RX 3 - Operationalizing Buying Groups in ABM | Davis Potter, ForgeX

In this week's episode of the Revenue Xchange, host Davis Potter leads an interactive session on operationalizing buying groups in ABM. Davis breaks down why buying groups aren't replacing ABM but rather represent the evolution of account-based strategy beyond outdated MQL models.

Key Takeaways:
1.) Buying Groups ≠ Glorified Lead Lists: Most organizations treat buying groups like contact lists, missing the nuanced layer between individual contacts and full accounts that includes business units and their distinct buying dynamics.

2.) Stage Zero Opportunities Don't Work: Companies consistently fail to sustain stage zero opportunity adoption beyond 6-9 months, making priority contact tagging a more viable pre-opportunity container.

3.) Both Marketing and Sales Must Own Contact Association: The most successful programs require marketing to surface deeply engaged contacts while sales associates new stakeholders discovered in meetings—it's a one revenue team initiative.

Closing Note: Davis provides a tactical framework for moving beyond the "buying groups vs. ABM" debate toward practical implementation. The session reveals that successful operationalization requires multi-layered targeting, rigorous CRM hygiene, and collaborative ownership between marketing and sales teams willing to track engagement across the entire buying group throughout the sales cycle.

Transcript

Audio Only - All Participants: 0:18

//I'll be hosting our revenue exchange event for this week's, and again, our topic operationalizing buying groups in ABM. So for a couple housekeeping, again, we want these to be interactive, so toss your questions in the chat. Or just come interrupt me as we go. and then also if you have any comments or any learnings that you've had from your programs, definitely share those with the group as well. So on-demand record. We'll be in our Forge X research hub. And then also for those who are listening through our podcast, again, the name of this is The Revenue Exchange by Forge X. and right now you will find it as the Forge X Files, but we're making this change this week, so. All of those pieces will be in there. the first thing that I really wanted to get a, get a poll around, and please toss this in the chat, but I'm curious if you all are using tracking, measuring, buying groups in your ABM or marketing programs today. Yeah. Yeah, we do. hey, I'm Peter partner. I work for Atlassian, and it's like for working on the ABM team, we definitely, meet with different sales members and just see like where the white space is in terms of like buying groups that they're going after. So, I think tracking it might be, you know, like a little bit harder, but we definitely like identify them and import context from those buying groups, stuff of that nature. Yeah. Which is awesome. I'm like, Peter, we're, we're gonna have to pick your brain on a couple sections here. oh, Emily, I see you just went off mute. Hi, how are you guys? I'm Emily. I work, over at Nutanix. we, I would say we're in the beginning stages of this. we definitely have identified, but I think. I don't know if the whole org as a, as a whole has kind of agreed upon, on that. And then definitely not tracking. So, so we're in the early stages of that and, love to learn more. Well, very glad to hear that you're in the early stages, starting to think about and adopt it. Ashley, I see you're working there. Two, you have some data issues to resolve in the CRM. Completely get it. Yes. Nothing to add. Yes. Yeah. But, yeah, we see that all the time. Have some, some comments and thoughts around that as well. and then, amazing. So first off. I wanted to start this by kind of level setting around something we've been seeing all the time, on LinkedIn or in communities. There's this whole notion around in question of is buying group marketing or BGM replacing. ABM and we have this meme over here on the side for those who are listening on the podcast. It's almost, you know, buying groups is this flashy new term where we had signals or signal based marketing, which came before it, and then it account based is dead or something that is being refreshed when in reality. A strong go to market strategy is all of those things, especially when it comes to ABM, it has to be account based. It's buying group centric, it's signal driven and it's AI enabled to help increase capacity. And it's not this either or game that some people or some, some organizations are trying to speak on it in. So. What I wanted to do is kind of share a little bit about the different levels of targeting, because again, it's not just contact or individual M qls who are hitting some form of engagement threshold. That is, you know, the old way. To think about it, and it's also not swinging to the complete other end of the pendulum and just thinking, okay, full on accounts, let's get these marketing qualified accounts and pass a whole account over to the sales team. It's more nuanced than that. You have the business units or sometimes even subsidiaries in really large accounts, and those business units can have their own buying groups in and of themselves, and those buying groups are made up of the contacts. So you have to think about all of these different layers. And this is especially important when you're building your one-to-one enterprise ABM programs. And so when thinking about, okay, you know, we might not have these buy-in groups right up front, how should we be thinking about this when we're initially building our programs? And we have, you know, we've split this out into. what we kind of call pg, so pipeline generation, pipeline acceleration, and then you hit