RX16 - Building an Always-On ABM Orchestration Engine | Justin Lopez, Bonterra

In this week’s episode of the Revenue Xchange, host Davis sits down with Justin Lopez, ABM Manager at Bonterra. Together, they break down how Justin built a five-component ABM orchestration engine that runs on autopilot across thousands of accounts, and what it took to get there as a one-person ABM team.

Key Takeaways:
1.) Start With Closed-Won, Not Just Open Ops: Justin earned executive buy-in by leading with revenue outcomes, not activity metrics. That support unlocked budget, headcount, and cross-functional resources that made scaling possible.
2.) ABM Orchestration Engine that WORKS: The engine connects account identification (6sense), contact enrichment (Clay), contact-level advertising (Influ2), personalization (Tofu), and sales execution (SalesLoft + Marketo) into a continuous, always-on motion.
3.) Contact-Level Signals Changed the Sales Conversation: Shifting from “someone at Bank of America visited your pricing page” to “the CSR Manager at Bank of America clicked this ad” gave sales a fundamentally different starting point for outreach. Real-time Slack notifications with contact-level data replaced generic MQA alerts.
4.) Quarterly Sales QA Keeps Targeting Honest: Justin runs recurring quarterly reviews where AEs and solutions architects audit segmentation filters live in 6sense, flagging bad fits and surfacing cross-sell opportunities before budget gets wasted.

Closing Note: Justin’s perspective is shaped by building this program from scratch over three years with no dedicated team. For ABM practitioners looking to scale while keeping sales alignment tight, this episode walks through the exact infrastructure, governance, and sequencing required to get there.

Transcript

0:05

Welcome to the Revenue Exchange with your host Davis Potter.

Davis Potter 0:13

What's up

Justin Lopez 0:13

Awesome. David, it's good to see you again.

Davis Potter 0:16

Good to see you too. All right, everyone who's just joining in, first off, welcome to another Revenue Exchange podcast, but today this, we have a incredible guest, and the first time I met this person was at Infl Two's user group, and Infl two asked him to present on some of the orchestration work that he's curated in his ABM program. Immediately saw it. I took maybe three or four pages of notes and I was like, Justin, we need to have you on a podcast. We have to break this down. We're putting in a new, in a newsletter to the community is going to be all over this. So it is a honor to have on Justin Lopez, who is the ABM manager over at Bon and Justin, first off, we need to hear more about your background, where you're based, and then I'd also love to ground the conversation in Bonterra too. What do you do? What's the

Justin Lopez 1:10

Awesome. No, likewise. Nice to, to be on here. Big fan. yeah. So based outta Boston, ABM Manager at Bonterra, I like to say I started, I was a rug salesman, turned B2B SaaS marketer, yeah, fresh outta college. Went to rugs.com, led their call center, grew their B2B marketplace, to trade shows. Worked in the warehouse operation side of the house for a little bit. I've wore like every hat. And then towards the end of my time there, before moving to Boston, and it was a fully like in-office job, I, discovered, the marketing department and, not discover, but finally, got experience in there. so worked on like SEO, conversion rate optimization. And yeah, loved it. And I knew this is definitely the route I wanna continue in. moved to, Boston about now, five years ago. And, yeah, I, worked at WeSpire. We were, a series B company. leathered Mangen team grew it 10 acquisition by Bonterra, where I'm at now. bonier means good land in Latin. and yeah, we're the leading. Software company in the social good tech space. So we help nonprofits, charitable foundations, socially responsible companies, so companies that have ESG, environmental social Governance or CSR programs, to raise more. Give more and get more for their missions. so yeah. we have a big, hairy, audacious goal of raising charitable giving in the United States to 3% of GDP by 2033. I think it's hanging around like 2% right now. So we're looking at boost at I think 580, million. So yeah, that's our big goal. but yeah, just last year we processed 28 billion in annual giving and supported 180,000 organizations, using our technology.

Davis Potter 2:54

That's incredible.

Justin Lopez 2:55

Yeah, it,

Davis Potter 2:56

out to actually using Tech for

Justin Lopez 2:58

yes.

