RX 5 - How to Align Your Organization for ABM Success in the AI Era | Robert Norum, ABM & Demand Strategy Expert, B2B Marketing

In this week’s episode of the Revenue Xchange, host Davis sits down with Robert Norum, ABM & Demand Strategy Expert at B2B Marketing. Together, they unpack how to align your entire organization for ABM success in the AI era.

Key Takeaways:
1.) The Full Stack ABM Model: Structure your ABM program across three tiers (one-to-many, one-to-few, and one-to-one) so marketing, sales, and customer success operate from a unified target account framework.
2.) AI for Scale, Not Volume: Use AI to deepen research, personalize content at scale, and remix messaging while balancing quality and frequency rather than defaulting to content overload.
3.) Buying Groups Have Always Been ABM: Understanding and targeting the full buying group is fundamental to ABM, not a new evolution of it.

Closing Note: Robert provides a clear roadmap for building ABM foundations that have remained consistent for years while adapting to AI-enabled capabilities. For GTM leaders looking to scale ABM strategically, this episode outlines how to orchestrate cross-functional teams, leverage AI intelligently, and avoid common pitfalls like misaligned targeting and organizational silos.

Transcript

Audio Only - All Participants: 0:13

Well welcome everybody to another revenue exchange, our weekly live podcast hosted by Forge X. Very excited to have you all. It's been a crazy week. This week, I'm sure some of our listeners offline and maybe some who are just joining in live might have been at Demandbase's New York City Go Conference, which was a lot of fun. It was great to see you all. Now, today for this episode, we have a very special guest and someone who I'm sure you might have gone through one of his trainings or seen some of his content on LinkedIn. and we will be talking about how to align your organization for ABM success in the AI era. So a couple quick housekeeping before we really get into the conversation. First off, we have this in the Zoom meeting style. So it is, we do not want this to be like a traditional webinar where we're sharing a bunch of slides. We're actually gonna take the screen share off, and we want this to be as engaging of a conversation as possible. So we have a few big rock. Conversation topics and some questions that I wanna ask Robert, but we will prioritize any and all of your questions first, and they can go off of these big rock topics as well. So we will get into that. All on-demand recordings will be on our research hub at four x and the audio will be on the revenue exchange on Spotify, apple Podcasts, wherever you listen to your shows. So a couple of the, the big rock topic content pillars we're going to discuss first off. Building a strong ABM foundation. We have the person online actually who coined the term ABM. Hey Bev. but think really, really getting into the foundations around, okay, ABM was coined the, the terminology over 20 years ago, but there are still so many foundational elements that organizations are struggling to properly. Curate. So how to do this, how to unify sales, marketing, customer success, the other revenue teams and internal cross-functional teams as well. And then scaling ABM with ai, how to do this properly, how to avoid ai, lop AI debt, and really prioritize which tools, workflows, processes will actually lead to outcomes versus just more out. Put. So with that being said, that was a a, a lot and a long intro, Robert. I'm so excited to have you on today we have Robert NorAm, who is a leading ABM strategist, consultant, trainer, all the above. Robert, I'm going to pass this over your way, get off of the screen share so we can really go into the conversation piece and send it over to you for a brief introduction. Okay, well, great to meet, anybody on the call I haven't met. I have to confess that, I know Bev and Dote quite well, so maybe we can bring them into the conversation at some point. Davis, and great to meet you, Molly and, Maer, if I've got that, pronunciation correct as well. In terms of a little bit of background on me, I've worked in B2B marketing for longer than I should ever admit to. I normally cap it at about 30 years. So I don't sound like the old man in the sea. I've specialized in, in ABM for the last 14 years, and worked, with a whole raft of different agencies internationally, with global brands. and most recently, I've been running the ABM Essentials training course for B2B marketing. which is a UK based entity, but now with a global community, which is propolis, where I'm an, so-called ABM expert in demand strategy, consultant for them. So I, I consult for agencies and clients, and I work very closely with the B2B marketing community. and actually Bev and Dote are both part of that as well. So that's one of the reasons I know them. Well, it's an honor to have you on Robert, and again, any and all on this call, please feel free to either jump on live and interrupt with any of your questions or toss them in the chat. But first off, Robert, I'm really curious to hear your perspective on how ABM has modernized and how even the fundamentals are beginning or have evolved. Yeah, it's, it's a good challenge, Davis. I mean, I think, you know, I, I thinking about getting the foundations in place and really setting yourself up for, for success, I think an awful lot actually remains consistent. curiously, and that is. Organizations really need to work out what they mean by ABM. you know, first of all, are they gonna use that through their acronym or, or not? and secondly, how are they gonna frame that in the context of how ABM is gonna help, not just with marketing or, and not just even with marketing and sales, you know, but really as a business. Strategy or a go-to market strategy. So I think that's absolutely fundamental, and that's probably been the case for many years. I think it's just, got a lot more attention on it now. You know, if we go back five or 10 years, ABM was often seen, as an initiative within the business that sat alongside everything else. increasingly I think companies are seeing ABM as a primary go-to market strategy, and as a result of that, I think it's much more about aligning, all aspects of marketing, sales, business development, even customer success in a way that's really gonna resonate, you know, with the customer. and, and make sure that everybody is kind of aligned, and and playing the same tune, if that makes sense. It totally does. And one of the, one of the large questions we kept fielding over and over again over the past few days at the conference, was all around targeting, segmentation. How do I build my list properly? How do I think about I even identifying the segments or the micro segments that we should be pursuing not only from ABM but as a revenue team as a