 target companies. either all within a specific industry vertical or a segment. For example, it could be SaaS startups based in the Bay Area with at least around B and 60 million in funding, 25 million in ARR revenue, something like that. Think more broader segments. It's definitely not one-to-one. So the personalization here is based on their industry, their specific role, their buying stage. And here, you have to balance efficiency with relevance. So it's a little bit of a middle ground between using, for example, you can use dynamic content snippets, modular templates, and that swap in sector-specific insights.

And last, one too many, this is where you're thinking programmatic. This is going out to more than 150 or so accounts, often across multiple segments, but with a shared theme. And content examples here would be like a thematic block series if you're going to financial services. These are the top five AI trends in financial services. Paid social campaigns do really well here. Email newsletters are fantastic at this stage as well. So here, really, the takeaway is choosing the right tier depends on your resource mix and goals. I won't go through this again. This is essentially the previous slide with a little more depth.

So I will share these slides, of course, so you'll have them in your reference deck. I think people always struggle with like, so what is the, how do I even build up my messaging, right? For any kind of ABM. And if it's one-to-one, one-to-few, one-to-many, how should I even think about it? I would say really behind every ABM campaign is there needs to be a clear four layer like message architecture that guides your prospects from first glance to conversion. Right at the I think the very fundamental is an odd star narrative narrative right, this is your one sentence point of view and the big, you know why we exist.

So here your purpose is to frame the industry shift position your solution at the center. Because this promise, your brand promise, is going to set the context for every asset you're going to build. An example phrase here is, as companies wrestle with data silos, our integration platform is a single source of truth for rapid, secure insights. So that's your reason for existing. And that's got to underpin almost everything else after that. Number three here or the second layer from the bottom is how can you add role-specific triggers to each buyer's unique pressures, right? Emotional hooks, for example, stay the hero of your next board review.

Rational hooks like cut your integration costs by 30%. So these are promises that you can make. The second layer from the top would be proof points, concrete evidence that makes your promise believable, case studies, analyst endorsements, lead with metrics like 42% faster time to value or the lowest total cost of ownership in our category and things like that. And the last but not least, the call to action, right? The next best step that aligns with your buyer stage. This could be a soft CTA, like, you know, subscribe to our newsletter, replay a video, download a brief.

It could be what's called a hard CTA, which is book a value workshop, start a pilot, request a proposal, right? And here, a big problem here where good marketers often do spend a lot of time on this is just we just match the ask to the buyer's comfort level. If you're too aggressive too soon, that often kills engagement. So you got to kind of read the room, read the person a little bit and figure out what are they going to really likely respond to? Is this too early to ask for a meeting? Is this too early to ask for a pilot?

Maybe there's going to be something else that you can do that allows them to take one step further. So with these four layers, like a not star narrative, proof points, persona hooks, the right call to action, you're basically building a message framework that's scalable and deeply relevant. So this is an example of a five day sequence. Again, based on, I've often used these in the past using automated triggers, graduated personalization, clear outcomes. So rather than like going into the details is that this is your basic ABM playbook. The one research that I'm really, I was interested to learn was These days, the more and more data points show that orchestration actually beats the channel choice.

What does that mean? So there's often a lot of noise about, hey, is it an OK idea for me to text a prospect? Is it an OK idea to call a prospect right away? And what a lot of research is showing is time to speed and orchestration is actually way more important than the channel choice. So if a prospect, for example, spends 30 seconds on your page or goes through two data sheets on your website. your SDR team should get a Slack alert right away to call within the next 10 minutes. And response rates really double compared to like next day or even next week follow up for sure.

So if there's really one take away from this slide, I would say, think how you can orchestrate these different touch points at scale and for velocity instead of trying to understand here should we send an email versus a text. Oftentimes like two or multiple teams working in parallel in lockstep with each other is going to be a lot more effective than, you know, quote unquote, like a particular team owning the outreach and doing it at a scheduled time. This is kind of for ABM and very quick legend here, right? So the size of the circle here is like the relative cost of each engagement.

