Microsoft, JEN, ABM discussed on B2B Marketing Now

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Transparent with me? I haven't date Jen looking forward to it. You're making this sound very old already. 15 years behind me. 15 years. A lot has changed in those 15 years. And where I would love to start because I find it fascinating, would you be able to maybe give us a brief journey? I know it's 15 years worth, but maybe we can trim it down to a minute or so of your professional journey and really what attracted you as the first employee really taking a risk there over in emea to demand base. Absolutely, yeah. And I'll try and do it in a way that I don't sound too ancient, but yeah I've started, I suppose where it might take world started. It was back in the Microsoft days. I was part of the Microsoft team that built and launched the first ever CRM version as we all know dynamics today. And back in those days, obviously, it was very new and very early, very exciting. So that was a great grounding on all things martech. And that moved in through an ESP I worked for mobile technology, predictive analytics, mainly in the B2C space and there's a great point actually. Why did I go into demand based? And I suppose there's about 7 years ago they approached me and one of the things I'd found over the years that there was a reliance on CRM and marketing automation systems which at the time were, you know, hugely being invested in and seen as very valuable, which of course they are, but they relied solely on the known audience. And there was this whole roughly around 95% of the audiences out there were doing things anonymously on and off their website. They just didn't know about. And then I was approached by this company called the mom base. And the first thing they said to me was we helped clients turn on that 95% of the anonymous traffic. So they understand where they should focus their efforts on the unknown buying committee rather than the no. And it's still as relevant today as it was then. But to me, it was a no brainer. And I was like, wow, and that's the missing best of missing pace. So I was very excited to jump in both feet. So I think that's phenomenal. And ABM, I feel kind of as marketing has evolved. All these big trends and everybody's, you know, kind of jumping. I think at one point it was content marketing. Everybody's doing content marketing and now, you know, account based marketing, you're hearing it all the time, and I know we're going to get to later in this episode kind of where it's going, perhaps. But in a quick one liner, what value today does demand brace, demand based, excuse me, you really bring to your customers. And it's involved so much over the last two or three years of putting it into one sentence will be tough. And I talk too much as it is. But I'll try. So what do we do? We help our clients really understand from their ICP accounts. Which ones are in market right now? Buying journeys and what buying signals are they giving to help our clients understand who they should focus on, what messaging they should utilize and what channels they should make use of within their marketing stacks as we call them. And then roll out activities around maybe email or advertising, et cetera. The idea being we help them build a better more relevant pipeline with faster sales cycles, higher average order values and close rates that go up. So that sells and marketing line at the second to them. I don't know if that was a sentence. I try not to breathe in it, but that was a really rapid way of saying, you know, end to end all the things we've been offering. Oh, I love it. Anything that says sales and marketing alignment. I'm totally on board with and for. And that kind of leads me into kind of this account based marketing and you know, I'm not trying to sell it short here at all. And, you know, you're coming over into the episode from demand based, which I know ABM, it's really what demand base is all about. But I do feel like right now it is a super hot strategy. I don't think you would talk to any sales or marketing leader right now and they wouldn't have heard what ABM is or not sure what ABM is. It's a pretty solid part. I think even after looking at those two transitional years, I'll call them off the pandemic. We've seen kind of everybody pivoting towards a more ABM approach. But what I do find interesting, the more and more marketers I speak with is that there are still a lot of us, sometimes myself included, right? Who we really think we're doing account based marketing, but in reality, when I speak to some of the experts who really do live eat sleep breathe account based marketing, we're actually not even close. So I was hoping we could get a little bit radically transparent if you will about what marketers may not know about account based marketing or we can approach the question a little bit differently and your opinion, what don't we know that we should? Yeah, that's a great question. And again, multiple answers around that one. I think what's interesting as we said, I've been doing this for about 7 years now for them on base. And it's changed dramatically. I don't think anyone's ever disputed that account based marketing works as a tactic. But I think what's changed over the last 7 years, it's evolved from that manually intensive. Each of those accounts we've got to build microsites for we've got to build this big plan and strategy or whatever, which takes a long time. And it's actually quite an expensive as I say time consuming manual process. And with the introduction of technologies like a demand based and others out there as well, it's now turned into something that can be scaled. So you keep that understanding. You want to be personalized. You want to be relevant based on what they're doing and how they're doing it. But now with technology can scale that across all of your relevant accounts. And that means all of the sales managers and all of their accounts are getting the same approach that once upon a time just that key account used to get. So I think that's a big thing that's changing. You mentioned planning. And I think this is fascinating now. And one of the things that I talk about all the time, not just with marketing and sales, actually, more and more with CFOs, which is really quite an interesting subject is the strategy for a lot of marketing and salespeople is still built a lot around that. It is that guesswork. I hope what I did last year will work again this year. And I hope that those accounts I want to go after the right ones. And I think often what's missed is the power of data that you can get in these technologies now allow you to understand, actually, these are the combinations that I should be focusing my efforts on. And these are the marketing strategies I should have. As opposed to saying, well, last year I spent a million pounds on advertising. I'm going to do it again this year. Now CFOs are getting a bit smarter, and they're saying, well, okay, well, where are you focusing that a million pounds? Who are you marketing too? So I think what is actually changing is that account based marketing is getting more sophisticated. And I think it's really making sure that we've all got limited time budget and resource, right? Let's make sure every element of that is only spent and focused on those companies that a we can sell to and beer in market right now. So I think it has evolved, and I think now technology is still making a far better part of that overall process. You can't do technology about strategy. You can't do strategy without technology. It's that combination of both, which I think has really taken a while to be adopted. And the other thing I would say is, I think the European market has had to be much more sophisticated, even perhaps than the U.S. market. Because in the U.S., there are so many companies, right? But even if you did a fairly average campaign, you're probably going to be fairly successful in getting a number of accounts engaging. In Europe, it's a lot smaller market and there's a lot more players in there. So you have to be much more sophisticated. So my view is actually account based approaches are probably even more relevant to Europe than they are in the U.S.. That's why U.S. colleagues. That's really interesting. You know, I want to also kind of dive a little bit into we talked about 2022 planning. And I think what you're talking about, okay, let's rely on the data. We want to understand which accounts we.

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