Dormant

The account shows no activity in this product or solution area. It may still be a customer of your company.

Category active

The account is researching and evaluating solutions in the category but has not settled on a brand, like a car buyer who has not picked a dealer yet.

Brand engaged

The account is engaging directly with your content in third-party channels or with you in your own channels, including your website and events.

Sales engaged

BDRs use the signals marketing exposes to move the account forward, and an opportunity is generally created.

Closing

Technical and business validation are generally complete and the selling team is moving toward contract execution.

Campaign manager

Defines and curates the channel mix for each state.

Product marketer

Advises on content and offers, tells the product story, and helps drive close rates and deal size once an opportunity is open.

Demand gen lead

Owns a channel, such as search, content syndication or on-site engagement through Drift or Qualified, and programs it with the campaign manager.

BDR

Monitors accounts by state and works with marketing to complete the buying center for each product area.

Carl Steffens

B2B marketing leader

More than 20 years as part of and leading B2B marketing teams at companies including Adobe, Cloudflare and Palo Alto Networks. Carl works with Vincent DeCastro and the team at The ABM Agency.

Vincent DeCastro

Founder and President, The ABM Agency

Vincent founded The ABM Agency in 2009 and has more than 20 years in digital marketing, starting in search and B2B lead generation. The agency now delivers full-funnel lead generation, demand generation and strategic ABM, AEO and GEO services, and agentic AI tools including ABM Velocity.

Carl Steffens

Good morning and good afternoon, good evening perhaps. If you’re in Europe or another part of the world, good morning, uh, elsewhere. Really happy to have everyone here today. My name is Carl Steffens. I’ll be speaking today with Vincent DeCastro. We’re gonna be talking about state-based marketing and AI-enabled ABM.

Super excited about this topic, uh, and look forward to sharing the content with you. We will have a survey at the end of this morning’s webinar, uh, for your feedback, and we really appreciate that as well. So quickly, just about your speakers. Uh, I’m working with Vincent and the team at The ABM Agency.

I’ve had 20-plus years, uh, being a part of and leading B2B marketing teams at companies like Adobe, Cloudflare, Palo Alto Networks, and feel very fortunate to have had that experience. Some of the things we’ll talk about today are things that I’ve learned and picked up and sort of believed over the years, um, in terms of how we can evolve our campaign planning and execution model as a B2B marketing community.

Uh, and I’m so happy to be here with Vincent, who founded and is president of The ABM Agency.

Vincent DeCastro

Thanks, Carl.

So talk a little bit about myself real quickly. 20-plus years in digital marketing. Um, started with search engine optimization, um, primarily B2B lead gen. And then about 10 years ago, we shifted the focus of the agency over to, uh, lower funnel and strategic ABM. So the agency now, The ABM Agency now has really three core services.

So full funnel, full service, that means B2B lead gen, demand gen, and then of course, strategic ABM. Um, additionally, we now have started offering AEO/GEO services, so answer engine optimization, um, is one of our core service offerings, and we also build agentic AI tools. So very excited to talk a little bit about what we’ve built for ourselves here at the agency and then what that means for B2B marketing in the future state.

Carl Steffens

Fantastic. And, uh, I have done some work with Vincent and team, and people that I’ve worked with on my team have. And, uh, one very, very well-known global systems integrator that we were working with, um, commented on some of the work that Vincent and team had, had worked with us on. They said it was better than what they had seen from any of their partner vendors up to that point, so I think that’s a really strong statement of, uh, of their capabilities, and, uh, just appreciate the opportunity to be here with Vincent and having him sharing his wisdom as well.

Carl Steffens

So what we’re gonna cover today is kind of the what is current state for campaign planning and execution look like, and how can we potentially evolve that? Um, if we were to evolve that, how do we build the foundation? How do we think about account engagement and pipeline, and then team roles? We’re gonna talk about MarTech and AI.

That probably means your existing MarTech stack, but also what can you be doing with AI. And Vincent will talk about, um, some really neat work they’ve done, which he just referred to. And then the last piece is how to get started. Okay, if I wanna go down this path, whether it’s in a pilot or a small scale or really overhaul my entire campaign execution engine, how would I do that?

Carl Steffens

So we’ll cover that as well. So first, what– if I think about most marketing programs today, I, I would sort of describe them as point in time, i.e., we define a target audience, we curate an offer, we have a new piece of content, we have an event that we’re promoting, and we of course have a desired outcome.

