RX 11 - Building a 1:few ABM Program: How to Lead with an Iterative Mindset | Marlee McDonald-Yepes, Account-Based Marketing Manager, Global Enterprise, Coursera

In this week’s episode of the Revenue Xchange, host Davis sits down with Marlee Katlyn McDonald-Yepes, ABM Manager, Global Enterprise at Coursera. Together, they unpack how to successfully launch and scale a 1:Few Enterprise ABM pilot.

Key Takeaways:

1. Start Small and Focused: Limit your pilot to 25-30 accounts per industry in a single geo. Attempting to launch across multiple regions or too many accounts simultaneously sets you up for failure.
2. Build the Right Team Structure: You need dedicated ops support, clear decision-making frameworks (RACI), and cross-functional partnerships. One person cannot execute strategy, operations, and content creation alone.
3. Launch Before It’s Perfect: Get your foundation in place with existing content before waiting for industry-specific assets. Use early phases to work through ops complexity, routing, and enablement while showing quick wins.

Closing Note: Marlee provides proven best practices for launching 1:Few Enterprise ABM programs, emphasizing the importance of setting realistic expectations, maintaining leadership alignment, and treating the pilot as an iterative test. For ABM practitioners building their first programs or optimizing existing, this episode outlines the critical infrastructure and mindset shifts required to move from planning to execution.

Transcript

Audio Only - All Participants: 0:13

Hey Marley. Hey Davis. Thanks so much for having me. Welcome, welcome, and also welcome to everyone who is on live as well as our on demand and podcast listeners. We have a really interesting session today. It is one of the topics that we fielded a lot of questions behind over the past few months. It's almost like one-to-one ABM. What does that look like? And then what does one to few look like? What are the distinctions across campaign type, actually building and designing the program? How do you measure, how do you optimize? And so today, there. The perfect person to help with this. We have on Marley McDonald, yaps. I totally butchered your, your last name. No worries. I have a lot of names and I was like that. I'm gonna do my best. And so yeah, thanks for a revenue exchange session today. Again, the format, please interrupt with any questions, toss'em in the chat. We want this to be as relaxed as possible. All of the on-demand recordings will be on our research hub. That's where you'll get the visuals. And then the podcast, the audio side search revenue exchange, that is exchange with a X. So for today, we're gonna be talking about building your one to few ABM program. So couple of the big rock topics we'll get into. one, why you can't launch perfectly on day one. Two tools and team structure that actually matter. And three real challenges and wins. And so Marley, it is an honor to have you on today. I'm going to pass it over your way for a brief intro and then we can, we can dive into to this great content that we have. Awesome. Thank you so much Davis. I'm really, really likewise honored to be here and, thanks so much for creating this space and bringing us all together. and yeah, just for all the work that you do in the ABM community. so yeah, I'm, I'm Marley McDonald. Es I am currently working at Coursera. It's a ed tech company, so in B2B SaaS, in like a a learning management platform. We're a very well known brand, around the globe, and we also work in all global markets. So I'm part of the enterprise team. Coursera also has a consumer side, but I work on enterprise and, and I'm on the global team. So I work with, today I'm gonna talk about, one to few pilot that we've been working on these past few months in Nam r. so yeah, north America, but I also work, closely with the APAC team, amea, et cetera. So we are everywhere. and yeah, I've been in the ABM world for a while now. I was. Originally, yeah, so I've been in, in education and EdTech before. and then I was in cybersecurity for a while. I was in AI and automation at UiPath, and then I just joined here back into EdTech at Coursera earlier this year. And it's a really exciting time for us. like any organization, I feel like right now we've been through a lot of changes of leadership, structural, all those things. however, I I would say we're, we're very aligned as much as we can be right on like our mission of what we're trying to do with bringing our quality product, into the hands of users, buyers, learners who can really help them to improve their skills. And yeah, just continue to succeed in the world and, and, and grow. So, yeah, that's pretty much a summary about me and I'm excited to be here. It's the first ABM hire. However, I do work really close with, the regional team, all the teams, the regional teams, marketing, SDR, sales, product design, you know, we're always cross-functional, so, I need lots of things from all those different pieces for us to be able to do what we're trying to do. So I'm excited to talk about it. Thank you. Same here. Alright, let's roll. ooh, do we have a question? Yes, ma'am. Oh, yes. Yeah. So I'm actually, oh, sorry. Do you wanna read that or for our, for our on demand listeners real quick. Andy, over with the quick question right off the bat. do you work as alongside the demand gen team? So I'm actually part of the Global Demand Gen team. there's just a few of us and we at Coursera, we have a few different verticals, Coursera for, for business, Coursera for campus, and Coursera for government. That kind of, it all kind of matrix together across the global and regional, teams we work together. But yeah, I'm, I'm part of that, global demand gen team. And then we do have regional demand gen. It's not a large team, let me say like of that specifically, but we are a larger team across the whole enterprise marketing organization. So we work together. Yeah. Amazing. Well, Marley, I'll pass it your way to kick us off on defining one to few ABM and what this looks like. Definitely. yeah, so I'd. I tried to just kind of write some specific notes here and I'm just gonna talk through some of the points, but I figured for, yeah, I do have a couple slides here for who's on, and you might I, if you wanna grab any of those, but I'll, I'll talk to all the pieces. but