your closed one. And so when thinking about the target personas, you might not know who explicitly is in the buying group, and you probably have some historical data around what makes up these buying groups. And also thinking about. not just broad based persona targeting as well, but really getting into the titles and the actual people within your specific segments, or even microsegments. So let's say for example, you're going after healthcare, but then what does it look like in the microsegment of pharmaceuticals? So who are you seeing in your historical data behind that? That's making up these buying groups? and this. Is where you can start your persona targeting. But the real goal is identifying, associating in your CRM or in your tech stack, the buying group members, and then actually tracking their engagement throughout the entirety of the sales cycle. And it's interesting because the buying group sizes. They vary. Six sense did some really interesting research and they're just about to publish, a new report around this as well. But they found the average buying group size globally. You have about 10 in North America, nine in emea, 12.8 in apac, and these are just general sizes. It will completely change and vary based off of, you know, what your average contract value is, what specifically you are selling into those companies. And so having a pulse on the number of buying group members is really, really. Important. And again, this is where that historical data analysis, partnering with your rev ops team or if you have a data team to pull this information is really critical, especially when you're partnering with sales, or even when you're building automation, to be able to track and gather who you have in terms of buying group members. Another piece that we get a lot of questions around is what are the different attributes of the actual buying groups? What are the things that we should be thinking of? Let's say we go and we find a person who's part of this buying group. What are the pieces or the the specific things that are attached to this person that will actually influence the outcomes of the deal? And there are these four different attributes that we really encourage thinking about. So the first is your buying influence. you have your buying role, perception, power line identification. and I actually wanna pull this up because I think that this is really important to see, which is. When you get to the buying influence, the. A lot of you probably have this in your CRM or your Rev ops teams might have some sort of initiative to build it, where the sales team, whoever is really working the deal, can go in and tag these contacts under what their influence is. If not, this is a great place where you can loop in as the ABM lead. To really help to start to think about, you know, who actually is deeply making the purchasing decision. You have the different roles. These can get lengthy, but really understanding, you know, who, for example, who's the investment evaluator. In the deal and what is the type of, what are the type of assets or the content that is, are, are really important to this person versus an executive sponsor or the initiative leader. Or the technical evaluator. So thinking about the different buying roles, and how they are influencing your actual sales process. We also have the perception, so are they a champion? Do they love your product? Are they really helping you as an ABM practitioner, and maybe even the sales team as well, to identify who the other stakeholders are in the buying groups so that you can. Actually build out these buying group maps. are they telling you and giving you some intelligence around who the blockers might be as well, or as your sales teams are going through their conversations, really working to identify these and associate these again in your CRM and then the power line. So who are the people within the buying group who actually have the. decision, final decision making ability, and we'll sign those checks, and sign those contracts. So that's also really important. And when you're mapping these buying groups, this is kind of what it can look like all put together. We will see some organizations, use a PowerPoint or a Google slide for this, which is pretty challenging. especially when you have, you know, let's say. 15, 16 people in a buying group, and you're trying to put all of these different attributes on one slide. we'll see, Miro boards as another place or, even lucid chart where these buying group maps are being built. And then again, you have all of these different components, all these different attributes that are loaded into here. So. Just kind of, kind of level setting on the actual, what is a buying group, what are the different attributes behind it? How to think about how the, the number of buying group members, that is just so foundational before you even get to the measurement in reporting aspect and how to actually operationalize this. So I think everyone probably on this call and, and listening to the recording understands deeply that M qls just create these silos. They're inefficient. They don't reflect how buyers actually buy. You have this staged linear approach, which creates these silos as well, where you have. marketing or traditionally, let's say a, a demand gen function who is working on building all of these quote unquote leads where they hit this cer certain defined threshold, converting to an MQL, get passed over to sales, and then sales is working these individual contacts. Through the process and just like we were chatting about earlier, individual contacts do not constitute a buying opportunity that is just one person within the buying group. And this is another