whole. What have you seen work. Really well, and especially as ABM is really becoming the primary go-to-market strategy. How are teams unifying and coming together around this strategy? Well, I, I think in terms of the way different organizations are handling it, I think it's perhaps a bit spotty and a bit erratic, but in terms of how I would recommend people think about it, I developed something a couple of years back called the full Stack ABM model. and for me that kind of has a logic to it, that makes it relatively straightforward for companies to think about their approach. And if you think about a, a virtual target. with, with a number of different tiers to it. If you start with the outer ring, that's the total adjustable market, and it's obviously critical that you understand what the, the market looks like to start making informed decisions. Now, there will be some marketing going on there from a brand level, pr, S-E-O-P-P-C, geo now, obviously, but that's really helping companies find you. so it's about driving inbound traffic where I think a. ABM kicks in at the first level is one to many obviously, which is typically saying, we don't want to just be doing proactive outbound marketing to anyone. We want to have really thought about that carefully. and we want to identify from our total, maybe there are 500, maybe there are a couple of hundred accounts that are gonna be really important to us. If you come into the next layer in, you have one to few obviously, and typically that's gonna be small groups of accounts sitting in clusters, very often vertical markets. And they're gonna be really important accounts, you know, where you're gonna invest, be investing quite a bit of time, effort, and budget. And then the sweet spot, sitting right in the middle obviously is one-to-one ABM. where you're gonna be doing that pretty selectively. So I, I think where people tie themselves up in knots is when they start with small ABM pilots. and that's sitting alongside business as usual, brand demand, gen, industry marketing, and there's all these different initiatives. what I've been trying to do with the full stack ABM model is to get people to think about this thing holistically, where all the teams are actually interrelated and working closely together. and that's just marketing, you know, then we've gotta start thinking about BDR teams, sales, customer success, even delivery teams. And we want to be able to identify, well, these are our top 20 accounts, these are our top 50, these are our top a hundred. in a way that's obviously not up for debate, that everybody can sign up to and start really thinking about what should our, our strategy and approach look like? You wanna see something really interesting? Check this out. So we had Christina Roka, who heads up America's marketing over at Riverbed Technology. So billion plus a RR technology organization. Yeah. And when you were describing the different layers within your full stack ABM model, my mind immediately went to this. This is what she shared on our, Quarterly research briefing. Is this your model? Is this visualization flat out from full stack? This is my model and, what's even spookier is my model is based around a hexagon rather than a round target. so the visual is almost, a lift and shift. I, I, I have worked with Riverbed in, in emea, and given them some coaching over the last few years. but it would've been nice perhaps if they'd, put a little credit in there as to where this came from. That's so funny. And, I really love the visual, so the hexagon and the way in which you've, you've built this and structured it completely makes sense. And a couple questions around this as well. How do you think about the number of target accounts or the number of named accounts that should be part of this, especially when thinking about it holistically, where you have your one to many and then your one-to-one and one to few maybe on the other side. how, and then also from the target market, how, how does all of this come together from a targeting perspective? Well, it's a great question, David, and it's obviously not a trivial question. And of course it, it rather depends on what your total adjustable market looks like. if I, if I sort of give you a real life example, the company I was working with recently, they reckon they had a total addressable market of 55,000 accounts. Which obviously a lot to be thinking of. but they had actually, identified an ICP group of 2000 accounts. So you could say, well, if we were being ambitious and, and we have a platform play that might be our one to many starting point. but interestingly, they were also able to identify around 200 accounts, that sat within their key verticals that they thought were. You know, cache opportunities that they should really be focusing on. Some of those are existing customers, and some of them, were new name, new accounts. And then if you come in from there, obviously if you're thinking about one-to-one, certainly in this pre we're gonna get onto Gen ai. I know at some point in a pre gen ai, AI world, you know, you might be doing 10, 15, 21 to one accounts in a year. and, and that rather depends on the size of the team and resources. So I think you need to make some intelligent decisions based around where your, your current customer set, comes from, you know, and, and look at your most profitable and valuable accounts and think, well, how do we protect and grow those? But also how do we find more that look like that? Which simplistically is your ICP. You also need to think about the size of your team. and of course. Real world things like budgets and resource. but I think the key thing is anything that sits in an ABM sphere, even from one to many inwards, needs to have the bandwidth from BDRs and SDRs and sales teams to be able to actually engage with these accounts when they start to show themselves. So, if you are running, programs into tens of thousands of accounts, obviously that's a challenge. I think, you know, the, the more focused you can be, the more likely your ABM program is gonna be effective. I just think, you know, there is some value in having those different tiers that give, give you an opportunity to approach things slightly differently and, and to throw another kind of, hopefully not a soundbite, but something useful in, you know, I talk about one to many ABM actually being the new Demand Gen. So it's not demand gen to everybody in the market that could buy from you. It's actually. Selecting upfront with the sales team, the sales organization with leadership and management. Well, these are the 500 accounts we've gotta, we've gotta engage, or the 200 accounts we've gotta engage now, let's proactively go after them. And it's not to say that that one to many program is then fixed. Of course, you could pull in another couple of hundred