You know, that will generally be some, you know, moving the account down the funnel. It will be sales engagement. It will be pipeline and eventually closed business, and that’s all good. Um, we’ll execute that program, and then we’ll measure it, see how we did, optimize it, and repeat it. If it went well, we’ll do it again.

If it didn’t go well, we might not do it again, or we’ll change it so it goes better. But then we start over. And, uh, you know, the way I would like to think about state-based marketing is a little bit different, which is rather than being a linear progression through time, it’s a matrix that we’re gonna set up that can capture accounts depending on their state.

And the way that I would think of this is if you go back to ever riding a carousel as a child or a grown-up or doesn’t matter, you know, you may remember that as you go around the carousel, there, there might be a place where you can grab a ring and, and, you know, sometimes there’s a game involved with that, like if you get the brass ring, you get something special.

That’s the way I would think about accounts in a state-based marketing model. They are on the carousel, and they’re moving around. As campaign and demand gen and product marketing leads, all we’re doing is putting the ring out for them, so they can grab it when they’re ready. So think about that analogy, and therefore, in this case, the account is moving through their continuum, and we’re putting things in front of them versus us building a time-bound campaign that happens for a point in time and then turns off.

So account-based marketing– or sorry, state-based marketing is always on. The accounts and contacts flow in and out of a specific state. As a campaign lead, whether I’m campaign, demand gen, product marketing, BDR, my job is to curate and create that experience that an account will have when they’re in that state, and therefore, team roles might change a little bit too.

Carl Steffens

And I wanna describe that as, not as a wholesale radical change. It’s really just a little bit of a pivot in terms of how we think about our jobs and what we’re doing and what we’re producing. The first step in building this out is to build out a pipeline and engagement framework for the account cohort that you’re interested in.

And there are five stages across the top here. We’re gonna go into those in detail shortly. Along the left side are a series of products or solution areas. The reason this is so critical to me, as I know at least in my experience, I’ve been a part of a lot of multi-billion dollar multi-product companies.

And a very typical scenario in a company like that is we’ve got a core product that most of our customers probably bought and might have been their point of entry to, to being a customer. And I’ll use Palo Alto Networks as an example of that, which is a very well-known cybersecurity company, largest in the world at this point.

And for the first five to seven years of Palo Alto Network’s life, the core product was really next-gen firewalls and subscriptions, and that’s essentially what a customer was buying when they became a customer of Palo Alto Networks. In the late teens, ’18, ’19, moving into ’20, things like cloud security, endpoint security, security operations, incident response all became important parts of the product portfolio.

But two things: One, Palo Alto wasn’t necessarily known for those things at the time. Uh, two, the core foundational customers for Palo Alto who had bought next-gen firewall and subscriptions, they were in a different part of the journey with respect to those solution areas, whether it was cloud security or endpoint security, whatever it might be.

And the challenge for the marketing teams in that sort of scenario, whether it’s Palo Alto or otherwise, is you have to build a different journey, right? And generally, frequently, you have a different buying center. So even the folks that we might have sold next-gen firewall to, those aren’t the people who are buying cloud security necessarily.

Carl Steffens

There’s overlap, of course, but there are also different people who come into it, and that’s why this multi-product approach is so critical. So let, now let’s talk about the stages along the top. This is what you’re gonna model out in your, uh, either ABX platform, uh, you can do it through a combination of web analytics and some other tools such as intent tools.

But the five categories in turn as we go across the top are basically describing the account state. And you can think of this as a funnel. It’s sort of like a funnel. Um, but I do wanna have very specific definitions for accounts here. This is what I would call a mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive segmentation.

So no account can be in two stages at once. They’re either dormant or they’re moved to category active. They’re category active or they move to brand engaged, and that’s the way I wanna track progression. And I know that, uh, ABX platforms like Demandbase and 6sense can visualize this for you, and that’s a super important part of building and implementing this framework, is that you build out that, um, funnel visualization in your ABX platform or, or some other tool if you have something else.

So the, the stages, in short, are dormant, and that means the account is not showing signs of activity in this particular product area or solution area. Again, that doesn’t mean they’re not a customer. They might be a customer of your company, but they’re not showing any activity in this specific product area.