reason why this whole concept of buying groups is really starting to take off. And you have that BGM or buying group marketing, as what people are starting to think about in terms of coining new terms. And when you look at the actual account-based approach to measurement and reporting and buying groups, this is a, there's a lot going on. On this slide, but breaking down a few of this. So first off, you have below the different, the different buying group stages. So pipe generation where your accounts are unengaged, engaged, and then hit the qualified threshold and then convert into active pipeline or a true sales opportunity, which is the pipeline acceleration phase of the deal cycle. But where you lose and break down these marketing and sales, silos is where all throughout the sales cycle, you might not know who the buying group members are. So you're kind of flying blind and you're going based off of historical data and who you believe might be part of the buying group. And then as you continue. To work it. You understand more buying group contacts. Once you hit the qualified, you probably have a pretty good understanding as to who the core players are within the buying group. And then in active pipeline, you've uncovered and surfaced even more. And what you're seeing here on these different colors, this is the engagement of those actual buying group members. and by engagement. We define this as, purely especially on the contact level, purely first party interactions across marketing, sales, customer success. So these contacts in the buying group actually explicitly interacting with your go go-to market organization or your company. So when we look at the different pillars of account-based metrics and how to operationalize the metric aspect behind buying groups. We have these four different pillars. So you have engagement, revenue, data coverage and scope, and then reputation. The first three are really where you're able to see, buy-in groups as a specific metric that you can leverage, track and use for your ABM programs or marketing programs in general. So when we look at engagement. We have number of priority contacts engaged. We're gonna touch on the whole concept of priority contacts in a moment. Number of buying group contacts, engaged, percentage of buying group contacts engaged that are associated to a open opportunity. And then on the data coverage and scope, you have number of buying group contacts identified. So actually putting some rigor and metrics that you can track behind this. and then also the number of buying group contacts associated to the relevant opportunity because again, this, all of this infrastructure does not work and it breaks down. Unless you have the rigor behind actually associating those buying group contacts to the opportunity or partnering with the sales teams to identify the priority contacts. So that was a lot. but I want to take a minute real quick just to pause for any questions, comments, what you've seen, work really well. If you're adopting this, feel free to toss'em in the chat or come on live. I'll just say this, I like this'cause it gets to where we're trying to get to. We just did a round of QBR with our ABMers. I'm in the ABM program office, I should say that, but I'm so supporting our ABMers in the regions, but. We notice in so much of the data, they focus on number of engaged contacts at a high level. And that's great for just top of funnel, but not focusing as much on like, are, are you talking to the right contacts, like quality over quantity. So, trying to get our PMRs and reporting on that and diving into that data more than they are today. Couldn't agree more. Ashley, and then you also have, I'm, I'm sure your team's run into these challenges too, where looking at the overall account contact engagement in a Bank of America or a re some really large company that has multiple business units, you're it, it's gonna be really hard to pull out tangible insights that you can use. Yes, absolutely. I think where we struggle, I don't know if anybody else has, this, is just the data quality and getting sales, like we have our CRM allows us to do all the things that you showed. It's got through people, ai, the mapping, the who's engaged, what's their influence, are they a champion or a detractor? It's just getting it AC actually populated. That information put in there and sales to care about adding it. And how can ABM be enabled to do that for on behalf of the sales team, Ashley, what, type of ABM deployment model are you all using? One to one to few, one to many, one to one, one to few. We do segment, scenario ABM, mostly one-to-one and a kind of a one to few, and then a vertical approach. Do you have any threshold or. Almost like charter or contract in the beginning of a one-to-one ABM program with the sales team, whether it's the SDRs or the ae, or probably, and hopefully all of, all the above. where you have a buying group, almost, you know, specific, charter or piece within there where it's saying, Hey, we are going to associate these contacts, to either the open opportunities or. Tag priority contacts that we believe might be part of the buying group, not so in detail. I mean, obviously we have our hard criteria based on revenue, potential, et cetera. And then kind of like softer criteria, like is the sales team engaged? Will they be willing to partner with marketing? Kind of that kind of like softer, but nothing like contractual. So I mean, it's not a bad idea to, to do something like that. You wanna know what was interesting? We, so when I was at Pega, we implemented buying groups and. Initially we were doing one-to-one, but it was really more of a deal-based ABM play where we were