RX 7 - Account vs Contact-level Intent for ABM | Anna Tsymbalist, Head of ABM, Influ2

In this week’s episode of the Revenue Xchange, Davis is joined by Anna Tsymbalist, Head of ABM at Influ2. They explore how contact-level intent is impacting ABM strategies and why timing matters more than personalization.

Key Takeaways:
1) Contact-Level Intent Signal Importance: Contact-level signals capture search behavior, third-party content consumption, and social activity for individual buying group members, even zero-click AI searches, enabling SDRs to reach out at the right moment.
2) Timing Beats Personalization: Anna’s experiments showed that relevancy through timing outperforms heavy personalization. Only 5% of your audience is in-market at any given time, making intent signals more valuable than elaborate persona-based customization.
3) Align Sales and Marketing on Contacts, Not Just Accounts: ABM programs work when marketing targets the same buying group contacts that SDRs are prospecting. Real-time engagement notifications via Slack and Salesforce ensure coordinated outreach.

Closing Note:
Anna shares practical insights on building a scalable ABM program with limited resources, moving from engagement cycles to continuous nurture, and leveraging contact-level intent signals. For GTM leaders managing tight budgets and focused ICPs, this episode offers guidance on structuring programs that actually drive revenue.

Transcript

Audio Only - All Participants: 0:14

There we go. We're live. What's up Anna? Oh my God. It's going good. It's going good. thank you for having me here. This is going to be really, really fun. Welcome everyone. We have another revenue exchange, our live podcast, and today this is a topic in a a and I. We were on a webinar a few weeks back when Infl two initially launched their contact level in 10. Solutions. This is not sponsored by Infl two, by the way. Just throwing that right off the bat. but it is such a intriguing, not only topic, but also product type that we wanted to learn more about, and I'm sure we'll have some questions from those on live as well. So quick housekeeping before we get started. feel free to interrupt with your questions live, toss them in the chat. We want this to be as interactive as possible. Anna and I will answer any and all. We have an hour today, so we will just be riffing for the entire time. The on demand recording. Any slides or visuals that we share today, you'll be able to find on our four x research hub. We will get that up and running within 24 hours post event. And then our podcast, if you're going on any long drives, you have a walk, maybe your, I don't know, cooking, and you want to catch. Some piece of the audio version that is on the revenue exchange by four x on Spotify, apple Podcasts. Wherever you'll, you are listening to your different audio podcasts, so. Without introduction needed, we have the incredible Anna Symbolist on, she's the head of ABM over at Infl two. Anna, I'm going to pass it over your way for a proper introduction, and then we can kick this off because I have a full notebook of about three pages of questions and, we, we need to get them answered. Okay. Okay. Okay. a quick intro about me. I've been in B2B marketing for around like six years now. I actually started with a media company. I don't know if you guys know, like a quick, quick backstory, character development. I was working for a company that's similar to nine gag where we had to, come up with viral content. So it's basically creating scripts for videos and YouTube for viral content, like 10 weird rules that, that hairdressers need to follow when they work at a salon. Like weird stuff like that. And we got millions of views. So I came from, like, I start, that's where I started, and then I gradually moved towards B2B because like, it just happened naturally. And at my previous company, that's where we started implementing ABM. And the reason why we started implementing ABM is because we had a very aggressive revenue goal and, we had to learn on the spot. I, I read a lot of courses. I got a lot of courses from Demand Base from Six Sense at that point. Six Sense was huge. I think their like book was the first thing that I read. and then three years ago I joined in flu two. in Flu two is a, it's hard to define infl two at this point. It's almost an ABM platform, but not yet, necessarily. at Infl two, I'm responsible for driving, basically the majority of our pipeline, which comes from outbound motions specifically. So whenever I talk ABM, that's outbound. All the way. we work with a very specific ICP, which means I only have around like 3000, 200, 3,500 accounts that I've been working with for the past three years. And they, like, the list keeps shrinking because they keep converting and like I have to do a flip every time, to keep them engaged and. you know, make sure we hit our goals. So I'm responsible for the entirety of the ABM, plays at FL two. I'm really happy to share everything I do for pipeline gen, pipeline progression. I also work with customer success, supporting them. And, yeah, that's, that, that's, that's my intro. Incredible intro. I'm like, we were on it to have you one today, Anna. And so I really wanna, I want, I wanna start this as well by setting the stage and the frame of what contact level intent actually is. And. What it looks like in the Influ two platform if you're an Infl two customer, or maybe if, if you are evaluating, I don't know, another platform or another vendor as well, like what actually is contact level intent. And then another thing behind this too is there is so much. So much buzz in the market around buying groups. And when thinking about ABM in general, like you mentioned, you have 3000 accounts that you're covering. The way that we're starting to really think about this at four Jackson speak on it is that is your go to market account portfolio. And not only