yeah, I'm gonna walk through this pilot for one to few that we've been working on, for the, the better part of this year. Elites, H two in North America. So we started with, we have been doing lots of marketing, you know, and we have the global and the regional teams, but we're trying to just go to the next level as many organizations are right now, and create a much more focused approach and like intentional. and we haven't done any, mostly, we haven't really done industry marketing or, Coordinated industry selling, focused selling. So that's a big thing that we were trying to test out, through this initiative. And in particular, we also, wanted to bring in the intent piece. So when I came on, we already had demand base, but it was really underutilized and was kind of going through like a, we're they weren't considering getting rid of it, but we were, trying to really fix a lot of those pieces on the backend of how we had, were setting it up and then in particular, and then how we're using it and the, the enablement around it, for our SDRs, and then also marketing and sales. So we wanted to bring into this, pilot also choosing the accounts, who were gonna have the highest intent, the highest value, and the highest win rate for our historical data currently. So that's how we got started. And yeah, and then, so that's how we basically put together our account list, and what we were, we were focusing on for, for this initiative. And also we just, like, we're trying to do as usual in ABM, we wanted to have a much more targeted approach where we're not just having, you know, we have many buyers for Coursera, but we are trying to really dive into that buying committee, and melding together those target those target job titles and really start to understand there's still a lot of work we're continuing to unpack around it. And build on, which I'll talk about. But just really understand who those specific personas are, what, who makes up that buying committee and focus on a few key roles in, like l and d and HR Tech in particular. yeah, and overall our goal for these initiatives, so we, we look at it as the leading, leading indicators of increasing engagement. That can be a kind of useful but also vague term. and so I recommend it's really important to like, go many levels of defining that and making sure you can measure it, which I'll talk about too. but, in particular for us, we're looking at that engagement in demand base, like just across the different campaign channels where we're meeting people of these target accounts and the key buying committee members at events. and like building not just more contacts in the accounts. The contacts who we're actually looking to engage with. and then also I'll talk about some of the, the different mix, but bringing people to our website, so in particular to some key pages and like an industry focused landing page that we have created as part of this initiative. and then lagging indicators like I think many of us pipeline and revenue also looking at meetings booked. so that's the ultimate way that we're gonna be supporting the business. Yeah. In question. Okay. So yeah, this is kind of our, our mix of what we did. in total, we have 56 accounts that's split between two industries. So we landed on, tech software and financial services. So that kind of like fell into that category of looking at our win rate data. Where's the highest a CV? Where's the highest place that we're winning right now? we also were working both with our like West Coast sales and East coast sales, so we kind of wanted to balance it that way. Most in the US most financial services companies tend to be like on the East coast and tech software on West. so that was important for us too. And yeah, again, those looking at key target personas, the, the job titles, functions, and then we developed, so we had a few vendors, which I'll talk about, but, and I'll, I can speak to like where they helped us in these different pieces, but we had, so we needed to create this messaging.'cause like I mentioned, we didn't have any industry. Focused really materials. So like the content and AL is always a big piece right on, on the ABM front usually. So we first did cross-functional messaging workshops to develop what that message should be and create that like playbook of how we should speak to these two industries. One for tech software and one for financial services in specifically this region, north America. and then we, and I'll say, because now we're launching, we're actually launching the next phase of it and APAC we're doing the same. Like we're following basically these steps, but we're using what we built in Nam R but creating like a regionalized version, which there's actually maybe 20, a little more than 20% of like differences between the region, right. Of just things that, That are different in, in that area of the world. So, but anyways, so yeah, we had to create the messaging. Then we started, we had a few phases of content syndication. The first one we just started to, it's a pretty heavy, like ops set up and all the legal approval of bringing in. So one of our vendors helped us with the content syndication, in like a very ABM focused way. And the other one helped us with the messaging and the content.'cause we do have a strong brand and creative team, but we, we need like specific and more support for those areas, and bandwidth. So yeah, we, jumped into the content syndication. We didn't wanna wait until we got to like actually having all the industry pieces. So we started with some great reports that we already had and, and resources, that were just like. More top of funnel, but specifically targeted at these accounts and those key, personas and job titles. And so we set it up to say like, okay, we're gonna just do 250 contacts first and then we'll do the other 400 once we launch the industry focus pieces. And that actually really helped us too, because, it's enabled, it's a way that we can show like quick wins, right? Of bringing in the context before we're getting to the next stage of like developing all the industry content. It helped us a lot on the ops side because it was pretty complex to make sure that we set up, you know, how we were bringing them in. And just, there's always more, I feel like there's always more backend ops things than you think there