helping support the open opportunities to close. and we had a specific, you know, piece in our contract if you were to be part of the deal-based ABM. You had to associate 25 contacts who you believe are either really important to the deal or part of the buying group to the open opportunity that we were helping to support. And if you didn't do that, you weren't be going to qualify to be part of the ABM program. That's amazing. We actually have an ABM R that came from Pega, and she's talked about her experience with the deal base, so I'll have to pick her brain on that. Oh no, actually what, what, what company? Oh, sorry. Red Hat. Okay. Who, who's the ABM practice? Hani Mar, honey Marks. I think she came to one of your events in San Francisco. Ah, and that's how I found out about you all. Okay. Please tell Hani I said hi. I love honey. I'll do it. She's the best. Yes, she is so smart. and damn. Okay. Amazing. Yep. So Ashley, and others, I think that this might be really, really interesting in terms of, you know, how, how to operationalize not only for deal-based ABM where you actually have an opportunity to associate buying group contacts to, but how to think about pre opportunity and what that could look like around operationalizing the buying group. So. First off, I'm sure you all are familiar with serious decisions, classic demand, waterfall. they've iter iterated on it multiple times. Our unified data model, or the way in which we have structured this to transition off of mql, we call it the count based arrow. And I'm gonna break down a little bit about the buying group, specific aspects of the account based arrow, but it's pretty complex. and first off, quick spoiler on this, using Stage zero opportunities, I really want to encourage, everyone who's, who's listening and, and on this call today. To to really think about it if you plan on adopting it. We've seen this multiple times where companies tried to adopt stage zero opportunities as a container for buying group contacts and then pass over the stage zero op to sales, or even partner with sales on stage zero ops and. The adoption rate is just it. We have not seen it successfully stabilize over 12 months. It's almost a six month, nine month, pilot, and then it just ends up falling flat. and so I just wanted to, to really add that in here. Because the way in which we think about this, so again, going back to this multi-layered, targeting level, where you have the account, the BEUs, the pie group, the contacts, how we think about actually measuring engagement signals on the contact level is for, and for each of these different sections, is listed down below. So we're gonna break, we're gonna walk through all of these. today. So first off, you have the account in the business units. So again, for our example here, you have Bandit Financial. This is a really large bank, like a, like a Bank of America. You have your business units and sometimes these business units can be so siloed that you know, crazy example, but one might be using Salesforce for their CRM, the other using HubSpot. And the way in which their buying groups are constructed are so different, same as the contact level. I'll give you another example. We're building a private CMO group and JP Morgan is, they have a few different CMOs, and those CMOs are all of their specific business units. So if you were to go in, for your ABM program. And look at, do we have CMO of JP Morgan engaged? You could have multiple CMOs of multiple business units, and then sometimes your sales teams, if it's a large enough account, JP Morgan is pretty, pretty substantial. And if your contract values are high enough and your sales cycles are long enough, you might have this account under your strategic sales pillar or that top tier where it might even have a, a dedicated. AE or two AEs, maybe a full team solely working JP Morgan, and if you're partnering on a one-to-one program with one of the specific AEs to pursue that one business unit, if you're just looking at the aggregate overall, contact engagement. Of the account, you're not gonna be able to get those insights where it's okay in this specific business unit. What does that look like for my actual buying group in terms of contact engagement? So you have overall account engagement as well, because there will be some pieces in this where you might not be able to get engagement metrics that roll up to an individual contact. Like anonymized website visits. when you de anonymize it, you might only be able to get the account. And so we're also gonna chat about priority contact engagement. But again, using metrics like looking at buying group engagement and still individual contact engagement is really important. So I just wanna pause here where it's almost, you know, looking at a individual contact is not bad. That's kind of where M qls were going when they hit that specific threshold. So contacts still very important. Buying groups also very important. Aggregating all of those contacts and looking at the engagement of the people that really, really matter. And then overall account engagement, priority contact, engagement. Kind of zooming in on the overall account engagement, this is also really important, because there are insights here that you might not be able to get and associate to a specific contact that would roll up into the buying group. So I, I think we kind of touched on this, where it's throughout the different sales stages. thanks so much for joining Peter. Catch up soon. but when you look at the different buying stages, overall account engagement, this is what you're really looking at, that aggregate lens before you have that active pipeline priority contact engagement. This is