should the ABM team be focused on that 3000 accounts, but how do you actually unify. Sales and customer success around the same unified go-to-market account portfolio where these accounts are, like the stocks you're investing in and the way in which you balance your resourcing, like your budgeting, your tactics, your capacity, your skillset, and your prioritization of the accounts falls on this go to market account portfolio. So for example, the highest revenue potential accounts, those are your. Typically, if you have the high enough average contract value, that would be, for example, one-to-one ABM coverage, where the sales team is usually operating on strategic accounts and so on and so forth. So like sales, strategic enterprise majors, mid-market, PLG, or self-serve. And then from the marketing side, you have. You know the different levels, which would be one-to-one, ABM, one to few, one to many, or growth ABM, as we call it, a four x, where you actually have a operating model to scale an account based strategy using tiers. And those tiers are where you're allocating and prioritizing the accounts. And so even taking a step back and looking at this holistically when you have. Your go-to-market account, portfolio of accounts within the accounts. You might have subsidiaries, you might have different business units. Of which those business units can have different and distinct buying groups based off of product that you're trying to sell. even when looking across the portfolio of accounts, different segments, and different products as well might have different and distinct buying groups. And then the last level gets us to the specific. Person, so that contact level. And when thinking about signals, you have your first party signals, second party signals, third party signals. So Anna, I'm, I'm really curious, after that very, very long monologue, when thinking about contact level intent, where does that fall within all of this and how do you think about that versus a first party signal? You asked a very. A very long question. Okay. I'll need to start. Let's go, let's go back a little bit back to the segmentation. So I give you more context about how my program is built and like what is, like what I'm working with. So, basically. my setup is a lot simpler than the theory that you explained, and, it makes my life a lot easier because, I can tell you, I can tell you how I, like how we started, how I was thinking, what results we got, and then, what I'm trying to build now, because I'm actually in the process of. Wiping out the entire program that I had in the last two years and building a new one. And that's actually connected to the fact that we now have the contact level and 10 signals. So. When I started at Influ two, I had, I had a limited budget and I also had to work with SDRs. Like I needed to find a way on how do we align with the SDRs and how do we align with sales so that everything that ABM does then translated into pipeline because unless the SDRs grab the opportunity there. No one's submitting form fills right now. No one's requesting a demo unless they're coming in through an inbound. And when you're working with an outbound audience, that's, you know, you need sales, like you have to bookmark them. So for me, figuring out a way to, make sure that we are synchronized was basically aligning on the audience. So that's where contact level comes into play for the first time. So basically for every account. That we had, we have identified the buying group using the titles, using analysis from. Our, you know, our previous deals, like we know who's the buying group, who's the buying group. So we have all of that information in Salesforce, by name, like SDRs are not collecting people for us. We research that as marketing, and we know that SDRs and sales are like, yes, those are the people that we want to convert. And then I, I thought there is ad fatigue. I was, I was so scared of ad fatigue of all that research. I was like, okay, I'm gonna divide them into batches. And keep in mind that I work only with one industry at this point for outbound. So I really don't need to divide them by industries. I don't need to divide them by product types because they only have one product, which makes, thank God makes my life much easier. But I divided them by personas. I was like, they work for the same companies, but for different companies, different size buckets, but I don't have capacity. I didn't have capacity at that point to change my content, change the lending pages, make, you know, develop messaging. We didn't have a product marketer. We develop messaging for enterprise account versus, mid-market versus growth versus versus SMB, which is. You know, you should do it. But I just didn't have capacity to do it. So my approach was I divided them by personas and I was telling to like marketing leadership one message. And when they were reading the lending page, they knew that I'm talking to a marketing leader because I was talking to them, I was talking about their pain points. We did a very deep, persona exercise and like we reiterated it many times, so I divided them by personas and into batches. And those batches just meant that the accounts and the targets in those accounts are going into targeting. from the marketing standpoint, I'm inviting them to webinars. I'm like, you know, I'm engaging them through every channel that I have. Specifically, if you guys don't know when Flu two lets you target people on a contact level, so you show out to a specific person and then you get report on impressions and clicks and visits, and so I would target them while the SDRs were actively reacting to their clicks and were also prospecting them cold. I would pull the audience through that batch for three months, and then I was like, oh, add fatigue, let them rest. And I let them rest. And then we do another batch. And it was just, you know, just doing