should be, but there they are and they're really important. Right. And then we also learned a lot of. Okay, now once these initial leads in come in, then how are we routing them to the SDRs? And, we also needed to work through some ways that some traditional leads were, were brought in or like how they were scored as m qls, et cetera. It's not exactly the same of how we normally operate. So there's always more things that are coming up like that, or this should be routed to this person. Oh, this person changed. You know, there's, there's always like many of those ops things. So getting that just top of funnel content out the door really helped us to set up all those systems. So then when we got in, got into like the industry focused content, which we're basically in right now, we're already set up to go. so we can swap it out and yeah. Is there a question? I can totally pause there. I have a couple questions. Yeah. Marley on this. the first one is around your target account list. So you have these 56 accounts across two industries. How are you balancing those 56? Is it pretty even across both industries? And then when you dive into the industries as a whole are, how did you, how did you do the segmentation? Is it, for example, financial services and then insurance or financial services and institutional banking for the cluster? How did you think about, how do you think about that? Yeah, that's a really good question. So we basically, we wanted to have about 25 to 30. per industry. So that was our ballpark. And we started originally with just the demand base list of really trying to target like purchase and decision accounts primarily. so they're the most ready to buy highest intent that were fitting, like, that, you know, that criteria that we wanted to pick in the industry. We, you know, that's a good question about like, I think we might incorporate it in the next V two or V three to get even more granular. oh, but sorry. Then we took that list from Demandbase and had the conversation with our sales team and they wanted to add, you know, they, they definitely added some other accounts that, weren't, like, weren't posting in demand base, but they, they wanted them there. And we said, okay, fine. You know, so let's see how it goes. Right. because it needs to be that, that partnership, We, yeah, we had, it's a mix. There's, there's, it's mostly like financial services, banks on there for, for the financial services. and yeah, not so, not so much. Sorry. So yeah, like mostly traditional banks. That's, that's kind of what this was. It's and not FinTech. Yeah, it's, it's financial services, mostly banks for that. And then tech software. Yeah. Like more traditional so, or newer software companies basically in the west coast. Us. And you touched on something really important that I, I want to frame and, and also get your perspective on why you made these decisions. Because when we look at this pilot from one to few, you have, for a ABM practitioner, you are covering two. Segments of right around 25 to 30 accounts in one geo. So you pick North America. and so I, I guess my question is how did you land on that for the pilot? Because this is what we recommend as well, where it's, you know, you want to start off in one region because you mentioned there's that 20% difference across different regions. There's a lot of pressure and we often see. Practitioners, when they initially start their pilot, they, they'll think, oh, maybe I'll do North Am I'll do some in emea, I'll do some in apac. I'll just include, oh, I see multiple different, you know, accounts in this campaign, even though they're across different regions and there's the temptation to add in, have more accounts than 56. So from an countless standpoint, I think you did a really, really strong job on making sure that it's limited so you can actually make an impact with the budget, resources, and capacity that you have along with choosing one Geo, how can, can you walk us through your thought process on building the pilot around that? How, how did you land on that? Yeah, sure. No, that's a great question. Yeah, there was definitely a pushback and even still some people as, once we got a little a bit into it, they said, wait, I thought. Don't we have more account like, no, but luckily, so I have a really strong ops counterpart. you know, the, the mindset has to be really be there and also our leadership team. so like my supervisor and our, the leader of our enterprise marketing team in particular just are really aligned on like the scaled approach, which I'm really grateful for because you don't, you definitely don't always get that. and, but if you don't do that, you're basically setting yourself up to fail, unfortunately, because you're gonna be doing way too many things. I mean, this is already a lot, let me say, but like, you kind of have to do enough for it to work, but you can't do too much. So it's a balanced line. Right. But I would, I mean, I, I definitely recommend, yeah, the 25 to 30 accounts. Is a really good place to start per industry vertical. And yeah, we didn't wanna do, we had to, like I said, kind of appease, we wanted to appease the east and the west sail. So that's kind of how we landed. We were also considering having healthcare in there. yeah. But this is how we landed to kind of keep that balance and the geo we needed to do this type of activity and test and pilot in North America. first just from a business priority perspective. We do have, I have really strong counterparts who have part of their roles. So they're, they're on the regional demand gen and part of their role is like running different ABM pilots right now. So that's one colleague in amea and then one colleague, in apac. And, so I work really closely with them. I'm on the global team and I've kind of like taken on for now this regional NR like ABM pilot role. But as we grow, then I'm really working with like the other, I'm, I'm fine to keep helping us with the NMR because we, we definitely need it. And it's, it's very tricky, like, you know, it takes a lot of attention to make sure that it's gonna be successful and that's fine. You know, we're still in the early stages. But ultimately we are building this like global center of excellence to be weaving in the regions and using our, our regional teams. And so for example, I mentioned, and