important and I really wanna spend some time here because pre-active pipeline or pre opportunity. We recommend creating a priority contact tag within your CRM so that you can actually have this housing stage for contacts that you as the marketing team. And then also the sales team believe are really important to, the potential opportunity, but not using a stage zero opportunity. So basically, you know, you have this, this housing stage where it's, these contacts are showing a lot of engagement. They map back. To the titles that historically we've seen as part of the buying group, they're within the business unit that we're pursuing. Let's go tag them as priority contacts. And then once a actual opportunity is created, taking those priority contacts and associating them to the relevant, opportunity. So this is, this is what it looks like. All put together where you have the overall all the contacts, overall account engagement. You have the priority contact engagement. These are the ones that are very important. When you have those opportunities that are generated, pulling mainly from the priority contacts. And sometimes you're gonna have a scenario where maybe there's an executive that is part of the buying group for multiple opportunities, and maybe they were tagged as a priority contact. So associating them to all of the relevant opportunities. And then as you progress throughout the sales cycle and you're uncovering more buying group members that maybe didn't make it into the priority contact engagement tag, then associating them to the opportunities as well. And we've heard this question before where it's is should marketing. Be responsible for identifying and tagging the buying group contacts, or should this solely fall on sales? And what we've seen work best is actually both, where marketing is helping to surface deeply engaged contacts. They're identifying contacts as well, using some of the historical data sales as well as they're going throughout their, prospecting or their initial, first few meetings and new contacts are being looped in. Making sure that they are associating them as priority contacts, in the actual systems. So this is a one revenue team initiative and should be something that both marketing, sales, and even customer success, if it's an expansion opportunity, or an expansion play within an account should be actively doing. Then the last thing, that I'll leave here is one of the most powerful things that, we see companies do. When I was a practitioner, this is what we would do. And from a, sales and marketing collaboration standpoint, really building a strong partnership, this was the best way in which we were able to do so where. We would go through and associate all of those buying group contacts, whether they, they were priority contacts, if we didn't have an open opportunity, or if we did have an open opportunity and had the buying group contacts associated to it. Going into the sales meetings when we were having our monthly or biweekly, weekly syncs. And looking at the engagement levels of the contacts who were associated to the priority contact list or associated to the open opportunities and looking at. Okay, these people are, low engaged or maybe someone was engaged, but the threshold for reengagement, which, we've typically had as 90 days where it's this person hasn't reengaged with our company in the past 90 days, so they're lost engagement. Maybe this is Susan, the CRO of, of this company that we have this open opportunity with who is really important to helping this deal close sales. Let's partner and see how we can reengage. Susan, and you know, almost looking at your buying group contact hit list and also looking at what they're engaging with so that you can double down. Maybe there are people who are deeply engaged, and looking at what are they continuously engaging with. And then the last piece here as well is throughout the actual sales cycle, we would see buying group engagement. Correlate with, the deal closing. So you would see, you know, 60% engaged when an opportunity was generated. And then once a deal went through legal and then ultimately closed, you would have 90, 95% of those buying group contacts engaged. and again, engaged being first party engagement. So having those direct interactions with our go to market teams, So that was really cool and very impactful. And then I want to take a, take a minute here, just to, just to pause for any questions, comments. Have you all operationalized this in some capacity as well? I know we have a, we have a few new people on. no, we're, we're pretty new, so that's a lot of great information. I'm just absorbing it and I'll probably have to replay this a few times, but that was, that was very insightful, so thank you. Well, thank you so much, Emily. I'm psyched to, to hear more about your program eight months, nine months from now, and how it's progressed. Amazing. Well, if we don't have any questions, any, any last ones before we jump? Dave, Dave is, hi there. Amit. Share. I'm new to this, I'm. So, it was a very insightful session for me and, all that you've shared, I know kind of deeply resonated with what I plan to do, in my current organization as well. And, I think the level of, Clarity that you were able to kind of, clearly share across, is very helpful. And, I I, I think this is the first time I'm interacting with you and I'm like, getting into a webinar with you. I hope to learn more from you as well, David. Hey, it's great to meet you. Natasha, thank you so much for joining. if you have any questions. On this too, definitely. Let me know if you're not a part of our Forge X community. definitely come join. I'm gonna, I'm gonna toss the, the link