this all the time to the audience. And then my goals grew. I needed to find more revenue while I didn't have more audience to work with. So I was like, what if there's no ad fatigue? What if there isn't it? What if there is no such thing? And what I did is I created a nurture program where I was showing fewer ads to people that were not actively prospected by the SDRs. So I would basically show them, oh, here's a case study. Oh, here is a press release. Oh, here is some podcasts that we recorded. So just to be. In, in their, in their space basically. And SDRs would only reach out if they've seen like enough engagement. And it was really based on what the SDRs thought. But usually some clicks would activate their, depended on how much quota they've generated. Usually the worse they're doing, the more they're sending. So, basically, and that got incredible results and that got me thinking, hey, I guess it's the timing. I guess it's just being in front of them at the right time. That's what's important because, you know, I could be showing them the best ads in the world. I could be sending them the best emails. But if they just hired like a new CMO who's changing everything? No, no. VP is gonna be. Going, evaluating a product or you know, if they just got acquired, if like, if they're focusing on expansion and not what I'm offering, like it just, it's just not the right time. Again, I think we all live by the rule that only 5% of our audience is in market at the time we're prospecting them. It just helped me stay top of mind and, that's how I continued. I then built ad campaigns for my open opportunities and I could even like show you some examples if you guys are interested after, after you unmute and we move on from, and we won't move on to the questions. So, So that's a long answer to your long question that like everything starts, like it's not that the contexts are now in the center. Everything started with contexts for me because I wouldn't advertise, I wouldn't invite, I wouldn't engage anyone outside of the buying group, which is super helpful budget-wise when you are trying to convert an enterprise and, where contact level. comes into play is specifically when you work with sales because sales need names and sales need talking points. They don't know what to say. They're gonna go to the LinkedIn page and say, Hey, you went to this university. Would you like to sign a deal for 60 K? Like, they don't know what the person is interested, unless they're a very good salesperson and. I know we're all marketers here. Have you met a lot of, I'm gonna get cancer. Cancer. But like, it's hard to come by a good professional, right? Like, and it's a lot of marketing work to do the persona exercise, to know who you're talking to, to, you know, know their pain points, know everything. Especially if you're selling, okay, marketing is not that hard, but if you're selling to engineers and stuff, how can you have a decent conversations with them? Conversation with them. Being a salesperson is very hard. Who do you call? When do you call? What do you tell? Like it's hard, and that's where my program. Gives them support so they know what ads they're clicking on. So they're like, oh, you're interested, like a very easy example. Oh, you're interested in ads or an intent. And they already know that because they know the click. So they know which value prop to start with. And now that we've implemented. Intent. I'm rebuilding my entire program to be continuously targeting and nurturing the accounts in, the contacts. And then SDR is proactively working with intent signals. So this is gonna sound, sorry. When you have outbound motion and prospecting is largely by your SDRs, how do you capture CXO and VP's, kind of senior buying groups? Usually they have low digital. they actually, yeah, good question. Usually they have low digital engagement and SDRs, feedback only intelligence. You have our SDRs feedback only intelligence you have. So basically for VPs and, lar, higher titles. we target them and I would even target them with a message show this ad to your team. They literally send their team on a disco call. They don't come themselves unless someone has evaluated it previously. But, I know it could be annoying when SDRs are like mindlessly prospecting higher titles because they can rarely be. they can really be relevant, to them, unfortunately. so we are like, we're also like looking into this issue that we shouldn't, like, you shouldn't be encouraging SDRs to bombard csuite. C-suite. But, what we are seeing a lot is that even when we target a CEO of the company, if they're intrigued by the technology, if they're intrigued by the offer, they would send the ad, they would send the offer to someone who's responsible if they have the pain point. But, called prospecting doesn't really work like they've, they are overflown with, with all sorts of messages. Does that answer the question? Yes. Thank you. And just to, just, if I may, just a follow up question. so, so you said you usually don't, ask your, to always contact the C-Suites. So how do you, differentiate between when to contact at what time c which needs to be touched versus the. CX or minus one, minus two. So what are the usual practice that you do when you set up your, buying group? So how, what kind of, audiences does it consist? if you could throw some line. Yeah, I think, I think, I think I heard you correctly. So I divide my audience by persona, which means I control the amount of, you know, content that they're being exposed to. from our company and the type of content that we're showing. So it's just the type of content that they would be interested in, you know, a partnership, a serious raising, you know. Anything that a CEO would be interested in results. Sometimes they like case studies, but, we would only reach out if they, if we've seen engagement, like enough engagement from them. But usually