sorry, yeah, I saw a question come in, but for example, so we're launching the next iteration of this right now in apac. And that's with my, with my colleague Shihi. And she is really amazing and we're basically taking like what we've, all the learnings and the basic framework that we've developed for NAM R and applying it to the APAC team. However, and still working with our, the vendors, for the content and, and creation messaging and also the vendor for content syndication. But like I mentioned, there are some really. We actually started those messaging resour res messaging workshops this week. And we have the countless for apac, and the personas and everything, we're about to start the content syndication phase one, for apac. But there are some really key differences on like, just the regions and, and the different countries. And we're not, we may translate one part of it, but it's mostly in English, but there's just different ways that they, I'll get back to you on specific things because we're kind of just going through it right now. but there definitely is like we're having the foundation, but we will have about maybe 20, 30% of the key messaging pillars slightly different. So, yeah, and I definitely wouldn't recommend to keep it Geospecific for that reason. because then, yeah, AMIA will be a whole different situation, you know? you, and if you are doing that, I would really recommend having like your colleague counterparts on the ground in those regions because, for me, I'm, I have a very global mindset and I have a lot of like global knowledge, but there's nothing like having somebody on the ground there, who can speak to some specific things that I think could be easily overlooked and that could are like key success factors and the times zone difference helps. So, yeah, couldn't agree more. And Andy has a few questions as well. Andy, you want to jump on live or, yeah, sure. Thank you Davis. Yeah, Marley, this is brilliant. all sounds very fa familiar. I found, the same sort of decentralized. model of rolling these out as well, but, ran into sort of resource, issues, with the field, team. But, the questions I had regarding this is with other problems I found was with industry focused content. You know, you guys, you know, like a learning platform where a cybersecurity company don't really have the internal expertise on say FSI. So did you use agencies to craft that content or was it really the insights of the sales guys? So we, we rely heavily on our agency to help us design that messaging. and the content. However, they can definitely not do it without us. So they also rely very heavily on us to make sure that it's matching, matching like our typical look and feel, our voice. and then specific like industry focused, you know, subject matter expert type of comments they can get mostly there. But then, you know, so it's a balance and yeah, so some key players for us and creating that was definitely feedback from the sales team, product marketing, of the actual like content. Content. Our content team. We have a small content team, but our content team, and then our marketing, yeah, regional marketing. And I will say like. Since, especially in the initial iterations of even this one, there's many iterations already, right? Of how we're kind of bumping through the process of the plan and then, okay, revise plan. Okay, if that's not working, then let's, let's do this instead. Not huge shifts, I would say for the most part, but like slight shifts. So for example, yeah, our, a couple months back, kind of earlier, our regional team was a bit more involved, the Nam R team, but then we had a couple shifts in, like our field team, right? And we just had a couple shifts of really defining, and I have this on a later slide, but of like. Remember, this is a pilot, a specific thing that we're testing, and we're not like trying to revamp all of our approach into industry focused marketing in a day across everyone. So that, I would say, is also really important to like, just remind people that this is a pilot. Okay, we're doing a pilot, you know, we're learning from this, this is what we've learned so far. These are the things we've tried, and just continue to communicate that. And like, this is our goal. This is how we're, we're posting to that so far. And getting many people involved in that. And like the leaders too, you know, the, the other directors and the leaders of the teams too, so that it's really aligned. And I know that's a typical ABM best practice, but I will say that's definitely really important. because like when you get into those sticky spots of, well. They wanna say this as our messaging pillar, they wanna say this as our messaging pillar. They're saying this, how can we create the content on this? you know, you need those, those you get into that spot where you say, okay, these are all great ideas, and they are, but like, what's our, who's making that decision in that call and why? and then we can always continue to iterate from there. Right. Cool. And then the final question was the 56 accounts, did you ring fence those against other demand gen activities for this, or did you just, let them get everything? Could you say that again? Yeah. The 56 accounts that you selected, did you ringfence those so that it was just your campaign that they got? Or did demand gen's team hit them up as well? Yeah, we've definitely discussed it at this point. I, I, am against that because we're still like. We don't have enough emails that we're sending out, for example. I don't wanna, I don't wanna prohibit them from, at this point, I think we could definitely potentially get there, but at this point, I didn't wanna prevent them from getting other, just general Coursera, marketing pieces because it, it's still useful for them at this point. Yeah. Amazing. Thank you Marley. Great questions. Andy and Carrie had another one around content syndication. Can you break down your content syndication plan and phases? Yeah, yeah. So I, I brought in along with the messaging and, and content vendor, the vendor I use for content syndication. I've worked with, with all of them in the past, a few times now, and. So every time we like continue to kind of evolve together. but what I really like about working, with Ben in particular is like, it's very ABM focused and we go a lot