each quarter. But I think to have that real focus and to have the bandwidth as an organization to really be following through with the promise of marketing, BDRs, SDRs qualification, you know, opportunity nurture if you like, is all pretty critical. I love the fact that you, you're thinking about the capacity of not just the marketing team, but also the sales team and other cross-functional teams, especially as you ramp up the number of accounts you have to be able to have the support to actually drive meaningful engagement within them and effectively market and and sell within those accounts. And also. So you have your total addressable market and then revenue potential as well when you're thinking about, you know, okay, which accounts should go into our one-to-one program versus maybe stay within the one to many. and when thinking about. Sales and how they're prioritizing their accounts and maybe some form of strategic enterprise, mid-market self-serve or PLG, if they have that as a go to market motion. How is the way in which sales is thinking about prioritization? How does that coincide with the various different deployment models such as your one-to-one, one to few, one to many, and then maybe that. Target market or brand, so to speak. How are teams aligning across the portfolio of accounts and what are the conver, what do the conversations look like across both of those teams when they're going through these exercises? Yeah. Another, good question. Davis, I mean, I, I think, you know, if you're, if you're setting yourself up for an ABM strategy, and let's assume we're thinking about 2026 now, as, as a, a real world en environment, I think the more you can do to be having the right conversations with leadership and with sales, upfront, the better it's gonna be, you know. Typically, if you're thinking about enterprise sales, let's sort of put a a stall out there, then, you would probably expect most, you know, senior salespeople to perhaps have five to 20 accounts that they're, tasked with. You know, maybe it could be more. it's probably rarely going to be less. And they're gonna know which of those accounts they think, there's significant untapped opportunity. You know, either existing customers they want to grow and cross sell to, and protect. or potentially new accounts they want to break into. So I think getting them to think about, well, where is the sweet spot for you in the next 12 months? and of course, how can marketing support you with that? I think they need to understand that again, if we're gonna look at this from an account centric perspective, we can't, do one-to-one on every account you think of. We need to also understand, you know, where we can add the most value, from your perspective. So I think it's a, a lot of this is about having smart internal conversations where marketing and sales are working as peers, you know, collaborating together. and you know, there will be times obviously when, you, you know, you need some arbitration because you've got some pushy salespeople who might want a bunch of stuff they can't have. And in that context, I mean, I spend quite a lot of time building out, scorecards, where you'd put your candidates for one-to-one ABM or even one to few, ABM through that scorecard. And, once that's actually been, Assessed, then quite quickly, you see, okay, these are the top five of the top 10 accounts we really should be focusing on as a business. and even the salespeople kind of will go, Hmm, yeah, I agree this account's interesting, but it doesn't really merit a one-to-one a play right now. Let's drop it into a one to few program. So I think if you're having, those conversations with the sales team, one to one and one to few scoring the accounts and a real live conversation maybe with a bit of senior management arbitration in there, that's pretty clear for me. When you get into one to many. you are obviously looking more likely to be, in a sort of quasi demand gen piece where you're saying, okay, these are the top 200 accounts we don't work with right now, but we want to, or the top 500 accounts. So this will now be much more about, laying our brand out in front of them. I've started talking about a term account-based branding, which is if you like, branding on a kind of micro-targeted basis, but making sure you are covering off the entire buying group across all of those accounts. you know, so that they're on board when, when they do start to come into play. so for me, as I say, one to many gives you that, some breadth. and the scope to be, bringing companies in, in early in the sales process, nurturing them over time and deciding at what point they get upgraded. probably that's something that marketing would typically drive. But even there, you need to have had the conversations about, well, where are key verticals? You know, where are our key market segments? which accounts do we think we should be trying to get in front of? And, and that's how I think you sort of start to get the whole thing to work. The one thing I haven't mentioned, which I do think is also critical, is the whole motion of customer success because there is this temptation, I think, in a lot of ABM conversations to assume it's just about winning the business. And as I know Bev and Dote would, would, would say if, as when they come on, you know, so much ABM value is to be had working with existing customers that you want to, you know, to, to protect, to grow, to upsell, to cross-sell, and to move from being just another supplier, or provider into being a real trusted partner. And, and so that customer success piece, often is not built into a, a company's ABM strategy at all. It's seen as something different. and from my money, if you're gonna do ABM effectively, it's got to really work right through the customer lifecycle. Couldn't agree more, especially when thinking about one-to-one and one to few. Sometimes the best pilots are within your existing customers and pursuing additional business units, maybe cross sell, maybe an upsell. and Robert, on the topic of ai. Have you seen any organizations using ai, whether it's in existing tools or building some form of workflow or whatnot, to actually select the target accounts or help augment the target account selection process? I, I'm definitely hearing about it, but it's pretty early stages, so I don't really have any kind of great case studies where I can go, this company did this, but I think there's no question that companies are starting to use ai. To help them make informed decisions about which accounts to focus on. you know, if we pick up the AI piece, where I've seen this working really well is companies using AI to actually be able to scale their research and insight play. So, you know, if you think with one-to-one and one to few, you've gotta understand the accounts in, in great detail, right