Um, an account will move from dormant to category active, which means they’re starting to evaluate, uh, research, consider solutions in a given category. Um, I might liken that to someone who’s ready to buy a car, right? There are seven or eight or five different dealers they can go to when they’re thinking about a car, but they may not have necessarily settled on a brand, and certainly they haven’t settled on your brand because they’re not active with your brand.

The next stage then that I wanna move accounts towards is brand engaged or considering, meaning that this is an account now that’s actually directly engaged with either my content in third-party channels or direct engagement with me in my own digital channels like my website, uh, and other, uh, channels I might have.

That could include events, by the way. It doesn’t just have to be digital. Um, that’s a good sign, right? That, that means that this account is not only category active, they’re showing signs of intent for this product category, but they’re also engaged directly with your brand. Um, the fourth stage is sales engage.

The BDR team, SDR, ADM, call them what you will, will play a big role in that transition from three to four. So part of my job as a marketer is to expose the signals that are showing up for this account or this individual in that brand engaged, um, stage so that the BDR can work to move them into sales engage, and what we’ll generally see happen there is an opportunity gets created, right?

And we’ll talk about that in a few minutes. The last stage is really one that we play a little bit of a role in as a marketing team. Certainly, we can play a role. Um, but from a demand gen standpoint, at this point, the technical and bus-business validation are generally complete for this solution, and we have a seller or a selling team that’s moving towards contract ex-execution.

Carl Steffens

So that’s fantastic. The finish line is in sight. So those are the five, uh, uh, stages I would like to think about. And then as a campaign demand gen product marketing lead, I’m gonna think about what do I program in each of those stages to, to have the best possible outcomes. So as an example, if we play this out, and these are sample percentages, I might take the Fortune 1000 or the Global 2000 in your region, it might be EMEA, APJC, um, and I can map these accounts across this continuum for each of those four or five or six product and solution areas, whatever it is that you have.

Again, this can… This is mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive across the rows. Um, however, an account can be in different stages for different products, and that’s the thing that we wanna map. Most importantly, for those people on today’s, uh, LinkedIn Live that have responsibility for a specific product or solution area, and that’s very typical, right?

So if I’m the campaign lead for product two, what I wanna be thinking about is what are the content offers and experiences that I wanna have between dormant and sales engaged, and maybe even closing, where I might do things like closing activities. And that’s my job as a campaign lead working with my demand gen product marketing counterparts to think through that journey.

Carl Steffens

Um, and again, what I want to do is not necessarily think about launching campaigns. What I wanna do is think about having campaign, uh, activities go live, and then accounts will move through those over time. So as you think about your role on the team, again, as a campaign manager, my job is to define and curate the mix across channels for each of those stages.

As a product marketer, I’m advising on content and offers. My job is to tell the story of the product, right? To pers- to sort of bring product market fit to life. And another thing that the product marketing team can do is help monitor sales engage. So once that opportunity gets open and we have a selling team actively working an opportunity, what can I do to help drive close rates and deal value and deal size?

As a demand gen lead, I might have a channel specialization. Vincent mentioned his team started out as a paid search organization, now they’re moving into a lot of other things and have expertise in a lot of other, other areas. But as a demand gen leader, uh, demand gen lead, I might have a specific channel that I’m looking after.

It could be search, it could be content syndication, it could be, uh, on-site engagement through Drift or Qualified or something like that. So those are the things that I’ll program out working with my campaign manager. And lastly, as a BDR, again, I wanna be working with my marketing team to monitor accounts and stages.

There was a little arrow along the bottom of the continuum there that said, “Complete the buying center,” and that’s something that I can work on with the marketing team, is, first of all, identifying what are the critical roles in the buying center for this particular product area, and then how can I fill that out with the right people?

Um, and there are a number of tools that could be used for that. I, I know Vin- excuse me, Vincent is gonna talk a little bit about how they’ve activated that in some of the things they’ve built. Um, also playing a role here, not pictured necessarily, field marketing, of course. The, uh, executive briefing team, exec programs, meaning you might have CXO activities that are running to engage your CXOs with customer CXOs, and absolutely partners, whether they’re resellers, GSIs, tech alliance partners, service providers, it doesn’t matter.

Partners can play a huge role here. And if you have, and a relationship with your partners such that you can ingest some of their first-party data as well around account engagement and intent, that would be a wonderful thing to model out, uh, in your, in your continuum.