into the buying groups and the job functions. And, we even also have a few side projects on like SDR enablement and kind of that strategy because they're a really important part of our team too. So we we're also kind of side building that. but yeah, so what we started with the content syndication, I mean we started with the accounts. We started with three, just like I mentioned, top of funnel pieces. So, two reports that we have in a white paper. And so the content indication inventor creates like a. A landing page that basically looks like our regular landing pages and, you know, promotes it out to the different networks. And we get them to interact with that and fill, fill a form on those pages and then through a few, integrations. It's a little complex, like I mentioned. We need to verify that there's a good contact, and real person and then get them into our sales force and then we route it to the SDRs, for action on those. And so we started with kind of just regular general top of funnel sequences. and then the next phase of that as we're starting to launch these more, industry focused pieces is a, going to the next level of being more granular, having a bit of a more industry focused feel that we recommend to the SDRs and the outreach. depending on the job title, like going up to C-Suite, sometimes the sellers, the, those, it will route to them. But, yeah, and we're also working on a next level of that to get even more granular, like with ai, which is pretty exciting to, that would be a SDR resource, but we're still testing it right now. but we could just, you know, instead of just having like one sequence in outreach, we could have basically like very specific sequences, you know, but we're still testing it to see. But but yeah, so that's kind of the different phase. We started with the top of funnel content and then we did about 250 leads on that. Then we're just getting into the next phase of that, that we have now the, the industry focused content. So we'll have about 400 leads. We did like one third and two thirds, basically more or less, with the industry focused content. And we're we'll, yeah. So let me know if you have any more questions about that. Awesome. Well, Marley, I'm gonna send us over to the real world implementation, please. Yeah, totally. actually, sorry Davis, could you go back for one second? Totally. I know this is kind of a long slide, but I just, I just will point out, a couple more things on here. That we also had to build the dashboards right in Salesforce. So we had kind of a mix of executive level one. We had many, many things We tried okay to try to figure out like, what do we need for all the different stakeholders? and so where we landed was, okay, we're gonna have an executive level one, it's very high level. Then we get a bit more into like tactical, more marketing focused metrics, getting into the content syndication, like metrics, events and things. And then we also had a specific one, for the SDRs, like just on those, those, content syndication leads. And I will say that too. So we also are doing a, A virtual round table for executives with a third vendor who I've worked with in the past, that's gonna be coming up in December for these accounts. Really excited about that. And we involve them in the field events. I think there's definitely like much more we can do in a coordinated way with the, the regional field team, but we did start to like help with, you know, shape that mindset of, hey, yeah, if you're gonna do an event, like, and you can potentially get certain accounts here, like here's the target account list. Try to get them there. and then like I mentioned, we've been building that ABM Center of Excellence, so having all of those resources on a high spot page in internally, that's really important. there's a always a lot of resources, but yeah, just like one central place that the marketing and sales and SDRs and leadership can go. and the vendor support, like I mentioned. And then finally, yeah, just like the project management side, I really feel shouldn't be overlooked because it's very important to have that project management piece. People and teams can do it differently in many ways. So like at past orgs, I've, loved monday.com for example. Here there's like very pretty complex spreadsheets that I would normally stay away from, but they actually, they like get the job done, you know, in different ways here. And, so yeah, we're definitely still exploring all the different pieces of the project management piece as we've been like building out and trying new things. seeing what people respond with. But yeah, just setting, having that like, cadence of meetings. and again, we have really evolved even through the past few months of like, who should be at those meetings and how are we forming, like, having that clear agenda and then the action items follow up and the timelines. But yeah, I just, I just wanna highlight that piece because, it's, it's definitely a really important piece, so, yeah. Yeah. Cool. Amazing. Cool. Yeah, so I think here, the main things that I wanted to point out, I mean, kind of talked about a lot of these already, in summary. I will, I will, before I just dive into these in particular, I mentioned a lot of them already, but, I, you know, there's, as you're launching it, there's always gonna be so many places of potential more success, right? In the future, like goals and, we definitely, you know, we have a good relationship with our sales team, but we also got a new sales leader recently. Like, you know, there's always constant movement around all the teams, marketing, product marketing, sales, SDRs, et cetera, everybody. So it's constantly about like building those relationships and, and continuing to, to build them and checking in with the leaders and making sure that like. You're, you continue to be aligned and that you have those feedback loops open. so some of the ways that we have started to do that and as part of this is like, like I mentioned, developing that high spot page and part of the, the bill of materials for what we've been developing for the industry focused content. We also have a seller's kit in there and, this is resources specifically for the sales. And I'm, I am sure a hundred percent sure we'll continue to build that over time. And like I said, we might be able to like