down to sort of stakeholders within them. in a one to few play, you've gotta understand the industries and the accounts. Up until Gen AI came into the frame. You know, I was working with an offshore team in India who did all my research for me, and, and, and worked extensively with, with different clients and agencies. that has definitely changed exponentially in the last 12 months, I think, where so much, research is now being driven by ai. and that of course, helps you to do a lot more research and therefore to scale it. So that, I think, is an absolute no brainer. the, the next piece over, if you like, on, on the sort of. communication journey is we need to create content, but I don't think it's about just plugging in a brief to AI and creating yet more content. I think, you know, you still need really well thought through human driven value propositions and messaging. but what you can do, I think, is to start to use AI, if you like, as a remix engine, where you take that core content and creative and you repurpose it, either for in, in individuals. Based around their roles, job titles, interests, et cetera. or if you're looking at a one to few play, you might have looked at the banking sector in North America. well now let's personalize that for each of our 10 or 15 accounts that we're targeting. So that's where I think AI has real value. It's not about just creating more and more and more content, it's actually getting more and more sophisticated in our targeting and personalization. And how are you seeing across the different deployment models as well? Are you seeing content being repurposed from maybe one to many if it's relevant for one-to-one or one-to-one being repurposed in a one to many campaign? Does content scale across deployment models or is it really. Has to be extremely custom for one-to-one, and we're just going to completely ringfence it and withhold it from any other account in a different deployment model. I think it can work in both directions. I think it's probably easiest that if you've done, the heavy lifting on, on one account, to then think about how you scale it. and I mean, I can talk specifically, you know, to try and give you a real example. one of the agencies on propolis, a company called Hut Three, were working with one of their clients, in the technology sector, and they decided that they would create a really bespoke program for Volvo. Motive manufacturer. and they created everything right through to a magazine, literally a magazine, full Volvo. of course, using AI to create quite a lot of that content or to personalize it, once they'd landed that, they then said, okay, that's manufacturers and all the heavy lifting had been done, if you like, in terms of understanding Volvo. So to, in, in that context, they be able to then. You know, clearly with some intelligence start to to look at how you could create new stories. So I think moving from one to one to one. So a few in that context is pretty straightforward coming the other direction, I think it's probably slightly harder because, you know, if you've got a relatively light touch going out to hundreds of companies, maybe even thousands of companies, how do you now personalize that in a way that's more relevant for a particular vertical or a particular account? But I think that the, the concept that you create a master bank of content that could be reused and repurposed at any time. Is definitely smart. You know, I mean, actually even before Gen ai, that was something a lot of companies were doing when they were building out a center of excellence, you know, and you'd go into the research folder and you'd see 50 pieces of research. Some of that stuff would be useful. You'd go and. Into a content folder and you'd find whole white papers or thought leadership pieces. Some of that would be useful. Make a piece of content, overlay it with the insight that we have on an account or even an individual, and personalize that content for them in a way that would be super relevant. When you were speaking on some of the building, the folders, the mass repository, the Templatization, the first note I took down was COE. Are you seeing a lot of organizations begin to think about establishing a center of excellence if they don't have one this year? Or how would you even think about. Going through that process for the first time, if your ABM program doesn't have one, and maybe you're just starting to expand your pilot into a a global team. Yeah, I mean, again, there are some very smart people on this call that might want to come in with their comments on COEs, but, for, for, for my money, you know, a COE can start relatively modestly, you know, you can say, okay, we are, we're doing some ABM in, in the UK or in Germany or in, in the states. now what, what do we do with that, that content? You know, we've done the research, we've created the messaging, we've created the content, we've gone live with it. How can we, first of all, reuse and repurpose that in our local market? But how can we start to create a center of excellence, which could be as simple as let's put everything, you know, in one place where people can easily find it. from there, one of the other things that I come across a lot is, is companies saying, okay, we are gonna go out live with a bunch of pilots. We're in emea. we're gonna have a pilot into some accounts in France and some accounts in Germany and some accounts in the UK and so on. And, and people aren't sitting there at the, at the beginning saying, well, what commonalities do these accounts have? And should we actually be creating a one to few program into automotive or finance or manufacturing? And then running one program where there are two accounts in, in the uk, three in Germany, two in France, and actually it's one program. So this idea of not reinventing the wheel. or not starting from a blank sheet of paper every time is really the whole ethos of, of a COE, you know, it's, find the smart people in the organization that perhaps have the most knowledge, first of all, perhaps at an ABM level. but even then the most knowledge at a, at an industry level. Or, or other things where they can add real value and, and, you know, look for your subject matter experts across the business of the way feels most appropriate. and, and by the way, I dunno if you wanna ask, do a question, Davis, but, she's, said, thanks Robert. I established CSCs ABM COE in 2013, as in 13 years ago. So she, she might have credentials on the COE. that, that, you know, are not necessarily mine. Dorthy, I can only imagine your thoughts on how you've seen COEs evolve from 2013, which is incredible. Yes. Please feel free to come on with, with any thoughts or questions for Robert Dorthy, we have to start with you. I saw you just came off mute. Well, yes, thank you and thanks Robert. I thought I