Carl Steffens

Tech and AI are your friends, without question. I mentioned ABX platforms already a couple of times, but, uh, Vincent alluded to AI and the big role that AI is playing these days. So at a minimum, I need foundational capabilities, whether it’s in my ABX platform or CRM or a data store that I use to do account list and segmentation.

That’s one of the first steps I’ve gotta take. First, let’s define the account cohort that we’re interested in. Second, let’s do that mapping across the continuum so I can understand where those are. A- another good example of that might be new logos. So, you know, your company has, uh, 30% of the Fortune 1000, but you’ve got 70%, 700 accounts, that are not customers.

One of the things I could do is map those 700 accounts across my product areas, let’s call it four or five, and see where an account that we’re trying to land is furthest along the continuum. That would be a good place to start, right? So even though the company’s predominant land motion might have been in product one, we may see that an account is further along in product three, so that makes sense for us to lean in with the marketing team and the BDR and sales.

Um, intent and engagement signals, whether that’s coming to you through your ABX platform or whether you’re subscribed to services or have another capability. You can also use first-party data like your site analytics and email open rates. Those are very valuable. Um, we do wanna start contact mapping by buying group role.

Carl Steffens

That doesn’t probably require that you invest in anything new, um, but it just takes, uh, some thinking about defining those personas in the buying group, which I’m sure a lot of you are doing. And lastly, super important, MQL and MQA… MQL and MQA governance. How are we going to tell a BDR or someone in the sales team, the next level of the sales process, that an account has reached a certain state?

And there are a few ways to do this. Um, one is to use the traditional sort of marketing qualified lead object in Salesforce or HubSpot or whatever you might be using as a CRM. Um, the other way to do it, and this is something Forrester talks a lot about, is to use the opportunity as the vehicle for handoff.

And one approach to that is that I will open a, a $0 opportunity for a given product area. That opportunity becomes visible and available to the BDR or SDR, and therefore they can start building out the buying group in the contact roles for that opportunity. The other really neat thing that we could start to do here with AI, with governance of course– Is create an agent that is looking at engagement and what roles are engaging in my content and in my digital assets, and actually start to assign those automatically to the buying group.

I have certainly seen, and we all know how much sellers have on their plates and how many things we ask them to do. I have just not generally seen that we get a lot of compliance with sales teams spending a lot of time building out contact roles, right? And it’s not ’cause they don’t want to, it’s because they have a lot of other things they’re doing.

So I would say as a marketing community, the more we can do to push suggestions to them, and even semi-automate that process, again, with governance and oversight so that they don’t look at their opportunities and say, “Well, this is terrible. This person is not the technical decision-maker.” So let’s make sure we have some efficacy there.

Carl Steffens

But I think AI can do a huge part here to help with that. And then lastly, multi-channel orchestration. You know, as you build out your continuum and your, your experience for an account across that continuum, make sure it’s multi-channel. Paid media, paid social, event-focused target lists, on-site engagement, which I think is very underutilized by marketing teams.

It’s so easy to change something like Qualified or Drift, much easier to change a script for Qualified or Drift than it is to go work with your web team to change web content most of the time, right? So make sure you’re taking advantage of that, but also make sure that the journey you program is multi-channel.

I’m gonna s- build out a couple of, of examples here and then hand it over to Vincent. So when you’re building out your program portfolio across that continuum in the row, you can kind of follow a top and mid-funnel framework because that’s ultimately what we’re doing left to right versus top to bottom, but we’re mapping it to engagement and pipeline stages.

We’re also mostly thinking about accounts. I would say major in accounts, minor in people, which is maybe a little bit of a different approach. I think a lot of times we get into the mode that we’re m- majoring in people and personas and minoring accounts. But to me as a B2B marketer, the state of the account is maybe more important than, than the specific state of a given person.

And that’s not to say that the latter isn’t important, it’s just what’s most important to me is I understand where the account is moving as a whole. Again, we need to be, uh, integrated and multi-channel. Marte- MarTech and AI are a given. Don’t build without them. And prioritize movement from stage to stage.

So especially in those early stages from dormant to category active, you know, I don’t necessarily wanna put gated content in front of, uh, a buying center or a buying group or a persona, right? What I wanna do is educate them, and I’ve seen a lot of examples in my time where we’ll invest in things like paid media, content syndication, sponsored webinars, et cetera, in order to drive awareness at the category level.