Davis Potter 2:59

it's not merely just another, organization that, that is, I don't know, building some workflow or some type of software, MarTech, but it's actually how do we leverage our time and our capacity and our resources to, to legitimately do good? And I also love the fact that you're in Boston. I up in New Hampshire about hour outside. We have some. Executive council, shout out to Steph Quinn. Shout out to Trevor Dean there in the Boston area. We're gonna get there hopefully sometime this year as well, with a, actually, I'm not, I don't think I'm allowed to share what we're going to be doing, right now, but we will be back there and hopefully we'll be at the Converse store again. Justin will, we'll have to have you there and maybe you could speak on some of these workflows there as well, but. Okay, so you're on the ABM side. How did you get into ABM?

Justin Lopez 3:50

Yeah. Yeah. So we had a popular tool. Probably a lot of your listeners have six sense. I started in a weird function. I started using Six Sense in a unique, Manner. so I was on there, I was demand gen at WeSpire, got acquired, joined their demand gen team running paid media to corporate market, nonprofit market, public sector, political market, a lot of markets. so I was using Six Sense actually. To QA the traffic that I was driving from my ads. So I would use six sense to tell me what accounts are viewing this page, search page. And I wanted to make sure that it was the accounts that I actually wanted to come to those pages. so I was basically using it as like a QA tool, and then I realized, I was like, this is. Really powerful. I was like, there's definitely opportunity to market to some of these accounts. And of course went down the account based marketing rabbit hole, and here I am now, like three years in the role, and completely in a different, state than I was, when I first started. so yeah, rapid evolution. but yeah, I love it and I don't think I'm leaving this, this role anytime soon.

Davis Potter 4:54

at three years is a healthy amount of time as well, building a program from the ground up and how, what has that evolution looked like? Where did you start? And then what does ABM at Bon Terra look like today?

Justin Lopez 5:08

Yeah, no, great question. yeah, we started with. Very much what I would call like a one few model, doing very like niche, like industry specific, targeting. So we had like for instance, nine out of the top 10 US banks use Monteer for their employee engagement and CSR software. I knew that this was a market clearly that we, that was sticky and we had good results, with holding these customers for many years. essentially ran a campaign targeting, non-customers that, we knew, were good. ICP fits based on different, technographic and firmographic data. and essentially like after doing several of these plays where we had. not just open ops, but close one opportunities. We realized that okay, management realized, and I definitely knew it pretty earlier on, that this was a powerful lever to help us hit some of our, a OP goals. yeah, so it quickly, yeah, quickly grew after that.

Davis Potter 6:04

And what are you looking like today? How many accounts are you covering? What does the deployment model look like? Are you still practicing and leveraging one to few or is it ha, has it snowballed?

Justin Lopez 6:14

Yeah. It's interesting you, when you were at the Infl two event presenting on the growth ABM, moving from enterprise to growth. I was loving that part'cause that's exactly what our evolution was. So that's when I knew. I needed to talk to you and you were the right person to connect with because you're definitely like, yeah, you, I lived that exact experience. We were doing the one a few, and then we're like, okay, we can scale it. let me, go back a little bit. One of the key, two of the key elements was one executive buy-in, having management. Being briefed on the success that we were having and them supporting me. I say my team, it's a one person team, but my team with tech money resources, so those resources can be in the form of like additional headcount for either mops, rev ops, enterprise apps, Design content, resources, advertising spend. So I quickly like, had that support from management, good storytelling coming with like the numbers that they wanna hear, the stats that they wanna hear. Close one, not just open ops, but like actually close one. and then also like the other big component of it was also having, strong alignment with sales. And I know that's very That's an ever evolving, never like fully achieving state, but we got to a point where we really were in, locks up with sales, knew what accounts we needed to, target knew what contacts of those accounts were, most important to engage with. and, had the feedback from sales also to know what's actually Helping close these deals. What are those value props? What are the most important things that they, are looking to get from our software? And just leaning in with that first.

Davis Potter 7:56

I love the growth ABM adoption. This is something we're seeing across so many organizations, especially in, converting their traditional demand gen or traditional. Quote unquote integrated campaigns teams from being so top of funnel lead focused to actually getting more prioritized, in who they're targeting, how they're targeting, how they're measuring and growth. ABM is really the perfect vehicle for that. And. When it comes to orchestration, this I really wanna spend a lot of time here on it because people need to hear how you've been thinking about it. So not only just what you're doing, but how you got there. Because I have this diagram again in my notes, of all of these different pieces that you've put together for this mass orchestration, engine essentially that you've built. could you start us with one, why did you build this? And then walk us through what it is.