joined in you. You often support Michael. I thought I'd hop on and support you where I can. So that's how Robert and I know each other. he was with a, with an agency at the time when I was setting up my COEA few years in, and that's, that's how far we go back. the thoughts, it's, it's an interesting question. I think COE is absolutely imperative, in my view, at least a way to, to gather centering the skills and, repository the best practices. but the reason maybe because. On the US side of the house, it's at a different pace or stage than is maybe in some more European, where European led ABM, I would call it the theory of strategic ABM, where you have this one-to-one where there's total sense in having rigor versus a lot of the, folks I see in the US are coming from a more demand gen driven, you know, go back to demand base, go back to to those early days. ABM for them was always about scale and about. A lot of accounts in the system, whereas over here, I'm, I'm based out of Germany and, there's this big manufacturing heritage for big stuff, and you always market into that differently. And so I think what I see now, what I love is that the two are kind of merging because that gives you the full stack that Robert was referring to earlier. but it, it. It highlights the need to centralize those processes because the more power you get with technology, the more sense it makes to really bring order to that. So I think there's an urgent need to, to actually, standardize and have those best practices anchored somewhere. And I'll shut up because this is Robert Show. No, thank you so much. Great to great, great to hear you. And almost see you. I can see a picture if nothing else. Yeah, it's, it's a bit dark here. Thank you. That sweat. No problem. And I wanna take a moment and pause here for any questions that anyone in the audience might have for Robert. And this can be on the topics we were chatting about or anything in general as well. Yeah. Or any issues that you are wrestling with at the moment in the ABM space that you think you could do with a, a little bit of a, a, an extra opinion on? Well, it looks like we have a shy group today, Davis, but maybe they'll, they'll warm up as we keep talking. Well, this is great because I have a million questions for you, Robert, so I'm just gonna selfishly keep firing from my list. Thank you. well, I would love to hear your perception on how AI is applied differently across the different deployment models in and of themselves. So, for example, as a, even, even taking a step back and thinking about ABM practitioners. We're really seeing this, not shift, but more, more just what the market is looking like in terms of you have these real strategic ABM, enterprise ABM practitioners who are deploying one-to-one or one to few, and they're hyper-focused on a really small subset. Of accounts, and if they're practicing enterprise ABM one-to-one, they probably have maybe two to eight accounts that they're covering at a time just given capacity, bandwidth, and resourcing for one to few, maybe, one to four clusters of 25 accounts or less in those clusters. And then. You have these ABM practitioners on one hand, and then we see the one-to-many ABM practitioner where maybe they have 500 target accounts, 1500 target accounts. They, their organization just transitioned from. The historical and classic demand generation running the Serious Decisions 2012 version of the Demand Waterfall, the MQL, for measurement and reporting. They're getting more account based and buying group centric in their measurement and reporting. And so, either demand gen or integrated campaigns, teams are now transitioning into one to many. How are you seeing these, what we call one to many? We, we, we reference them as the growth ABM practitioners versus the enterprise ABM practitioners deploying one-on one and one to few. Yeah. How are you seeing AI used differently across the deployment models and with these different practitioner types or roles? Yeah, that's a, a, a searching question there. I mean, I, I think if we think about one-to-one and one to few, we've touched on some of the things that you're doing already, you know, which is really in depth research into an account. If we are looking at one-to-one. looking at the buying group and probably profiling all 10, 15 people in that buying group, In that sense, starting to create, really bespoke value propositions and messaging that can be tailored. so you, you build your story out once for the account, but you start to tailor it by department or even by individual. and that's clearly being driven by, by generative ai. When you then start getting into the content, you create some great content, but how can you actually personalize that again? By department, by individual. a AI's gonna enable you to do that in, in a, in an interesting and efficient way. I think the same thing applies with one to few. You know, in the old days you might say, well, we're gonna, create our story for the, the, you know, I'll go back to the US banking sector and we'd go after our 10 or 15 accounts. Now we can afford to do those, account profiles and maybe even individual profiles. On all of the, all of those accounts and potentially another 10 people within them, because AI has enabled us to scale. And rather than creating our content and a perhaps a superficial personalization by account, you know, we stick their logo on the front page of the brochure. Maybe we change a few words in the copy. Now, using generative ai, we can obviously personalize that content in a, in a much more compelling way, both visually. and, and in copy. So I think, from a, a one to one on one to few perspective, we've sort of touched on it, but it's about. Increasing sophistication in terms of understanding of the account, the people, and how you communicate with them. I think on the backend, from a reporting perspective, I've started to see people really using generative ai, you know, to create very bespoke reports that they can play back to senior leadership teams that show exactly what's going on and how we're moving the dial. Even if, you know there isn't a revenue number in play, if you can start to show the engagement across all those multiple touch points. That can be quite helpful from, from a one to many play. I guess a lot of this is really being driven by the big players. You know, dote mentioned Demandbase. I, I'm hearing Six Sense talked about almost every day, you know, from different clients and agencies. And simplistically intent of course, has also been around for a while, but that is getting more and more sophisticated. So, you know, if you think about your. A thousand or even 1500 accounts, that's a huge number of accounts to be able to track if you can actually, put those through an intent platform and, and get, information obviously showing