So you can see that an executive roundtable is like very high. I mean, that's the biggest circle you can find here because I used to run executive roundtables at a startup I was at, and these are often very, very expensive, right? poor meeting or a poor engagement basis, these often run into the low thousands of dollars. So that's the highest circle, but it's also the highest intensity. It's the darkest color because these are typically executives who are very close to making a decision. So you have to choose the right level of channel here for an ABM program.

Left to right, the audience reaches. How many people can you reach through that channel? The y-axis is like, what is the depth of personalization? For an executive roundtable, essentially, you are going to have multiple one-to-one conversations. So the level of personalization is very, very high. And for display, it's going to be low. So as you think about content and specific playbooks for marketing and sales for an ABM campaign, I think this is something to keep in mind. And you really need a good mix of multiple tactics here, right? You can't go all into executive round table because that's not gonna give you the volume you need.

You can't go all into display because that's not gonna give you the personalization you need. So kind of think one-to-many using display and paid social, one-to-few using emails and webinars, one-to-one with executive roundtables and direct mail approaches. Let me pause here to see if people have any questions specifically about this.

I'm checking the chat. Floyd, did you have an additional question you wanted to ask?

No, I'll get on questions, but a quick comment just to support this. Nice graphics, by the way. At a tech company called NGINX, we did a retrospective project where we looked back to see what content had been consumed by our most successful, our largest accounts, right? So we were able to take our content and map it to some of these concerns of outreach and what had worked for us. And then at another company, to your other comment, our sales team would reach out within, if somebody had a few points in our scoring matrix and hit our pricing page, we would call them within five minutes, as you suggested.

Absolutely, absolutely.

I have a question. Please go ahead. Sure. Sorry about that. Yeah, I put it in the chat, but I think I like this graphic, but I think sometimes it gets misinterpreted as, wow, the big dark green dot is the most important one and we should invest everything in that. That happened at my last company where they don't see that the smaller lighter green dots actually lead to the big dot. So how do you show that or do you have data? What's the best way that you've found to kind of persuade the leadership that the small dots get you to that big dot conversation?

That's a great question, Karan. I wish there was an easier answer, right? It's always a balance between and what gets measured gets improved, right? What is that phrase there? I think you're spot on, right? Like the display or rather the broad awareness kinds of programs are eventually going to lead you to those meetings, the meetings don't happen in a vacuum. Your brand stands for something, so your presence overall online or at trade shows, at events. I think it is all connected. I think that's probably the takeaway from all of marketing and sales. It's all connected.

There's no such thing as we should do only executive roundtables. Having said that, this is probably my pet peeve. Tactics are often held to or their tactics are measured by the wrong things. For example, for display, you cannot really measure MQLs or conversions like form conversions through display. That is not their role. One way to re-architect or rethink, and this is a conversation between the CMO and the CFO and the leadership is, How effective is that channel to getting them to the next step in the process? I think that's all. That's all. Don't hold them respond.

Don't look at display or paid social for MQLs, content engagement. How many downloads did you get? How many people actually checked out the website? Did they stick around on the website and then saw other pieces, things like that, right? Really sorry, but no easy answer. I think you probably have a lot of the scar tissue that I have from similar kinds of conversations.

I have another question. Floyd, following up from your comment, so you said when somebody hit the pricing page, you would follow up in five minutes. So my question is, were you successful with that, that it resulted in sales or because my reaction would probably be that I would feel creepy about that.

So what was the response? It worked really well. And this company were pretty aggressive marketers and they were willing to indulge in a little bit of creep factor if it got them results. But the difference is the thing that saved them is that they really loved marketing, right? And they were They were animated by wanting to share what they'd found about the best ways to do marketing. So it wasn't purely, you know, Ginz and Ives kind of sales. The driving attitude was a little different. So believing in something other than besides your numbers is always valuable, I think.

And that helped us.