they stay in Cognito and they just ask the team to request a demo. And very often we'd have like a click from the CEO who read the landing page, and then in a day we'll have a VP or a director coming and asking for a demo. So it's just communicating the content that you're sending them. It's communicating them a value proposition that's on their level. Basically. That's what what they care about. Because to a director, you're gonna be giving some really other. stats from, the tech, you'll be more focused on technology. While with the VPs and C level, you're more focused on ideas and value what they have as a result. Okay, and Anna, one thing that you mentioned is SA marketing from your. Ad spend and your resources. You are only pursuing the contacts and the accounts that the SDRs or that sales are as well, and you're using. Engagement as well as the contact level intent could, could you walk us through or define this contact level intent? What is it, where does it come from, and how does that play with the engagement insights that you're gathering as well? Yep. So I, we discussed the engagement insights that's at clicks and visits. the intent that we introduced, October 1st. Yeah. it consists of different types of intent. The first one is. Search intent. So we are able to capture, keywords, that like the, the searches that people are searching for, selected contact. So it's basically, it's almost like the ti, the ABM intent that you know, but on the contact level. It's on the contact level, not in a discovery sort of way, but for specific contacts that you select. So just like you need to give and flow to the names and companies of the people that you want to target, you also need to give the names and the companies of the people that you wanna track intent from. So we're not collecting in front intent from the entirety of the internet. We are focusing on the specific people that you're after, basically. And that's, I don't know how to talk about the technical part of it. I, I'm not the expert, but how, what we get as a result is you get search intent on the contact level, even with a zero click. So if they read the AI. answer and don't go to any websites for after the search. We can also, capture that and you just need to, you know, give the person that you're interested in. Then, you have the third party content consumption, intent. Actually, let me, I have the, I have the intent page here. Because we just launched it. yeah. So that's researching and it's gonna be giving to you where they are searching for it, what are they searching, what are they reading? and AI is going to basically give you like a quick summary of what they're interested in. So this is something that you're ae is gonna get, Hey, this specific target that you're after is gonna be. He is researching this, search intent without relying on a click, and then social chatter. So basically scanning their social media for the keywords and the topics that you're interested in. That's, the best. Like that's, I think that's best used for SDRs rather than targeting And then, yeah, and then intent that you generate with ads when you, track that they click on ads. Okay, so that's really interesting. So almost if you have, let's say you categorized it into, these are our priority contacts, or when you have it officially, or at least a better understanding as to who actually makes up the buying group. Then you tag those in infl two, and then you're capturing all of these additional contact level. Intent insights. And this leads into a great question from Lisa, which was, how do you ensure that your SDRs receive those clicks slash intent signals in a timely manner? there are a lot of ways that you can do it. It really depends. Like you need to know what sort of infrastructure your sales and SDRs are using. So you, we have a, like, we deliver it through. Three or four channels at this point, just to make sure they get it. They can get it inside of the product and I can show you what it looks like. They can get it at Do a dedicated channel in Slack. Through AZA peer, integration. So basically, you define the, information that needs to be given to the person. like what's the click, the content, everything, however, however you wanna present it. you can send it in Salesforce or HubSpot, or you can send it as an email or an email digest as well. Sumitra, right. you asked, to let you know some tools to capture AI search level signals. I don't know any other tool that can do it at this point. I know some, tools that can help you with the social listening signals. There are. There a bunch. There's a bunch of those. There is no other tool that can get you search intent and third party consumption intent on a contact level specifically. I haven't seen any other either, and I'm like, imagine, I agree. There isn't. Yeah. I'm like, well, imagine we have a technical, someone who could really get in the weeds behind it from the infl two side, but then also all of your competitors would. Deeply understand how you're doing it. but oh, Nikki, it was great to see you. No worries at all. have a good day. And Anna. Okay, another, another question, and this is something that you mentioned as well, when it comes to personalizing the content and also capacity, because when we, or at least. When, when I, or, or when we field questions about personalization. We had one last week in, in a workshop. We were running in partnership with the Demandbase, and the question was from a capacity standpoint, I don't necessarily have. Enough bandwidth, or my team doesn't have the bandwidth either to deeply personalize every single asset for our campaigns. How much is enough and how should we think about personalization with limited resources? Good question. that's actually a question that we've discussed at a clay club. on Tuesday. I hosted a clay club the other night. yes. So personalization, there are different