which accounts are starting to engage on particular topics with particular content. Not just with your own of course, but with, a whole raft of different third party content that I think gives you a filter that says, okay, we've got 1500 accounts in play. But using intent, we can see that 300 look more interesting this month than the other 12. So let's focus on those. And it comes back to the point that we can at least focus our resources and our teams and our BDR teams, et cetera, in the right place. because I think, you know, trying to target 1500 accounts simultaneously. It's pretty challenging. even there, of course, if you're talking about the 1500 accounts, then AI is gonna enable you to create a greater, sort of veneer of personalization than you being able to do so far. so from that perspective, I think it's personalization at scale. But the, the flip side of that is I just think we need to be a bit cautious that, AI doesn't equal just more and more content thrown at more and more people, because. That's certainly not ABM, you know, in any context it's just chucking stuff at the wall and hoping some of it sticks. we, we had a great conversation about this, in our certification workshop a couple days ago where there was a question about personalization and it was around does personalization equal more frequency of content? Should we just. Now that we have AI and these other tools, should we personalize pieces and just increase the volume in which we're doing it and throw that at the target accounts? Or should we focus on really, really crushing a couple pieces of deeply personalized content for these accounts and focus less on volume and more about just really nailing the quality. I'd love to hear your thoughts on, on that. Yeah, I mean, generally speaking, I think quality over quantity is, is the way to go. But quite interestingly, a a a, a US based client actually that I've been doing maybe I advisory work over the last year, and they have a, a relatively young, team and you know, I'm obviously trying to give them a perspective. From, from, you know, the gray hair point of view. And I introduced them, to an ex-colleague of mine who, ran an, an email marketing agency for many years very successfully and is now essentially an email marketing guru consultant, if you like, whatever. And he, it was quite intriguing, you know, they were saying, what about the frequency and, how often should we send emails and when should we send them? And, and he, he, he said, you know, quite obviously. If you send two emails, you're probably gonna have twice the chance of success of sending one. So generally speaking, it's about opportunities to see in the email world. And if you send more emails and they have more opportunities to see, the likelihood is you will get a a, a higher response rate. Now, he's not saying send 20 emails a day, so you clearly have to think about your brand, your positioning, the people you're talking to, and what cadence is acceptable. But I think actually his point was. People are much more tolerant of receiving things than you think they are. and of course, in, in email it's pretty binary. If they, if you, if you piss'em off, they opt out, right? So at that point, you've got the signal that you've, you've sent too much. so I, I would say you kind of need a balancing act. I wouldn't go if, if we are looking at a quarter, I wouldn't say let's just do two pieces of fantastically. You know, deep and, and influential content, I'd say you need a cadence and you need to bear in mind that just because you send somebody something doesn't mean to say they see it or they engage with it, or they have time to think about it. So in that sense, I think you do need to be consistent and in front of people. And, particularly if you're thinking about email, if people didn't open something, they haven't seen it. So let's find a way of getting them to open it. if you're, if you're producing high value content. you know, and if you're talking about, senior leadership, I'd say digital marketing is pretty optimistic these days. Finding different ways to get cut through. you know, I'm a great fan of physical direct mail where packages are being delivered to people, with real value in, in, in closed, you know, but I think you have to kind of look at your target audience. You have to test and learn. You know, there's no one answer. and I would say whilst quality is more important than quantity for its own sake, you definitely need a cadence that that means you're in front of people regular enough to make a difference. So don't go completely off of the frequency scale with ai. Just start churning out a, a crazy amount of content, but frequency is still. Important. It is. Yeah, it is. Because don't forget, you know, all your competitors are probably adopting some similar kind of approach. You know, if they're not doing ABM already, they probably will be. And if you send, you know, two amazing pieces of content, you know, in a quarter. And they send a dozen, you know, who's gonna have higher mind share. So I, I think it, you know, yes, of course quality, but definitely think about, well, we need to be in front of them in a, with a cadence that will at least keep us top of mind and make sure nobody else is stealing our, our lunch. It is a, that's a great point. And you also brought up the difference between an executive audience versus maybe a practitioner audience. And this whole concept of the buying group, which has been. Everywhere on my LinkedIn feed and a lot of different pieces of content are coming out, some research has been done. Forrester has been talking about buying groups for a while now as well. And I'd love your thoughts on this, especially given, I'm not sure if you've seen this, but, the term buying group marketing has been, been floating around for maybe a, a month and a half now, and so. How, how does buying group marketing differ from ABM? Is are buying groups a part of ABM? love, love your thoughts to help clarify that because we've been fielding a lot of questions around it, and I know some of our listeners would love to hear your perception on it. Well, it's a great, great one, Davis. And actually, it's actually something I feel really strongly about because I've also been reading about this buyer group marketing thing, and I've even seen somebody positioning it as the next iteration or generation of vm, which I find faintly ludicrous because if you think about what account-based marketing is. It's about understanding the account and communicating with all the key stakeholders in that account to engage them. And if that's not buyer group marketing, then what is it? So, I think buyer group marketing is relevant because if it, if it gets you thinking about the fact we are not targeting an individual or even a couple of individuals, you know, in most