Good. Thank you. Great point, Floyd. And Uli, I would just like to add one thing about that, actually. Spam is often in the eyes of the beholder. So true story again, a few days ago I was looking at this CRM page, like it's an AI based CRM, small, very small startup here in the Bay area. And I actually bounced off from their contact us form because it was like a progressive form, right? It was divided over like three interstitial pages. And, but even if I did not hit submit, they knew my phone number because I had entered it.

I got a text within, so now I have abandoned the form, but I get a text saying that, Ash, this is the CEO of this company. Can I ping you just for two minutes? So we had a quick conversation and he asked, why did you bounce off? Why did you not complete? And we had a quick conversation about something about the pricing that I was not sure of. But fantastic, right? I mean, at any other time, if anyone would have texted me, I don't think I would be generally happy about it. But in this case, it worked okay.

There is always a balance and I think what's spammy now probably I would say changes also with time.

So I agree with text or email, that I find totally fine, but I think Floyd did a phone call that I would personally find aggressive. But it's okay, we don't need to go into deeper. I was just curious. Thank you.

So a key takeaway from this slide is map channels to your objectives. So invest in high cost, high depth channels for top tier accounts, especially top tier accounts in late stages, but use programmatic, lower depth channels to cast a wider net in the early stages. So this is kind of your flywheel of awareness, engagement, conversion. And most of the time, people don't have the luxury of just saying, I'm going to double down on one channel that's going to work for us. It's typically at least three to four different things that are firing all at the same time for things to make work.

real campaign actually that I ran for 50 gold accounts in cybersecurity. So I'm not gonna go through everything, but it's a good point of how we can warm up accounts, how we introduce personalization, where we make like proof heavy content from week three, how we focus on conversion in week four, So this was a campaign for 50, again, gold accounts for a cybersecurity company I was at a few years ago. And excellent results, 36% of the accounts that we were targeting, they booked workshops, which was the right goal for this kind of campaign. Four million pipeline influenced and an average sales time reduction of about 19%.

And one of the key takeaways from this particular campaign was like the touch frequency actually matters. So as marketing or salespeople, we often have this weekly way of thinking about things like we'll send out a weekly cadence, a weekly cadence for your accounts that are actually showing high levels of activity. increasing the touch frequency to every two days, every three days. And you alternate the channel flavor, so it's not just the email, but you do email, calling, LinkedIn, direct mail, things like that, so that it feels orchestrated instead of spammy. Just alternating the touch frequency, but being a little more aggressive for accounts that are showing some activity actually has worked really well, in my experience.

Just a quick circular flow, right? Like how do you build a virtuous feedback cycle from targeting assets to figuring out all the engagement metrics you need and continuous analysis and validation, refining and optimization. just a way to sharpen your relevance, boost engagement, and accelerate pipeline. And in the template that I'll send after the webinar, you will see specific metrics for each of these and how fast your feedback cycles need to be. So expect a bit more on this in the spreadsheet that I'll give. So for KPI metrics, this will of course change from company to company, but the story of the ABM, the large enterprise ABM programs that I have run in my experience, right?

Coverage, which is, I think most companies don't really spend enough time on this, right? What is the percentage of target personas at each account who have received? It's not about who has engaged, but who have received at least one meaningful touch point. from you. So real life example, one of our current clients, which is a large ERP kind of company, they appeal to IT, finance, a bunch of other roles. And it was very important for them to actually have that coverage of functions And titles in their database. So are you even reaching out to the right sorts of audience right or are you I mean or call it probably might be a very important a target account for you, but if you only have two people from them, then your point of failure is actually quite high, especially if one of those champions leave.

So do you at least have 80% of your target audience reflected in your database, reflected in the personas you're reaching out to? Engagement score, this is actually a mathematical formula that has page views, email clicks, event attendances, things like that. But it normalizes diverse behaviors into one metric. So you can also see which accounts are heating up. And by the way, the numbers here, 80, 75, 12x, 28, these are top quartile benchmarks. So actual quantitative benchmarks with a formula for each one that you can use that I will have in the template when I'll follow up.