Justin Lopez 8:58

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So what got us there, and I I got sidetracked on the last answer, but essentially one, if you had success, we had buy-in from executive team to support this initiative, this, outbound function essentially. going all in on that. And, we essentially were like, how. How much can we scale it? Like how wide can we go? And obviously one to many was something we ran in the background more of a brand awareness play that was also pre and flu two, where we can actually get a little bit more targeted in who we were engaging with. but essentially, yeah, we scaled it across. Basically we took the framework of we know our total addressable markets. Let's feed that into six sense, for our different priority markets, nonprofits, corporations, political, public sector, and essentially built out our tams. And then we layered different data in there. first party data, second party data. Not as much third party on Boor intent topics, but definitely through G two is someone we work with for one of our intent sources. basically layered in this data, to Close out, lessen some of the noise and, refine it down to a more manageable, and I'm using air quotes, for those of you listening on a podcast, while you're driving or something. because it's a lot of accounts. So I think you asked just before like how many accounts Yeah. For each market we're going over. A little over a thousand accounts. so that's a lot to chew. We also have a, maybe 50 people in our org going outbound. So like we have a ma we have a very heavy outbound LED organization. we're a 1200 person company, actually 1300 person company. and yeah, executive team is definitely, the sales and marketing team is, a big, driver, for our strategic initiatives. yeah, essentially, yeah, that's what kind of led us to, to go after more.

Davis Potter 10:51

So you have all of these different accounts that you're going after. How do you build this orchestration engine? What does it look like? What are the different pieces and what does each different piece do?

Justin Lopez 11:03

yeah. No. Good. good question. Essentially, there's five core components to our orchestration model. So there's an account identification tool, Six sense data enrichment and segmentation. We use Clay for that. advertising, both of us are huge fans of Inflow. Two contact level advertising. And then personalization. we use a tool called Tofu. And then execution is our sales enablement tools. so SalesLoft for sales. And then, Marketo is our, tech stack, for the marketing side. so yeah, essentially we have our account identification tool, six sense identifying these accounts within our tams that are actually coming to our website, engaging with paid search pages, coming to webinars. Visiting, In-person event registration, pages, just tiering what pages are most important.'cause again, we're going after a lot of accounts. I wanna like hone that in. So while I'm saying we have a thousand account in each of our market, it's a lot less that we're actually targeting and going outbound to. but yeah, that account prioritization tool is Really critical, a big, critical part of the, the orchestration model. and then from there, yeah,

Davis Potter 12:13

Can I pause you here for a second? I wanna dig a little bit deeper into the account prioritization model. So do you have a quarterly review, annually review with the sales team where you're selecting the accounts? Or are you really relying on Six Sense and the tech to prioritize who's going to be part of this? How? How do you think about

Justin Lopez 12:36

Yeah, that's a really good question. yeah, I'm smiling really big because, I just had a call this week, five different calls with solutions architects, AEs, across our different markets. And I do that quarterly. So I'm meeting with these people quarterly to recurring calendar invite, and essentially it's just QAing. I want them to come and poke holes at my segmentation filters, my targeting, telling me which accounts are not a good fit for this market, but might be a good cross sell opportunity for a different market, which accounts to exclude altogether. so yeah, that's, yeah, that is baked into my process. I have it as a recurring invite because I never want that to like, slip through the cracks because that is like a really critical, part in our, integrity for making sure that we're. Creating these accounts in our CRM and purchasing contacts for the right organizations, the right fits. so yeah, that's a really good question.

Davis Potter 13:30

So how does that review process look? Is it going in and looking at the filters in a six sense? Or is it, Hey sales, here's a list on a spreadsheet of all of the accounts that are most likely are potentials to be part of our ABM program or this orchestration engine? How, what is that dynamic?

Justin Lopez 13:50

yeah, it's the first, that you mentioned. So actually getting them into the platform. I'm driving the meeting, my screen's showing and going through each of the different filters that I have, and then scrolling through that population of different accounts, and. Scrolling through each page, set the page sort like a hundred at a time. I know that's might be overkill, but I want them to get a sense of what marketing is doing. And again, this is that feedback loop to let them know that we're invested in your success. I don't get any success. I'm not happy if they're not happy. So it's a mutual beneficial relationship. I am very pro talking to sales. I had it like my, one point in my LinkedIn, it was like, best friend to sales as like my headline because I'm just like, that's also like how I started in the role was like partnering with sales and making sure that. the people we were driving inbound were in fit. so I apply that same practice, with ABM. I think that's one of those, underestimated, skills of ABM marketers, but also something like a strength, to lean in on is just like asking for help from the people who are doing these dis disco calls, demo walkthroughs. And I didn't, I don't just meet with. AEs, I actually include the solutions architects. And it's funny how you get conflicting, opinions from the two. So I was on a call yesterday where one AE said something and then the essay was like, no, that's a good fit. why do you say that? And then they were going back and forth and they were like, actually, yeah, let's leave it Justin. that's a good fit. So it's, seems like it's funny. I have them hash it out and then I'm just clicking the buttons, making my updates. and optimizations.