in the chat and then also. Ashley, I saw your question on the slides. We will have the replay up and running, probably by tomorrow afternoon on our four x research hub. And then also a quick teaser on this, we are building a, we're still working on the name, so if you have any suggestions or ideas. Definitely let me know. we're thinking either the Growth Academy, the Growth Hub, the Revenue Hub, not sure yet, but all of our four X IP research benchmark data. We are going to build a dedicated home for all of that, because there are a lot of slides and, and also a lot of information and benchmarks around this that we just didn't have time to share. and on other topics as well. So, Ashley, we've got you. It is coming soon. We are in the progress of building this, so very excited to share more, in the next few months. Hey Davis. hi there. so, my name is Mitro. I'm not new to four J, so I'm a certified demand based four j person. but this is the first time I'm interacting with you on a webinar. so I joined a bit late. so I missed a couple of, slide. so my first question would be, this, account engagement. So do you tend to mean that this account engagement as far your C RM stages are, kind of the old school, you know, LinkedIn, CTR, email, open Web, how do you define, various stages of account engagement as for your private contact versus, generic contacts is the first question. Second one is that, will you email us the, the recording and on? That will be great help. Great questions. I'm gonna answer your second one first. we will be sharing the recording out post, so do not worry about, losing any of this information or any of the, the details around the slides. And then your first question about the different stages. So let me, let me pull this up quickly. Because I think that this is really important, and these are a few slides we did. We partnered with Demandbase, earlier this year to host a certification around B2B MX. This was a slide that didn't quite make it in the actual presentation, but it kind of shows the different buying journey stages. All combined together. And when it comes to the actual account based buying journey stages, the way we recommend putting these together at four X is using unengaged, engaged, qualified. Active pipeline. and then closed one, your contact based. Again, these are just classic contact based journey stages in your CRM. This doesn't, and is different from contact engagement. And then you also have your classic opportunity based buying journey stages. But when it comes to the, actual. Where is that? When thinking about the account based buying journey stages and how an account shifts from unengaged to engaged to qualified, or if you're a six sense user, this would be a six qa. If you're a demand based user, this would be an MQA. If you've built this in-house personally, you could probably just call it qualified or however you want to define it. This being that readiness threshold, before it converts into active pipeline. Now, each of these different stages, specifically on the account based buying journey stage, these are influenced by the engagement of contacts and also the engagement of signals on the account level that you're able to pull. So. When we're thinking about, and I, and I think this is also important as well, to define signals because this is what goes into all of these different models. You have first party, you have second party, and you have third party. And there's a lot of confusion around this whole concept of signals as well. And so. We really want to standardize and have clear definitions behind each of these different types of signals because some are more important than others. So for example. Your first party signals. We call these go to market engagement touch points because this is where a contact has an explicit interaction with you. So it could span across marketing, sales, customer success. If you are just tracking, go to market engagement, touch points purely at a marketing level. You're missing out on all of the other interactions of which these contacts are engaging with you. So you, this is also where we encourage teams to start, start thinking about it as, again, that one revenue team versus marketing signal generation versus sales versus customer success, because that's, that's not conducive of a successful, program and partnership. So. Again, pulling these at the account level, the contact level, we have a few classifications and I think we have, we have a little bit of time on this call, so I think this, these are important as well. So when you are pulling and classifying, categorizing all of these different signals, there are three different level, layers or levels to this. So you have direct inquiries. This would be someone. explicitly says that they want to talk to you. So, filling out a contact sales form, requesting a product demo, interacting with a AI SDR, inquiring about product pricing through that Ai. SDR or a human active. Go to market engagement touchpoints. So this is not a direct inquiry, but it is still direct engagement. So this would be a form filled, downloading an ebook, maybe they went to a VIP executive dinner that you hosted, or anything that you're able to track, which is not them explicitly, explicitly saying that they want to speak with you, but they are engaging with you. And then you also have passive signals, which would be word of mouth, LinkedIn posts. This is kind of where that whole dark social concept comes into play. And so actually auditing all of the different types of signals that you're able to capture through your existing infrastructure and build out those signal models. This is what goes into that account based journey stage