Pipeline influence, which is the total value of all opportunities tied to accounts. The rule of thumb is $12 generated for every one program dollar. This is the top quarter performance for marketing teams. And of course, win rate. The top quarter benchmark again is 20% or more. So ABX, of course, fertile ground for AI because the workflow is super data rich, everything from data intelligence to content automation to performance insight. I mean, I would say the key takeaway here is AI can really become a massive force multiplier. In the interest of time, I think I'm going to skip a couple of slides here.

So I wanted to land the plane with five crisp takeaways and the exact steps to act on them. So one is when you think ABM, think always like relevance more than volume. So if you only remember one thing, remember that meaningful coverage of the entire buying committee will always be blasting thousands of contacts. So really track that coverage metric, target 80%. 80% of the people you want to talk to within a particular account, there needs to be a way for you to engage with them somehow. Number two, insight fuels content. So great content starts with an account insight card.

Just just use AI for this actually right use LinkedIn and AI for my own platform campaign like a pro also does it. So set a 15 minute SLA to create an insight card for one of your target accounts and and see you know what information is useful for you and how you can use it. Tier your investments. So allocate resources by deal size, reserve one-to-one experiences for the whales, and scale thoughtful one-to-many plays for the wider net. Orchestrate that human touch. So content opens doors, but humans close the deals. So automate things like Slack alerts, right?

So SDRs can strike within four hours of high intent engagement. and continuously keep on optimizing, especially for a content marketing audience. Treat every asset as an experiment. Aim for three to five tests each month across different tiers and keep that learning velocity going. So on the right is a basic action checklist. So whatever helps you execute, but these are some, if you're new to ABM or especially leveraging AI for ABM, these are some practical steps to get you started. And I think that was it. That was my last slide. So when I practiced this, Dennis and Rich, this was about 30 minutes.

I think I slowed down.

No worries. Plus we had a lot of, we had some conversation next in. So Ash, if you wouldn't mind, you shared a lot of great tips and tactics. Tell us about your product or platform campaign like a pro and where might it help with some of these things that you outlined today?

So campaign like a pro, actually what we have done is architect, give me one sec. What we have done is it's a solution. So we leverage search with AI and what we have basically built is a solution that automates these five steps for you, right? There's a human in the loop between each handoff to make sure that the train does not run off the rails. And this is very, very important, especially for those initial signals, right? And this is highly client sensitive is what we have figured out. Like what are signals for a healthcare company are quite different from a logistics company or a security company.

So essentially what we do is you can input a list of your leads and we can do research on each lead at, so as we kind of sharpen the tip of the spear, we start with what industry are they in, then what is their specific company, and now who is this person that we are actually doing research on. So we kind of, we progressively build like a sharper and sharper profile that then drives the next steps, which is insights, generating messages, building content and so on.

And your website domain is? It's campaign like a pro, campaign like a .pro.

Let me bring it up.

Yeah. Ah, campaign like a pro. Nice, very creative. I think we have time. We have five minutes left. We have time for a question or two. Does anyone have the question?

I'd love to know a little more about where you're using AI, if you have used AI specifically, and what tools you might be using.

So for most of it, Karen, we actually are using our own stack. So campaign like a pro is actually we are using a lot of search and we are using search, for example, to classify your segment into some very specific use cases. So if you're familiar with any prospecting tool like zoom in for, you can easily say, give me a list of Series B companies in the security space based in the Bay Area. What we can do is combine that with a search and find out, give me security companies with a particular use case for data center security.

So give me companies who are showing M&A activity, who have had new leadership in a particular function. or, and are using a particular technology. So we can layer on different things now using, from zoom in for other sources that you're getting. And we, within our own product, we're constantly experimenting with different models as well to figure out like, what is that unlock for specific content types? Like, so for example, different models do a better job at ideation versus content creation. So that in itself actually is a pretty big deal.

All right, last call for the question. All right, I think with that, we're out of time. Ash, thanks so much for joining us. Great presentation. And we have one more meetup scheduled for believe June, and we're all always looking for new presenters. So feel free to get in touch with me or Rich Schwarn. Thanks, everyone. Thank you so much, everyone.