Davis Potter 15:23

That's awesome. And I totally agree on the, don't just speak with the AEs, but get the solutions architects involved. Have those conversations with the head of sales, even the BDRs, SDRs, there is so much knowledge that you can. Pull from all of those different conversations. And another question before we move on to the next piece of the engine, is the accounts, are they tiered in any capacity? Is there a different, in terms of the treatment and investment in each account, or is it really any account that falls under this remit? We're just going to provide, they're in ABM, they're getting the same level of investment.

Justin Lopez 16:05

Yeah, no, great question. yeah, at this point in time, they're getting the same treatment. so because we're doing a one to many, we're casting a pretty wide net. what I will caveat, so like I should give myself more credit, we do pay attention. we do a lot of like flagship, like in real life events. so when we do these events, we get the attendees li attendee list. I specifically, I go into these spreadsheets and I identify which accounts are in my MQA, my marketing qualified account, initiative, and I will make a note. And those, our customers will, they will, these are prospects that will get personalized outreach. They will also get a gift, at the event. and then of course, invites to any micro event like a cocktail hour. Or a breakfast that we're hosting, making sure they get a touch point on what, speaking engagement we're having there with a customer or another prospect. or thought leader within the org. while they're getting the same level of treatment in terms of like the advertising and the outreach, there are some unique cases where, I partner with events and specifically do extra, outreach and, gifting to those, to those accounts.

Davis Potter 17:13

Yeah, it's funny. Field marketing and ABM, that's another thing that we're seeing across so many organizations specifically this year, where it's, historically there has always been something there and some of the. Of the organizations had made this shift, but now it feels like the wave is unbelievably there, where the ABM teams and the field teams are either conjoining and converging or they are just having such a strong partnership all across the board. And so I also love that you mentioned how it's buying journey stage. differentiated in terms of the treatment where, you know, hey, for those accounts that are actually hitting MQA or are showing actual either purchase consideration, intent, or, their engagement is strong enough with our organization that we are going to give them extra attention. And okay, you have your accounts, what is that next step?

Justin Lopez 18:12

Yeah. Next step is finding, identifying and purchasing the contact, the contacts that we can then, target in our outreach efforts and our digital advertising. Efforts. that's powered by Clay right now. I think, that tool has been really helpful in minimizing the manual work that our MOPS team, or rev ops team we're always, tasked with supporting me on. those same people I've now done training to then become, I guess go-to-market engineers is the term. I think, they're, yeah, going by now, but essentially, yeah, just. At scale, seamlessly, uploading into tables what our ICP is for each of those markets. And then, making sure that the context that we're picking up from those accounts align with those titles so they have one of those keywords in their job titles. and then those are the ones coming back to Salesforce for us to, to then go outbound to both from a digital advertising perspective, but also sales outreach.

Davis Potter 19:13

So you're essentially using clay to go find and source potential buying group contacts.

Justin Lopez 19:19

exactly. Yep. yeah, for a lot of accounts.

Davis Potter 19:23

Yeah.

Justin Lopez 19:24

For a lot,

Davis Potter 19:24

you think, what do you think about Clay? It, this was something when we were at the user group, it felt like almost everybody had it. And what do you think about it? Do you go in the platform yourself and actually configure things or is that what your GTM engineer does?

Justin Lopez 19:39

what our, yeah, great. Yeah, great question. No, I do not, I'm not currently in the platform. I did just start recently, clay BM Academy, so taking courses to hopefully get a little bit more comfortable, in the platform so that. I can see what it's about. I like knowing like what's under the hood. but yeah, no, I'm not in the platform, so I don't have the most, to say about the platform. I can just say my team has saved a ton of time, using it and time is money. they seem jazzed about it. But, I'm probably not the best person to ask since I haven't, I haven't used it a whole lot. we have an internal team that, that is the subject matter expert for it.