get like even more granular with SDR and sales messaging resources and things like that, but at least we're building that initial, like, here's the main messaging we're using, here's the main reports, here's some suggested messaging for you and like reaching out on, on LinkedIn and, and emails. And things and yeah, just building that, that relationship of best practices. Right. but, but yeah, in summary, you know, this alignment and the participation, it takes time. And this will, I think, always comes up in any of the ABM best practices. Like you should 100% start with your, the, what do you call that, the early like. Your best candidates, you know, the ones that are really excited to be involved, you're not, not everyone's gonna be that. In this case, we kind of needed to roll it out to like all of Nam r and they, it touched on most of, or all of the reps in Nam r, east and West. but with that, we kind of then can still have some scaled approaches that, of some of the things we're testing right now, like with the extra SDR and sales kind of messaging resources, the AI focused ones, you know, we, we pick from that, okay, who's performing the highest, like in the demand based enablement that we've we're doing, who's like really involved? We have some different champions on the SDR and the sales side. so that's kind of the next level of like, yeah. Then get those really, really key stakeholders and the people who are really excited to. To be there. and yeah, like I mentioned, having that RACI for decision making and being open to that racy, evolving, you know, as new roles come in or like you just realize, oh, maybe that person, we actually need this person to be making that decision on the content. Or like, this is how we should do it better. That's too many people. Like we could, we really need to narrow this down to like one to three people to make that that final decision. It's great to have all of their input, but we're never gonna be able to like get to the next launch and we can continue to incorporate that as we go. and yeah, like I mentioned before, just really helped to continue to set that expectation and remind people that this is a pilot. I mean, I have, I've had different people. Ask me when we're trying to do different things, for example, on the webpage or something where the team might be used to doing like just a one asset webpage with a form and that's it. Versus like creating these industry-focused landing pages, that may have multiple, not too many, but multiple resources on them, like a few different CTAs and things and saying, are you sure this is gonna work? You know, it's like, well, this is the information, this is what we're basing it on. And again, this is a pilot, so we're going to actively like, get insights in real time and look at them and continue to iterate on it, throughout the next 1, 2, 3 months. So, Yeah. And the same thing with the measurement frameworks. I mean, we have like our initial, what we're planning, but it also really needs to be matched on like what you can measure. So that was a big build that we were working on, with the ops team, especially my, my ops counterpart, Luis. And, yeah, so we kind of made a good enough what we can do for now, right? Of how we can measure those, those different pieces of the enable of the engagement, and the impact that way. and yeah, you're like, you can hear in many of these podcasts and, and resources on ABM best practices, like your data, the results are only as good as your data, right? So like. But also just make, make sure it's good enough to start and it's going to improve over time. Right. As you, sharpen in on that clear ICP and those key buying committee members, it's not always the same for every account and, but you will see, start to see more patterns and try to match that to data. and the same thing with like how the SDRs and, and sales engage. You might have assumptions, for example, that like, you know, how the sales are gonna approach this process and some of it may happen and some might not. so then like taking that into account and saying, okay, maybe, well, we need some more enablement on this area, or, okay, we need to like make sure that. We are very aligned to see how much of a high priority this is, and we need to really collaborate. If we choose the target accounts, then like those are the, you know, this is what we're gonna do around them. That's what that looks like, across the team. So, yeah. And finally, yes, it may not be exactly right, but at least it's done. That's from an old professor of mine, a design thinking professor actually. But, I, I tend to remember that. And, you know, again, you're iterating on it. You gotta like, get it out the door and get to the next thing and the next thing. and then before you know it. It will be amazing. So yeah, I love that quote. It reminds me of progress over perfection. Right, and it's so true, especially with your ABM pilot. You are testing and breaking things so often in the organization and you're doing things that probably have never been done, especially on the measurement and reporting side and the way in which you're actually unifying all of these revenue teams around a small cohort of accounts versus broader demand gen. So couldn't agree more. Cool. Yeah. This is kind of just a summary of like, we've talked about a lot of them, but there's some definitely like must haves and this will, this might be. More or less a good outline, but it could change, you know, from organization to organization and your team and what you're trying to do. But for us, you know, we definitely needed the CRM. So that's Salesforce. We needed the ABM platform. I know some people, they're doing different things. They might not need it, but for us, we did that. We already had demand based what we needed, like I said, to really, improve the backend setup and also how we were using it, the enablement. we needed a, well, we had it, but a place to build the webpage. So that's in Contentful. we haven't used follows yet, but we might, we're considering it once we get to like more scaled, I've used that other orgs in past. you need a place for your, your dashboards, you know, so we ha we ended up using it here for sale in Salesforce and demand base and some sort of project management. like I mentioned, you know, we had. We've kind of