And mostly what we’re doing there is we’re exposing the business problem and getting agreement that this business problem is important. That’s the time when the buying center and the decision makers start to think about, “Okay, now I agree this is important, so what am I gonna do about it?” And it’s that second statement that gets them into category, uh, active and then engaged with your brand.

Carl Steffens

Great. Here’s an example. So just a quick example. If I’m the campaign or product owner for product two, solution area two, uh, and I wanna focus on category active accounts, let’s say I have 162 accounts here, um, I will likely go out and if I’m not seeing direct engagement here with my, uh, organization, whether it’s through digital channels or otherwise, I will generally go out and try to find these accounts through paid channels.

So that might include targeted LinkedIn ads, direct email via third party lists, sponsored webinars against the TAL. As I start to accumulate, uh, interested contacts in the accounts that I’m focused on, I can now communicate with them directly. I can engage with them directly. They can come to my website and visit me.

Um, and then I’m gonna move into that, um, brand engaged where I can actually see their activities in my first party data. So that’s just an example. Again, if I’m a campaign lead, a product marketing lead, a demand gen lead, um, get together in a room and one of the first things you can do, we’ll talk about this in a few minutes, is do an audit of your content offers and experiences across those five stages, right?

And just see how you’re doing. I bet you’ve got a lot of it already, um, but it might just make you think about it in a different way. It might also expose a gap where you say, “Gosh, I’m not investing very much in accounts that are dormant. However, this is a very important product for my company strategically, so I need to make sure that these accounts know that we play in this area.”

And, and I think that’s very common for multi-product companies. So with that example, let me hand it over to Vincent to share some of the amazing work they’ve done with agentic AI and some other things.

Vincent DeCastro

Thank you, Carl. Great stuff. I’m gonna go ahead and, um, take over the share at this point in time so I can share my screen and walk through some of what we’re doing.

Vincent DeCastro

So when I think about AI, my, my big picture question is, does AI work for me or am I working for AI? And I think a lot of marketers are at that point in time as well. Um, so, you know, we, we have a pretty specific distinction between generative AI and agentic AI. And so generative AI is I’m going directly into ChatGPT or Claude, I’m prompting, um, I’m getting the results that I want, and then I have to do something with those results.

When we think about agentic AI, we’re talking about workflows. We’re trying to solve challenges and figure out ways to make humans more efficient. And so the goal isn’t to reduce or remove the humans from the process. The goal is to be able to empower the experts to be able to do more work and do it more efficiently.

So AI needs expertise. Um, AI doesn’t function well without expertise, and quite frankly, AI doesn’t make somebody an expert. And so we’re not looking to replace those experts. What we look to do with AI is to solve challenges. And so we really had three primary challenges that we looked to solve when we were building out these two platforms, ABM Velocity and Revenue Velocity.

So how can we reduce the amount of time that it takes to go from strategy to a live campaign? Depending on how bespoke or the bespoke nature of the strategy, that could take two, three months. Um, and that, that’s a big gap. And why does that matter? If you think about state-based marketing that Carl’s presented, you’re, you’re talking about what’s the current state, not what was the state two months ago.

So if we’re building a strategy off of signals that are already old, by the time we get into market, there’s a high degree of likelihood that we’ve potentially missed an opportunity, or the information that we’re showing to the account and the people might be a mismatch with where they are in their purchasing decision.

Carl also mentioned how busy salespeople are. And so I’ve always defined ABM as probably what your best account executives are already doing themselves. The problem is they have limited time and capacity to do these things. Their focus needs to be on the selling process. And so, so our goal is to get into market faster, to use AI, as Carl mentioned, to do a lot of the stuff that, quite frankly, that’s what machines should be doing.

It shouldn’t necessarily require humans to be analyzing the data and the signals and to be making those decisions. We wanna be able to use AI efficiently where it’s going to have the most impact on the business. So I’m gonna do a quick high-level walkthrough, but keep in mind, what I’m not trying to do is to, to say, this is what you need to use.

What I’m trying to introduce to the community is these are the advancements. These are the things that really can change the frameworks and how we look at B2B marketing, ABM specifically in this case, because now we have tools that do things that we were never able to do before. This is not to advocate for removing your current tech stack.