types of personalization there. There's personal, where you go and research what the person does, who they are. as we like to say, as a human, what is you up to as a human? And that's how you grab their attention. And then there's also persona company personalization, which I think is the main one that we need to focus on. And it also has to do with timing. A personal example. So we just hired a brilliant SDR leader and, but they took some time. That took some time. It took us some time to find Katie and while she was out and we were actively hiring, I've had a lot of SDR agencies prospect me saying, Hey, we can ramp up your SDR department. And that was a huge pain point for me because if you ever listen to my podcast, if you ever listen to anything I say, I'm like, I'm outbound focused. My quota is outbound. Like I can't live without SDRs. So I read every single email they sent to me and I was, you know, gasping for them because it was a pain point. So that's how signals work basically. So signals help you identify a good moment. When there is a pain point, when there is a need, and when there is a need, you don't need to catch their intention and say, oh, I read your, I read your book, or I really like the movie that you reviewed a few years ago. You don't need to do that because they already need that information. They already need that solution. So the timing and that intent, that's why everyone's, you know, everyone's after intent because that gives you. That gives you this really good entry point of being relevant to them in the moment. And I think relevancy these days, it changes really quickly. You know, we hired Katie, I didn't know about it, and immediately I don't have a need for this. That's it. That we, there was a three months window, I think, where you could have persuaded me to, to, to, to partner with an SDR agency. Because you can partner with them for like a month or two, but once we hired her immediately, there's no need. Whatever you send me, whatever you tell me, it doesn't matter because I don't need this. Right. So unless you're selling something that everyone needs, which is not probably the case, you need to, you need to make sure that the timing is right and that's where the signals come in. Lisa, you, asked a question, how many target accounts do you work at any given time? The buying group research is very labor intensive. I'm trying to start up a growth ABM motion, but I have 800 plus accounts. It is a very intensive labor motion to research the accounts, also to revalidate them. Because, you know, 30% of the buying group changes regularly because people change jobs. And making sure that you're targeting the right people is very important because, you know, you're doing all that work, all that personalization, just to send it the wrong way. So it in flu too. I, I actually have the luxury of a research team. I know that a lot of people are using, different vendors like Sprouts, ai, which I wasn't like, I didn't like specifically. I do like clay. So if you have, and it's also Clay right now is very easy to use, for like. For credits, it's credits based, pricing. You could research, specific people and parse them, but I personally trust Sales Navigator the most. Yeah, a research team I like, I have a luxurious setup at Influencer. We're an advertise like marketing company, so marketing is bigger than development team. I think at this point. Yeah, so in my, my buying group varies between three to like hundreds of people, depending on the account size. So, you know, if it's an SMB that's 200 employees, they usually have like three to four marketers, honestly. And then if it's, you know, HBS or sorry, HSBC or HP or Intel. Imagine how many departments they have, and it's also opens up the question of how do we store them in Salesforce? Should they be one account with entities? Should those be different accounts? Like how does it work? So that's also something we are trying to figure out right now. It's one account. Yeah. But, I would suggest, working in batches. So the way we do it also in flu two, literally we have our own product audience scope that we release that helps you clean up audience and keep it updated, like similar to Clay. so we revalidate them in batches. You could do that manually, you could do that through a vendor. but they definitely need like a refresh. Every month at least, we go through a batch every week, like smaller batches, and we just recycle them all the time. And Anna, on the, on the buying group side, are you tagging. Those members in some capacity in your sales force, or are you able to get granular and really zoom in to those buying group contacts, even let's say, both scenarios, pre opportunity, how you narrow in and say, okay, we believe that these people are most likely part of the buying group. Let's target this specific subset, and then as the opportunity opens. And you'll most likely have more clarity around who actually makes up the buying group. How are you, how are you looking at that from a measurement and reporting and an insights standpoint? Yep. So, first of all, we always have the persona type. We also have contacts that are associated with an opportunity. So basically researching an account starts with this, you know, the buying group that we think is the buying group. But once we, we, for that buying group on a contact level in Salesforce, we track, how many engagement cycles they've been through when we were working through engagement cycles. So that would help me figure out who's. You know, who knows more about Infu two, who knows less basically. And, you know, we, regularly can run reports, by just defining threshold of engagement level that we, capture in Salesforce, which would include infu two clicks, webinar registrations, attendance, live events, touches that wherever we have a scanner. so. That was the first part of the answer. I remember there was, there