and also the contact engagement stages as well. So for example, you have the contact engagement signals, and this can be complex, it can be less complex. It really depends, on. Your organization, your go-to-market strategy, your infrastructure, what you actually have to be able to build it. But thinking about the actual contact engagement levels, so is a contact low engaged versus high engaged? And then thinking about the model of which all of the different signals that you're aggregating, what is the tipping point? For a contact to be high engaged versus low engaged. So this could be, a high engaged, they've consistently attended webinars. they've gone to your live in-person events. Maybe they have had a back and forth email engagement with your sales team. And then unengaged, meaning they've never interacted with your company directly. and then low engaged, medium engaged. These could be smaller engagement levels. Maybe they've just done one thing, maybe they subscribed to your newsletter, but that was it. and then also having that. Time period. Look back where it's okay, you know, how are we, how often are we going to refresh these contact engagement levels where it's maybe 90 days, 60 days? Where if a contact was high engaged but hasn't had another interaction with us in the past 90 days, they will transition into lost engagement. And the contact engagement levels will influence all of these, because again, the different signals. Will be connected to contacts and that engagement rolls up into the account level. You also have account specific engagement and even buying intent signals, like third party and second party, which will go into these, these different journey stages as well. And so I think this, this was a really long answer, to your question, but I hope that that was helpful. Absolutely. Bang on. Information in Sharp. Thank you. Thank you de thank you. And I'm just allowed to follow a small question from your rich experience. So de although we consume, I mean we operate on the six sense, own proprietary, third party intent and all. But I always operate and mostly I wanna, operate on first party engagement. From my experience. So how do you see to, you know, utilize, better second, third party largely and second party engagement scoring or engagement signals with your first party, CRM or CTP, whatever you call, is this, I mean, what is the current practice? Is the ABM r widely using third party very much, or, kind of old, if I may say so, which? By and large, depending on the first part. So what are some of the best practices and what are the usage among baby? If you could throw some light. So best, best practices when it comes to second and third party. and let me, let me share this as well just to show how we think about it. you have your first party go-to market engagement touch points. We classify the second party and third party as buying intent signals. And so these, these are a interesting and helpful indicator around potential buying intent. But best practice and where we're seeing companies, find the most success is using this as a potential indicator. But the first party, again, this is, this is the most important signal to track, measure, and implement. And so companies will surface these, like for example. in an ABM program, maybe you'll use second party, third party data when you're building out your target account list as a interesting, Insight, maybe you'll surface some accounts that might be surging in intent to sales, where it's, Hey, you know what's going on here? There's something happening. is this worthy of us actually putting more effort in pursuing this specific account? And then also another piece that we have in here too is this whole concept of triggers. So for example, maybe, there was a job change or a company had a funding announcement. we've seen other specific triggers, vary across industry as well. there was a, a. Company who actually wanted to build triggers for when specific, construction contracts were, surfaced. And so. They were actually pulling those manually in, are now, now starting to think about building custom AI tools and automation to be able to scrape that information. but all of these being those intent signals that can help inform the target account list, help inform sales, maybe your campaign when thinking about, oh, okay, we're seeing something surge here. You know, maybe there's an opportunity for us to do something. But I do really want to stress how it is just a, a signal of potential intent. And the first party that is, that is where companies, the successful and high performing companies, that's what they're really deeply focused on, and they've built their models or configured their tools to reflect that. Thank you. I appreciate Of course. Awesome. Any, any additional questions around this or anything in general too? We can, we can go completely off topic in the next few minutes. Awesome. Well, we will again. We will have this recording. Up and live in our research hub. The slides in the recording will be on there as well. next week we have a great expert guest speaker. again, we are running these on a weekly basis. and thank you all for joining. This was really fun and such a hot and pressing topic too. I mean, talk about buying groups, the signals. We've had some great questions on here too. and we will also be hosting this on our podcast if you're not a member of the Forge X Community. I definitely encourage coming and joining. It is free to join, bring your Teammates. and thank you all so much for joining. I, I hope that this was helpful and look forward to seeing you all next week on our latest revenue exchange. Sure, Davis. Thank you. Have a great week everybody.