Vincent DeCastro

This is essentially the plumbing inside of your existing tech stack, doing some of the things that really take a lot of time, a lot of human effort that we can actually augment, improve, and make more efficient. So, so first we’re gonna do a quick walkthrough of what we call ABM Velocity. The tool is created to be able to do one-to-one, one-to-few, one-to-many, and RFP campaigns.

It’s designed to have teams to work inside, so it’s got a project management element so that you can come in here and you can tag team members. We’re able to tag clients. We upload files. We ask people to complete tasks. But the view looks like this. So you would upload your strategy, supporting context.

Um, we build these for each individual client. So Carl talked about the importance around marketing of all of your, your products and in many instances services. So that gets built into the tool. So all the products and services are in here. Um, this is completely brand compliant. So everything about your brand is built into the tool: colors, tone of voice, fonts, um, approved imagery, everything.

Pardon me. Buying group is in here. Client intelligence. And so I’ll move through this pretty quickly. It’s quite robust. Next step is going to be the strategy. Campaign strategy pulls that information in. We decide what type of campaign we’re running. Is it competitive displacement, pipeline acceleration, brand awareness?

KPIs are built into here.

Moving into the buying group, so as Carl mentioned the importance of the buying group, our tool takes that into consideration, and it will let us know when we’re missing key members of the buying group.

Moving into account research. So we’re using LLMs to help us to create the research. Our go-to-market strategy. These are recommendations around channel, um, mix and how much money we should be spending. Creative concepting is built into the tool as well. And then we move into asset creation. So in this instance, it’s a one-to-one campaign.

Vincent DeCastro

Each member of the buying group can get their own individual assets. So that looks like landing pages that are built for individuals, ads, and then also case studies. Now, the next feature is Revenue Velocity, and so here’s where we switch over to the sales side. And so this tool will now bring in all of the research and information from ABM Velocity.

So starting to create that alignment between sales and marketing to ensure that we’re operating off of the same sheet of music. So we’re not necessarily re-researching, we’re not necessarily redoing competitive landscape, although these are things that we can do. We’re now sharing this information. And so this tool is designed to help to create that account pursuit plan that the sellers can also follow.

So all of their information, their notes, everything from the CRM, from the marketing automation platform, even your ABX platform, you can choose which items you wanna pull from ABM Velocity. You can even communicate with the data. So you can say–

So we can query the data. It’s a data lake. The tool will then give us that update, let us know what performance is. It will let us know which accounts are in market, and we’ll start to integrate some of that information into what our plan is. But it lets us know what’s the activity at the individual account level as we’re beginning to build out our account pursuit plan.

Sellers can upload, and they should upload, all of the information that they have. It can pull the information automatically, but really best case scenario is when the sellers are putting in individualized information around that account and then moving through these stages of the process. So if we’ve got research already, competitive landscape is built in, buying group can get pulled over from ABM Velocity with additional areas where we can put in notes.

We can mention whether or not we met with them, what the next step is, pulling in the value proposition from ABM Velocity, and then getting into where does the account stand in its current state. The whole point of this tool is to then create the pursuit plan for the individual sellers. So now I can go ahead and I can hit the export button.

It’s created custom pursuit plan based on all of the information that comes from ABM Velocity, but it’s also been entered in by the account executive or the BDR at that point in time. So it gives you the full overview, um, how the plan works, what the current situation is inside of the account, engagements to date, the people who are involved that we know, the ones that we don’t know and we need to map ultimately, how can we enable the champion inside of that particular account, what are the primary questions that objective, uh, objections we’ve heard from that account so far.

So what do we need to make sure that we address, um, with, with purpose, with assets, with messaging, and then it gets into the full playbook. So who do we message, when do we message them, what do we say to them? All that information gets built into the pursuit plan. And then what’s the long horizon cadence for the decision-making process all the way through setup tasks.

So who does what in order to enable this particular plan, what are the metrics, the governance, and then what’s the 30, 60, 90-day plan around activation. So, so these are just a couple of examples of what it is we’ve been building in order for us to enable our clients. Um, we allow our clients to get access to this, but, but I would say that this is hopefully inspiring people to think about what’s possible in B2B marketing.

And that really, from my perspective, is, is the, the point of sharing this kind of information. I love the per- the prospect of using state-based marketing along with these types of AI-enabled tools that are going to allow teams to be able to meet these accounts where they truly are at any moment in time.