needs to be a second one. Oh. And then after we research, after we have an opportunity, the sales person comes back with insights saying we need to target and we need to focus on these specific people. They are the decision makers. This could be potentially a blocker. And, we update the targeting list and the list in Salesforce to make sure. That we cover them as well. H how do you define engagement? I know you mentioned the different levels. How, how do you look at those levels? Can a contact become, is there a threshold where it's like, you know, within the past 90 days, if they've interacted with us in a first party way or directly, that's the only way it's engaged and then they can become lost, engaged? Or how do you look at the different levels? I don't, actually I've tried doing that honestly. I've tried doing a scoring model. I've tried running specifically, like warmer, you know, more pushy campaigns to people who have been, who have visited the lending page twice in the past 30 days. You know, and I've experimented with different engagement levels that we track webinar registrants, like different, different engagement. It's the timing, like for like, it never worked for me. I never seen great results coming out of it. It was just, it's the same, you know, it's not worse. And what works best is timing and following up on that intent immediately, as soon as we can. Because people don't remember what happened yesterday. They don't remember what happened 30 days ago. Unless you made like a genius playbook or a white paper, they won't remember. They read it. Like I talk to customers regularly. We distribute content to them. A piece of content that I wrote, which is presented to them by CSMs on their meetings. They like, they got a newsletter. 1 billion times with this piece of content. I come to the call and they're like, could you walk us through? We've never seen it. They don't remember it. And it's fair. Like, I don't remember. Like I watched TikTok. I don't remember the last three tiktoks I've seen. I have no idea, but I liked them at the time. So, I don't, I just don't do scoring anymore. Actually scoring also once played me dirty at my previous job. I could tell a little bit about that. the MQL enemy, we love a good MQL and yeah. I guess the dashboard, how are you surfacing the engagement insights to sales? What is your dashboard? Do they go into a dashboard? Does it live in Salesforce in some type of, you know, smaller view or, or how do you have that built? so for them to act on it, they get notif, like instant notifications in their slack. they also have a list of engagement engaged contacts in Salesforce and there the SDR leader. We have reports that show how many unique engagements each SDR has for, you know, for any given moment. So I know that this is yas being empowered. His audience is being, is, is engaging while the other one is not in such a good spot from a marketing support perspective. And, I, they will say, I will be able, I, I'm able to see, how many account, like how many unique accounts and how many unique contacts are engaged. And from, from my standpoint, I'm also, when I'm looking at my reports, I can see every, like, which. Which segment is the most engaged? Basically, how many enterprise accounts have I engaged? How many growth accounts have I engaged? Then I'm looking at, what are the titles? What is this seniority? I can cross reference that information so I know because I'm pushing almost the same content to every segment right now. I under like, this is my way of analyzing. Which segment is the most engaged? Which one? You know, how is it working? Who likes it? And because I'm trying to, you know, go bigger, so I kind of neglect and deprioritize the SMB accounts, which don't like sometimes the content that enterprises do, which is fine because that's, I, I can do that at this point. And also, yeah, go ahead. No, you go, you go, you go. No, I was gonna, I really like the story from shelf, so I wanted to share it, but if you want, okay, so a shelf we had like, it was all ABM. It was really, really high stakes deals. So like, we close, I don't know, 10 deals per year. We're done. It's good. So it was before the ai, it was a. Google, like search for a company. So imagine you have like a whole company working and, fixing robots for Amazon on, and they have, like manuscripts of instructions for every robot that they have. And basically if you bought shelf, you could scan that and then search with, like digitally search like a Google search, a book. With instructions and pictures and everything. So it was a cool product and, you know, we had this whole model of MQLM, QAS, Q-L-S-Q-A, like every, all of that. and, you know, we did the, the typical conversion rates for every stage. And we're like, yes. So we have, for this quarter, we have a higher goal, which needs, we need to generate 20% more MQS. Like, okay, how do we get 20% more MQs? We need to put more money into marketing. We need to, and for us, MQS was a scoring model. So, you know, pricing page, view pricing requests, content download, you know, those things, everything we could track would contribute to the scoring. And we're like, okay, so we just need to. and the CEO would, and the CEO would come in and be like, we need more M qls. We need more mpls. Why don't you lower the threshold? Sales don't have, have no one to talk to. They're not doing anything. Just lower the threshold. So we would lower the threshold and we would lower the threshold, and the sales would be like, you're bringing shit. Like, I'm not talking to this person. This is a student I'm talking to. Like, what are you, what is this? I'm not working with any MQ LS that you're bringing me. That's a waste of time. And it's fair, right? That that's good feedback. So we take their feedback. We're like, they don't like this. They don't, they don't like this situation. So we. we change it