landed on spreadsheets for here now, but we don't have monday.com here, but I, I did like, using that at other places in the past, but whatever works for you and the team, right? It's kind of a combo. and you know, we, we actually do have mutiny. We've talked about how we might use it. We've had a couple of different calls. so, but we decided not to use it right now in these initial launches just because it will, it will potentially get too complex to get those off the ground, but we're definitely looking into different ways that we can at least test out a couple things in 2026. and yeah, you know, you can get into, there's lots of iterations of this adding in different advanced enrichment score models, multi-touch attribution tools and things like that. There's lots of fun things we can get into down the road. Yeah, so I would say like definitely invest early in having that clear ICP and test and iterate on it because it will evolve. and like you'll continue to get into that, the granularities of the buying committee. you need that account list as is a typical AV m best practice, like driven by intent and sales. So it's part data and part just the conversation and like that collaboration in my experience for that. yeah, because yeah. And Oh, go quickly for this. Yeah. A clear messaging framework, you need the partnership, SDR, and ultimately of course sales too. Leadership buy-in. You need the cross-functional support. and you definitely need like ops and content. Those are two of the places. That's why we place a lot of focus on that. It can, tend to like be blockers as as you get into scale. So having that vendor support is really helpful, but definitely be very intentional and specific about it, about what you're looking to get out of that. and yeah, a vest later in. So as a secondary and less important in having too many tools, some tools can be great, but like, just make sure that you can, manage the scale and the enablement and the setup and the ops piece for them. and just trying to do too many creative or design builds complex web personalization. Save it for much later it iterations, I would recommend. and. Like for us, we kind of had to do we that full rollout, more or less to the NMR teams. But there are ways, like I mentioned, to kind of have different, tiers of that. And so focus mostly on the key stakeholders and where you're like seeing success and definitely don't be afraid of like trying new things and pivoting. not huge pivots, but as you're in it, you know, stay in it. But small things like okay, this is how we're gonna scale this. we're gonna market this account as an MQL now and things like that to like fit into the certain system. This is how we're gonna like get this landing page live within the structure that we need to operate in. Things like that. Yeah, this is such a great breakdown. And we have Carrie on here as well. Who Yeah, go ahead. Has a, has a great question and almost scenario where he's working on planning for 2026. He's in a niche aviation industry where we only have a ABM target account list of 50 airlines. I'm a marketing team of one and traditionally, traditionally have lived on the brand and product marketing side. I have a sales ops and a director of sales to work with. Where should I get started? What's realistic and how do I set this up in a way where I run some of these channels without drowning? It looks daunting and I'm trying to figure out resource planning. Yeah, definitely. That's a great question. I mean, so I would say. We can all make decisions, but try not to make those decisions on your own. Like go to the leaderships and the bosses and make, you know, you feel free to present what you would recommend, but also like rely on them to, to help you shape where you're gonna prioritize things so that it's not just you making that decision of like the region or the industry or the, the top priorities. I mean, you should, you should do the backend work. The much you can, you know, of looking at the data. So, of, you know, where you're winning or the highest a CV. Those are good places to, to kind of aim the, the a VM mechanism and approach, but then also make sure that it's a partnership with the leadership to design. If you can't agree, then. At least your boss. Yeah. If people have, because they will, they'll have different opinions, but at least align with like the closest supervisors to you of this is the priority to start. and try to balance with like what they wanna see with also what you think is realistic to do. It is a bit of a balance, you know, you gotta roll, roll your sleeves up and get in there. But also it's okay to like say we absolutely can't do this. Like, it's a balance of that. so, and sometimes you definitely don't always know until you, you get into different things, of that scale and the complexity, but you can have a more or less plan of that prioritization. Happy to dive into that more. I have a question for you, Marley, and I know we have eight minutes left. I wanna be conscious of our time. one of, one of the big challenges that a lot of ABM leaders are thinking through right now is what the definition of personalization is and how it differs across one-to-one, one to few. That being what we define at four X as enterprise ABM, and then a operating model for one to many, or that's what we call growth ABM, but. One-to-one and one to few personalization. What it looks like, what it feels like, how deep you go in terms of gathering account insights, what the assets look like, what the collaboration looks like between you and sales. How do you think about personalization across these 56 accounts and how, I guess, how deep do you really go? Yeah, I think it's definitely still a question that we're trying to figure out and balance between like what we choose to do and what's meaningful and like worth our time to kind of get into. Because for example, I mean like I said, we do have Mutiny, so we have the capability to do a lot of things. I, and we've had different calls where we, it was even very specific of like things they recommended for us for these specific, you know, things on the webpage or for the sales outreach and things like that. We just decided to look at that more in 2026 and wait a bit, for some of those specific things because it had the potential, it's not that hard, but it had the