enterprise is the research says between 10 and 17 people are involved in any major purchase. So the buying group is critical, but I think, you know, any kind of ABM it's implicit that you are always targeting the buying group. and I've been saying for many years, you know, even persona based marketing. Is not really where you want to be with ABM. You know, if you're doing one-to-one on one to few ABM, you want to know the, the named individuals in the roles that you think are most important to you. So nothing wrong with buyer group marketing, but the idea it's something more sophisticated or, or new. Compared to ABM, I think is a complete misnomer. And I've even started to talk about the ABM ecosystem, actually at the ABM conference in a few weeks time in London. I'm gonna talk about the ABM, ABM as an operating system and, and for me, if you think about ABM as an operating system, then there are apps that sit within that. And I think BGM is an app. You know, it's something we need to do, but it is part of the ABM story. It's part of our positioning. And interestingly, your other question, which you proceeded that one with is this whole piece around, the, you know, senior leadership teams beyond perhaps the people that, that you normally sell to. And you've probably seen it. But LinkedIn and Bain brought out a piece of research last year where they were again, looking at the buying group. And talking about two types of buyer. The, the active, buyer if you like, and the passive buyer, and the active buyer are the people you are normally selling to. So imagine you're selling a, a cybersecurity solution. You're gonna be selling to the ciso, the CTO. You know, the CIO, their teams and, and the sales person is obviously gonna make a beeline for those people because they're the people that look like they have the money and the purchasing power. And they'll be specifying which brands and which products. That's actually only 50% of this buying group that Bain and LinkedIn talk about. The other 50% are the invisible buyers or the passive buyers. And they are people like the CEO, the CFO, the COO, the head of procurement. in certain instances, maybe the head of legal or, or the head of HR or whatever it might be. But they're basically people that. Are very unlikely to get passionate about a vendor. but they have the power to say no. so they're not really gonna be involved in specifying who, who should be on the shortlist, but they'll be the very first people to say no to a vendor they don't know or they don't recognize. And if anyone's old enough on the call to remember IBM as a player, you know that phrase of you, you never got fired for s selling IBM, or for buying IBMI, I should say, sorry. it's almost back to that syndrome. These people who are the passive buyers, they want to be trust, recognize, empathize with, they want to be. Familiar with the brand that they're being asked to, to spend money on, and the, the Bain and LinkedIn stuff actually says quite often a superior product or solution will lose out because the brand is not there. So again, back to this sort of the, the operating system and the apps. I think account-based branding is a really important thing, which is how do you position your organization? To all of the stakeholders and influencers in the accounts that you want to be doing business with. and, you know, some, if, if your workday or Ser ServiceNow or Salesforce, you can go and run Super Bowl ads, right? But, but most of us don't have those budgets. So how can we actually build our brand in a relevant way to the key stakeholders in the, in our ICP, in the accounts that matter? And again, I think that's one of the key plays that sits within the ABM ecosystem. Who owns buying groups? We, we've heard this question a few times where it's does marketing own buying groups, does sales, own buying groups, our customer success, is that team even involved in this process? Yeah, that's a, that's a good challenge. I mean, I think to some degree it would depend on whether they're a prospect or a customer. you know, if they're a customer, then you could say that customer success, maybe the people that should really understand who all the key stakeholders are within the accounts that they're looking after, if they're a prospect. I don't think customer success would get close to that. and I think generally speaking, sales wouldn't have engaged with that prospect. until quite some way down, you know, the, the engagement piece or the sales cycle. So I would say generally speaking, it's probably marketing's responsibility to understand the buying group. first of all, who are the personas and the roles? Secondly, what are their motivations? And as we start getting more specific. Into particular accounts. We can obviously do that at an account level. You know, we, we look at Citibank in the us we say these are the top 20, decision makers. These are their roles, these are their motivations. This is what's going on. We've, we've used crystal nose to go and do some psychographic profiling on each of them. you know, that's a marketing role I think. Sharing that information with BDRs and with the sales team is obviously critical, and then them being able to use that intelligently is also critical. If we were in a post customer environment, then probably you'd say that it would be somewhere between marketing and and, and customer success. And of course, even account managers or relationship managers would be people that should be able to contribute to that. And one thing too that is just so underutilized in a lot of ABM programs is the product marketing. Team, they usually, and some sometimes they might not have this, but when you're thinking about even targeting segmentation, your overall go-to-market strategy when it comes to product and industries, let alone personas, and who is most likely in these buy-in groups? The product marketing team usually has done some work behind this and we'll see ABM teams completely neglect having a conversation. With them or even looping them in at all. And one of the challenges with this is your product, your, your VP of product is probably either building the deck or even presenting to the executive teams and the board around what the go-to-market strategy is from a product perspective, from an industry perspective. And if your ABM programs. Aren't aligned and you just went off and completely built something that is different from the overarching businesses. Go to market strategy without completely threading the needle and connecting all of the dots. That can be such a miss. And then Robert, you also brought up. How buying groups has have always been a part of ABM. It's not a either or really. Can't stand the either or part because not only have they always been a part of ABM, but it's a part of the buying process in general. And I feel