back and we're like, okay, what do we do now? Because it's a mixture of MQs from every channel and like, okay, what do we do now? What do we do now? And we're like, we're gonna be super smart. We're gonna find, like, we're gonna track every channel that the lead comes from to see which one converts into revenue. So now we're not looking at MQs as like, generally we're looking at their quality. Smart, right? So we're like, okay. Most of the deals that we close come from a bid on a Capterra search and, and we're like, okay, throw money at Capterra. and Capterra leads are not endless. Turns out there's only a certain amount of people who come to Capterra who have a need, who are researching products, and we were able to capture some of them with our search bidding, but it definitely didn't bring us a 20% increase to the MQO number and. As a result, that channel basically dried up because now the bid was incredibly expensive and there were no people we could convert. They were just gradually converting, right. And they just all converted and you know, there are no more people there. And that's how we're like, we need. ABM. That's how, that's how we actually got to ABM. We're like, we need to understand what are the accounts that we need to convert? What are the chances? What do I need to do to get their attention? How do we, you know, how do we bring the right people for the sales to talk to so they don't hate us? That's how we got into ABM and yeah, that was like, that's my favorite story about MQS and, and how they, how they ruined my life for six months. I think just about everybody who's on this call or listening to the podcast version resonates with that in some degree because, couldn't agree more, and especially when you're only, if the goal is to close 10 accounts and those contract values or the deal size were probably massive. I mean, that is where an account based strategy shines. Yep. another thing that we did to figure this out was create a partnership program. Turns out we had a lot of partner resellers that we just needed to educate on why we're the best compared to other competitors and resellers are very responsive. You know, they would come to a call, they would accept a gift. You could, you know, bribe them with gifts and do virtual wine tastings that are very cheap, but engaging to people and just educate them on why they need to sell your product because your product is better than the other that they're selling. And that worked really, really well to a point where our, reselling companies started developing their own version of our product because it was selling so good. so yeah, there are a lot, a lot of. channels, but ABM and, you know, this strategic approach to context and buying groups is where you get to when you know, you've exhausted the low hanging fruit basically. And when your total addressable market is not that big at that point. But again, if your total addressable market is huge, you're like trying to be everything for everyone and it's just, you know, it's just, it just doesn't work in a. Long term. Oh, Lisa is asking Davis, it's for you. Absolutely Lisa Yal. We, we should, we should put this on the board for one of our next ones. Maybe we do this in, in November or early December. and you know what, Lisa, I'm even thinking out loud. This could, this could warrant like a, like a two hour session. and maybe we bring on a couple different people and try to get some real world examples too. so that could be really, really cool. And then Anna, we're gonna need to see that dashboard that you built along with some contact level intent too. And now. I'm, I'm, I was tempted to show it, but I just don't know if I can show it. I don't, I don't know if I'm gonna show any, you know, NDA information. I wanted, I wanted to give a quick comment for the, for the dashboard and, collecting the, there's so much data that you can collect for ABM, but you should only collect it if you trust it, because we tested a lot of data sources, sources, and a lot of them didn't. Didn't prove their worth. And then so only something that you collect yourself, you know it's good and you're trusted, and that you also know what to do with it because you can spend so much time building a structure that will collect it without knowing what to do with it afterwards. And like at, at some point I had this obsession. I was like, there's this cool product that's called Rev Shore. And they basically like you integrate them into the, into your, CRM, and they analyze the touch points that you, That you collect, like all of the data that you have, and they basically build your funnels of, you know, what is the best flow of action that needs to conversion. And you can segment it. You know, if you want to convert an enterprise account in SAS stack, you need, them to download a playbook and then attend three webinars and then come to your web, you know, just, just give you this flow of insights based on the data that you have. But I was, yeah, I was pushing our ops, like, can we build this ourselves? And then I was like, I don't know what I'm gonna do with this information. How do I force them? Like I'm still inviting them to webinars. I'm not excluding anyone from webinar invites. The more people, the better what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna be sending them more white papers to download. I'm already doing that. So I really, I was like, okay, w why? Why would I need this information? Because it's s super cool to have it, right. It sounds incredible. but yeah. Yeah, that, that, that's my take the activation piece and you know what else we need to talk about too, which is super relevant for, you know, people in different company sizes and having different resources available to build your modeling around your accounts. Build your modeling around contact, engagement and intent because it. If you're in a really large enterprise