potential to like get too complex and we needed to get the rest of these things. There's quite a few things as you saw of pieces, off the ground. I think some of the things we are personalizing. So we do have also, this year we've been also launching two side by side, one-to-one current customer pilots. So this is all prospects for the one to few. but we're also trying to do some pilots and beginning stages of one-to-one current customer. And so that of course is all personalized. It's a similar framework of this, but all personalized specific to that one account. But this one to few, the prospect. Industry focused approach is personalized on the two industries. So it's either one tech software or financial services. And so that, that group, about 25, 30 accounts each. so that's kind of the personalization for now. We definitely have a lot of capabilities, like I said, of many other things we could do. We, we just haven't decided yet what, I'd love to hear other people's ideas and of course I, see like lots of resources and things on it, so we'll see. I'll let you know. Well, we're gonna need a round two on that one. Yeah, definitely. I can. another massive question that we've been hearing. This is a huge trend around of course, measurement and reporting, but specifically the ABM. Dashboard. And I know you mentioned you have a couple different views. One more executive focused. When, when you came into the, to building this program, how did you think about building that dashboard for your MVP, that V one, what, what were some of the things that were a, I absolutely need to make sure we have this on here. And how did you think about what is important for the different audiences for exec, the board versus for cross-functional marketing teams or maybe even sales counterparts? How, how did you work through that? Yeah. So my first thing was, okay, where's my ops counterpart? Because I, I, no, I cannot be building that alone. So who's, who's with me? and, luckily I have a really strong ops colleague here at Coursera, Luis. And, he was part of, right before I joined, like, doing a bunch of research on demand base. And so he has varied that mindset. Mindset, the skillset. And so we really walked through a lot of these together and, had so many iterations. Yeah, we can, we can bring him into some of the, the future calls maybe too, because he's great and we, you, yeah, so you really need that op support. And there was a, a bit of a time in there where they were considering doing a bit of restructure and I said, no, no, no. Like, we can't do this without him, you know? And so I, you need that support. Second in that, yeah, I mean we, you really have to start, we had to start with our goals. So what are the goals? And then we went through a lot of conversations like, okay, what, but what do the different teams care about? And like, what are we trying to show on this dashboard? And we had so many iterations of it. in the end we kind of landed on that, like, okay, what's the story that we wanna tell thanks to my manager? You know, and like a few of our managers kind of giving us critique as we were getting a lot into the weeds, but good in a good way. But keeping us of like, alright, but make sure that we're keeping this executive one. That's kind of where we had the break between the executive and the tactical one so that we could really have that high level story of, the engagement piece flowing to meetings, pipeline revenue, that story. In just like five. And so, and then we also, since we had the two industries, we were trying to figure out if we needed to split them into different dashboards or not. For now, we just kept it namer and we have the two industries on there for that. so we can kind of compare in this initial pilot we'll see, you know, how that goes as we scale out. and have now like the APAC dashboard and if we added more industries and things like that. There are 25, there's a 25, module or whatever it's called, widget limit on a Salesforce dashboard. So that was also a reason why we, tend, we ended up breaking it into the tactical one and then we wanted to be very specific to help our SDRs with just going, you know, keeping them focused. So that's why we made also the third one in the end for the content syndication leads. Yeah. And I know we're a couple minutes over as well. quick, maybe a last question, 22nd wrap up here around, from Carrie. Do you find that the ABM platforms help uncover and enrich customer accounts? Like we're looking at 1500 potential customers worldwide, but want to uncover and enrich, wondering if you find these platforms really helpful with enrichment and uncovering prospects? Yeah, I mean, I think they do, at least for what I've gotten it to so far of at least getting started. So as part of our different demand base enablement sessions, we also did, we did some enablement for the customer marketing team and like the customer, account teams. And there's definitely still so much more that we can do. It's one of our hot items for sure, for 2026 as we're planning. to continue to build that out more. But I mean, I definitely think it help. It's much better than no, no data for sure. And then, but then you also need to bring in the specifics, like once you just dive into the account and from actual conversations with the, the account customer champions, on the ground in those accounts, and the sales and SDR conversations. So a combo. But definitely from my experience, it definitely helps. Thank you so much, Marley. This was so insightful. You have no idea. And thank you. So for those who are listening to our on demand, where is the best place to find you for any questions they might have? Oh yeah, sure. yeah, you can reach out, you can definitely find me on LinkedIn. That's probably the best. I, I can, I think my email's on there. You can always email me. Too. But yeah, definitely reach out. I'm happy to connect with anybody. Awesome. Well thank you so much Marley. Thank you for everyone who joined live as well as our on demand. And we will see you, I don't think next week because of Thanksgiving. I think we're taking next week off, but we will see you at the following week, first week of December. Marley again, thank you and have a great rest of the week everyone. Thanks so much. Thanks everybody. Appreciate it. See everyone. Bye. Bye.