Carl Steffens

I love that. Fantastic. Um, I mean, I can just imagine, you know, a ABM or a marketer sitting down with a rep and going through a lot of that data. You know, I think one of the things we’ve missed as a marketing community for at least 10 years, you know, I know Demandbase and 6sense have been around for quite a while now, and they’re fantastic tools and fantastic platforms.

Salesforce, HubSpot similarly. You know, to me, Salesforce was built around opportunity management, you know, and that’s generally the way it’s used. And I realize there’s an entirely different set of it done around CRM and customer success management and service. But if I think about a, a, a toolkit or a platform that a marketer can work with a seller on, especially in a one-to-one account context or a one-to-few account context, it’s been a lot of ad hoc stuff, right?

It’s Google Docs, it’s Microsoft Docs, it’s spreadsheets, it’s notes back and forth in Slack or Google Chat or whatever you use. So a lot of the things I think that Vincent showed to me as a marketing leader are really just meant to enable that process that we’re building on our own. And while a lot of it does need to be based on the account itself, a lot of the workflows are similar.

And I think that’s where, you know, Vincent and team have built a pretty compelling example here of what could be built using AI, um, to emulate those processes, either generally, which is what they’ve done and they’re working with clients on, but also could be customized for your specific sales and marketing scenario and maybe even the sales cycles that you drive.

Carl Steffens

So– If you’re thinking, “Hey, what do I do now?” I’ve heard some great content this morning around a new way to think about my campaigns and my campaign execution and planning. I also have seen some really compelling capabilities built out using AI in ABM Velocity and Revenue Velocity with The ABM Agency team.

Couple of next steps you could take. One, strategy and planning workshop around your cam- current campaign model, campaign planning and execution. Gives you a chance to do things like align on the pipeline and product framework, think about what product mapping I wanna have, map and… or sorry, excuse me, inventory your campaigns and content to understand what stages of that continuum are already covered so that you can identify gaps.

Look at your tooling, understand how you’re doing from an intent standpoint, analytics. One of the key things here is data quality, which I’ll talk about in a few minutes, at the account level. And then account cohorts. What’s actionable? A frequent question if I think about state-based marketing is, what account cohort should I pick?

And I think the real quest- the an- the real answer to that is pick an account cohort that’s actionable. So it could be 7,000 accounts, it could be 30 accounts. Whatever is best for you. You know, and I think what’s actionable is a combination of two things. One, what will have a strategically valuable outcome for your company?

And the second dimension is, what am I organized to execute around? So if I pick, uh, global airline accounts, but I don’t have any content and I don’t have any subject matter expertise internally around go-to-market for airlines, that might be a tough one, right? S- conversely, if I pick new logo accounts and I pick a certain vertical or a certain geography, and I know what the land motion is likely to look like for those accounts, then I can start to build out.

Um, validate your team roles, and then again, think about AI orchestration. So those are some things to think about in a strategy and planning workshop. I know the Vincent team and I are happy to help with those and help plan with those and moderate them or facilitate them, if that’s of interest. Secondly, if you wanna dive in immediately, and these are parallel at motions, not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Um, jump in with Vincent and team on AI capabilities and ABM Velocity, Revenue Velocity, what they’ve built out. You can scan the QR code there to book an appointment, uh, for either of these and, um, Vincent and team and I will be happy to follow up and jump in. So with that, thank you everyone for joining.

Um, a quick little plug here. Who doesn’t love puppies? Uh, we need your feedback, so this is the one time, the only time, and I’m, I’m sure people have had their phones out, but this is the one time we’re gonna ask you to get your phone out. Scan the QR code in the middle. Uh, we appreciate your feedback in the feedback form that we’ve set up.

It’s five questions. It’s super quick. We’re gonna leave that up for a couple minutes here. Um, in return for your feedback, we’re gonna be making a donation to the Georgia Humane Society. Uh, Vincent and the ABMA team are based in the Atlanta area, so we’d love to support this local cause of theirs and, uh, we’ll do that on everyone’s behalf who joined today, and everyone who might be seeing this, uh, on an ongoing basis as it’s recorded.

Carl Steffens

So while you’re doing that, let’s jump to the next page. A few questions here that might be asked. LinkedIn Live isn’t a massively interactive platform, so we’ve, we’ve got a few questions here which are very typical versus asking everyone for questions. The QR code on the left continues to go to the feedback form.