or one that has enough resources, you probably have a data science team that can help build out these dashboards. You might have a full, you know, your stack is going to look different. You probably have some form of a data warehouse where you can ingest all of the different signals from first party, second party, third party, and then build out in a tableau or a power bi. Your dashboard and really customize it versus if you're in a smaller organization that you don't, you probably don't have the resourcing and you probably might not even have a data warehouse. So how do you configure it in your Salesforce instance? Or maybe you have HubSpot. So what does that look like across. Different organizational sizes, different resourcing. and Anna, we have another great question for you here, which is, do you infer contact level signals from your competitors? Could you, could you just explain this question to me? What exactly do you mean? Like, do we track if people are, you know, researching competitor? Yeah. So. So, for example, the, the, some of the competition companies of Q2 maybe, responsible, maybe six sense, right? Maybe demand based. So do you also, map, measure, some, some graphic, targeting or some, some of the, you know, competition mapping tool? To assess which of six sense slash demand they start working. What kind of a, you know, if their bidding strategy, typically, let's say Google Ads. Let's say CPA or something, how this should be, how this, this could have a ripple effect on the, let's say the CO CMO minus one, director, marketing, et cetera, et cetera. So do you do it at all? Or maybe you don't do this because you have a large set of, of first party data, so I want to hear it from your practice. Got it, got it. Thank you for clarifying. So I am not. The expert at FL two for, like we definitely have bait search, PPC campaigns, all of that good thing, competitor comparisons. That's just considered inbound at FL two because, you know, we're just, Google Channel is just not, what I typically do, but something that I do and something that we've done at other companies. So depending on who's your competitor, there are different ways of figuring out who their customers are. you know, case studies on their website, traces of code on their website. You know, they, them mentioning it somewhere, reviews sites. So there are different, different channels where how you can figure out the, if someone's using your competitor. And for that, for my ABM program, I do have campaigns where I enroll companies, contacts, buying groups. Same thing for me where I enroll people, in campaigns that are comparing us to a competitor or highlighting our benefits when, compared to a competitor, based on the firmographics that we've collected previously. I never go like with ads specifically, you can never go like aggressive and you know, you need to be mindful. But being given them an informative, informative, landing page that, highlights your, capabilities versus your competi is a good strategy. And when do you do that? So based on what signal? So let's say you send the three, waves of. Email or, you know, direct outreach by yours. So when you say, in two versus six sense or in two versus your competitor A, B, C. So based on what intent signal you unleash that particular landing page where you show, these are this, you know, you versus your A, B, C. So when do you do that? Mm-hmm. Only your input or do you have a different signal capturing the can model? In the past, in the past, that would, depend on the engagement cycle from the SDR. So if the SDR is actively prospecting the account, we would automatically show that content to them. we only introduced contact level intent. 16 days ago. So I haven't, I haven't built it. Like that's everyone's, I haven't built it yet. I haven't done it yet. But in theory, I would be showing it to people who are showing the search intent, obviously researching competitors. I would be showing it to people based on the social media post, if they like content of a competitor or if they comment there or if they post about it because people post about, you know, using tools. yeah, so. Just on any intent that indicates they're interested in a competitor, I would be showing that whatever you can capture. But in the past, I've done it just regularly. Just, you know, I'm educating you guys, read this. but yeah, your, your question makes a lot of sense. I just haven't done it yet. No, no, it's, thanks, thanks for giving me a perspective. Yeah, thanks. Thank you. Coming soon. That's for our measurement and reporting dashboard. Session, Anna. We'll, we'll make sure we, it is next week. I, I don't have, I, I have a day off tomorrow. December. We've got you. We've got you. And then we'll, okay. December. We'll have to show some of that. Yes. But I know we're just over time. Thank you all for joining. We will have the recording up on our research hub as well as on the Revenue Exchange Podcast. Anna, this was incredible. I have a bunch of notes. I know everyone who joined does as well. Before we jump, where is the best place to get in touch with you with any further questions or anything in general? On LinkedIn, I am super responsive on LinkedIn. If you guys wanna be friends, I'm, I'm happy to be friends there. so just add me on LinkedIn. This is my name there and it's Symbolist. you'll recognize me by the picture. I guess. There are not many people with this name. so yeah, just add me there and I'll be happy to connect and answer any further questions right away. amazing. And also go, if you're in Kyiv or anywhere in amea, you have to go check out some of the upcoming speaking sessions, Anna, we'll be doing around this topic and ABM actually is cool. but thank you all for joining and looking forward to see you on our next week's revenue exchange. Cool. Thank you guys for joining. Have a good night or day. Bye. Thank you. See everybody.