like ABM from a. Targeting or from a vendor perspective, historically leaned so heavy on purely an account focus. So how do we get X QAs or M QAs, these marketing qualified accounts to a specific level, pass them over to sales versus A-M-Q-L-A, just an individual contact who hits this score or some. Some threshold or some trigger that goes over to sales. How do we go from one individual contact to a full account? But it's always been missing that middle ground because you have the account, you'll have business units within that account. If it's large enough, like a Citi group, you'll have. Buying groups within those business units. And then it goes down to the contact levels. So there are so many different layers within this. Just passing an entire account over to the sales team can sometimes be, be really challenging and they'll look at it and be like, okay, this is great, but I don't necessarily know which business unit, these contacts or this account is relevant, the product. it, it's so nuanced. Yeah, well, there was a lot of stuff wrapped up in that Davis. I mean, I, I think, you make a good point about product, and the idea that you wouldn't be involving product in an, in an account centric strategy clearly makes no sense. in fact, one of the things that existing customers value most and, and potentially even potential customers is having a really clear understanding of your product roadmap. You know, what you've got, but also where you are going and with existing customers, even having the potential to shape that can be quite valuable. So, I totally agree. And, and the, the, the idea with the full stack ABM model, by the way, was actually, you know, quite often I was talking to people and saying, well, we don't have much resource in ABM. you know, we might have a couple of ABMers or, or we might have a, some people in marketing who have to run, run account-based marketing almost in their spare time. How do we do this? You know, we don't have the resource. And what I was saying was, look at the wider organization. think about that a outta tier. You, you've got people probably looking at brand. You've got people looking at pr. You've got people running, SEO and PPC campaigns. You've got industry marketing, you've got product marketing, you've got field marketing, you've got salespeople, you've got BDRs and SDRs. That's quite a big team, right? So it's not about, oh, there's only three of us, or there's only five of us. It's actually how can you orchestrate the rest of the organization to be playing, you know, in a consistent way, with these accounts and prospects that are part of our ABM program. So I definitely think part of the ABM. Journey, if you like, is to understand all components of the go-to-market strategy. And you know, even if you like the whole concept of breaking down silos and getting these teams to work together in an appropriate way into the most important accounts and prospects, that's gonna give you a much better chance of success and it's gonna align the organization, which I think is a huge win. and, and you know, you're gonna be putting your best foot forward. So that I think is absolutely critical. If I come back to your other question, which was really complex accounts. I mean, obviously part of this is about really understanding where these buying groups sit. prioritizing the accounts and, and trying to find your way into the accounts in an appropriate way, which is again, a collaboration I think between, okay, this is what marketing are doing to get this kind of engagement. We're bringing people into, you know, webinars, round tables, discussions, conversations with BDR teams. It, it needs to be dynamic and you need to be, as a marketeer, you need to be, listening and, and, and responding to the information you get back from the field so that you can find the appropriate entry point into an organization. And if there are five different places in that organization that you could land, then make sure you've got all five buying groups. In your program and covered off, you know, so it is definitely not simple, or easy, but I think it is doable if people have the roadmap and, and the, and the plan. Have you found any vendors or research intelligence firms that you've partnered with or have seen their output around helping to uncover potential buying group contacts in a net new account? that's a good question. I'm not sure I could point to somebody Snappily and say there's a solution for you. I mean, I think if you go to any of the, sort of the information vendors if you like, I mean, you know, the Zoom infos, the Dun and Bradstreets, my, my mind glows blank on, on a whole raft of others. But I mean, I think all of them have a perspective on sourcing data in the right way. then the question is, you know, what kind of brief can you give them and what are they gonna provide back to you? And what are you gonna do with that information to enrich it over time? So I wouldn't want to set myself up as a data guru, because I'm absolutely not, you know, and, and again, I'll look at the people on the call, see if anybody wants to come in with, any, any observations on that front, any observations or questions in general for Robert? I know we have his genius for about one more minute. so I wanna, I wanna open it up for any last questions. Thank so much for joining, Molly. Thank you. Thanks for joining. Thank you. Nice to meet you, and I hope it was useful. Yes, it was fantastic. Thank you. Excellent. Good stuff. Bye. Well. I think people are dropping, very quickly now, Davis, so maybe we're, we're out of time. I think we definitely are. And Robert, thank you so much for joining. This was a great conversation and I know for our listeners on the call and for the podcast or on demand recording, where is the best place for them to get in touch with you for any questions they might have. Probably the most direct place Davis would be LinkedIn. there's obviously information on me there as well. but yeah, hit me up on LinkedIn and then obviously happy to give you my email address and mobile and all that good stuff in due course. Amazing. We'll go follow Robert. Ask him any questions you might have around these concepts or anything. In general, if you're going to be at the ABM conference, you have to make sure that you, go to his session. But not only that. Beat him in person as well. I wish we were going, we won't be there from the Forge X side this year. But thank you all for joining live and for our on demand and podcast listeners for tuning in. We will be back again next week with another episode of the Revenue Exchange. And Robert, thank you again for joining. My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Davis. great conversation and I hope people find it useful. Well, have a awesome rest of the week everyone, and we'll catch you next week.