Just don’t want you to lose that. So again, thank you for your feedback. I mentioned already how many accounts can be included with this approach. Um, I would say the main, uh, limiting factor there is data quality, right? So if you’ve got really clean account data and you can say that when you pull a list of 7,000 accounts, those are the 7,000 accounts, then great.

7,000 accounts could be it. If conversely, you try to pull an account, a list of 7,000 accounts and 30% of them are duplicates, that’s maybe not a good place to start, right? I would maybe start then with a smaller number, let’s call it 30 or 50, or a very specific account cohort, where the first thing I might have to do is go through a little bit of a data validation exercise to make sure my account lists are correct.

I know I had an experience with that with one of our marketers at Cloudflare a couple years ago, a very talented individual, um, who that was the first thing he had to do with, with Fortune 1000, Fortune 500 new logos, was just get a clean list. So, you know, that might be the first thing you need to do. Um, how do I determine the best product groupings?

Again, two potential things there. One, what’s strategically important to the company, therefore, where do I wanna make this investment? The second thing you might think about is, how are we organized from a campaign and a go-to-market standpoint? Because you’re probably already set up in a way that allows a small group of you to, to sort of jump into this and tackle it.

Um, and that’s an easy place to start. What should the sales team’s involvement be? As Vincent mentioned, sell- the good sellers are doing a lot of this already on their own, but they’re doing it in notes and things that they keep. Um, uh, what I would do from a sales team involvement, first of all, it’s our job to build most of this stuff out, right?

So 80% of the work here is gonna be on the marketing and the demand gen team, and BDRs as well. We want to advise the sales team that this is happening, and especially the, the first thing I might do is if I pick a list of 30 or 50 or 150 accounts, is just let the account owners know, “Hey, we’re gonna be running this program. Here’s how it’s gonna work.” And I know all of you probably do that anyway. So, um, not, not suggesting anything that wouldn’t be natural to your DNA anyway.

Um, fourth question that might come up, uh, can everyone do this? If so, like, is it gonna help us more than anybody else? And I- I would say that what’s driving your success in the marketplace is mostly product market fit and your efficiency as a go-to-market team.

So this is just going to make you more efficient. Everything we talked about, whether it’s state-based marketing or some of the AI capabilities that Vincent and team are building. So it’s good for everybody. And, you know, it’s just a simple way to get your message and your, your products out in front of customers more quickly in an, um, in a more, uh, programmatic fashion.

So I don’t think that you need to worry about, “Hey, if my competitor is doing this, um, do I need to do it differently?” I don’t think so. I would just, uh, encourage you to get started. And again, how can I get started? I mentioned this, uh, a few minutes ago. Pick a cohort of accounts that make sense to you and run the strategy and planning workshop around that set of accounts.

Take at least a half a day to do that. Um, do it in person if you can. Uh, and then run through and figure out where you are and how to get started. So some quick ideas there. Lastly, uh, for all of us in B2B marketing, it’s generally all about pipelines, so let’s focus on that. Uh, Vincent and team are here to help.

I’m certainly here to help, uh, working with Vincent and team. So, uh, we appreciate as a follow-up to today’s LinkedIn Live, feel free to shoot us a note. We showed the link earlier to schedule time, uh, via the ABMA, uh, Calendly link, and you can also access that on The ABM Agency website. So feel free to, to connect with the team there and, uh, we’d love to work with you.

Carl Steffens

So with that, we’re gonna stay live just for about two minutes here to allow people to finish the survey, but thank you all for joining. Vincent, thank you very much for the time and, uh, partnership on this. It’s been a great, great content and really happy to share this with everyone.

Vincent DeCastro

Yeah. A, a pleasure as always, Carl, working with you, um, at Palo, at Cloudflare, and, and now on state-based marketing.

So, uh, very, very lucky to, uh, have been introduced to you years ago and, and now being able to continue that partnership.

Carl Steffens

Agree. Thanks so much, Vincent. Look forward to lots of success here on, on behalf of your clients, for sure.

Vincent DeCastro

Absolutely. Thanks, everyone. Happy Tuesday. Have a great rest of the week. Again, we’ll stay live for two minutes.

Uh, have a great morning and afternoon.