Davis Potter 20:15

Does it, do you get good feedback on the contacts of

Justin Lopez 20:18

Yes. Yeah, I guess that's one thing I can say. Yeah, the contact quality is higher than other tools, that we have or have churned. so yeah, very satisfied with the, quality of contacts that I can say with complete confidence.

Davis Potter 20:33

that's huge. So you've got your accounts, you're enriching at scale using clay. what's the next component?

Justin Lopez 20:40

So next component is probably my favorite part coming from like a digital advertising perspective. Prior demand gen person. Yeah. Next up is targeting these folks. So partnering with sales, I align on the messaging. So we have a awesome product marketing team that creates different OCS for us to work off of ICP. We know the pain points. We know competitors in the space. We know what's our reason for winning these deals. Reviewing that doc, partnering with essays, naes, those same essays and AEs are the ones that actually QA my ad copy. So I write the ad copy and I, send it to them. They give me feedback. I take, I accept some of their revisions. but then I, yeah, we send it to the design team, create the ads, and then I show it to them and it's usually really on the mark. And then those are the ones that I just upload to Inflow two to then, target. yeah, that's, yeah, I'm really blown away that there is a tool out there for us to, To be able to get so specific with who we wanna advertise to. So from like a cost efficiency return on ad spend, roas, like it's, it's leaps and bounds ahead of anything we've ever used. shout out vital, DDI or, my amazing CSM I've been working with for almost three years now. She's taught me a ton of stuff. and, oh, unlocked, A lot of potential for us to tap into, not just NCA for new customer acquisition, but install base for active customers. that might be another topic for us to cover at a later point. I have really intricate, install base, like active customers campaigns that I do, from an ABM perspective that I partner with CS cx, and the install base sales team on, That I'm really proud of. but yeah, contact level advertising is the next thing in the queue of the orchestration model.

Davis Potter 22:29

That's huge. Okay. And so basically you have Clay who is identifying these contacts, and you might already have some contacts, hopefully, and probably do in your c. RM that's existing for these accounts, but Clay is enriching and pushing it back into, let's say Salesforce for example, and in flu two, are you are, so these ads are at the contact level in the account level or how does that work? Are you actually looking at who is in your CRM and who you've enriched and then specifically pushing ads

Justin Lopez 23:03

Exactly.

Davis Potter 23:04

people?

Justin Lopez 23:05

Exactly that we've shifted from a broad account based marketing to just, just contact level advertising. yeah, exactly that.

Davis Potter 23:16

What do you think about the match rates? That's one question I hear all the time.

Justin Lopez 23:21

Yeah, no, good question. on average, so to also give context, we're purchasing contacts for the whole buying committee. So most of our markets, five to 15 people, varies by accounts. Some accounts only have five. Some of them have 15, 20, but we cap it at 15. But, yeah, match rates typically I think they're around like 60% that we get. I think benchmark for in info two customers is less. I think clay is a factor, depends on where you get your contact data from. So since using Clay, our match rates have gone up from prior tools that we were using. yeah, the tool's also a factor in that, I would say. But, yeah, match rate's 60, but. If you're doing broad account based targeting departments, seniority, who knows? you don't really know who, unless they come inbound, who actually saw your ads. So if I can at least be sure that I'm hitting 70% of the people I wanna reach, it's far better than not having that clear line of sight on like where my ad spend is, is hitting.

Davis Potter 24:23

Yeah. Wow. 60% is, it's pretty solid, especially if it's exactly who you want to

Justin Lopez 24:29

Yeah, no, exactly. No, it's really cool. Click-through rates are also like higher than most customers is what my CSM told me, and I think it's some of the due diligence, the time of just partnering with the essays, the AEs, and getting that feedback from them, a lot of the ads are coming back to me with comments. So I'm always glad I went to them for that. so yeah, I would say yeah, creative's also a good component on yeah, we're reaching 70%, but like, how many of them are actually like clicking? So we're getting those signals to sales saying Hey, prioritize these people. but yeah, the ads is a, it's a big component. The creative specifically.

Davis Potter 25:07

That's huge. So you have your ads. what's the next piece?

Justin Lopez 25:12

Yeah. soon as we get engagement, this was also like a common thing that, I was hearing. I thought we were like the one-off customer using Slack integration. it seems like at the user group, a lot of influ two customers have like the Slack integration. So yeah, once there's engagement, we get notified through Slack real time. I think there might be like a couple minute delay, but we've tested, it's like. Nearly real time, that notification will come into Slack to a dedicated Slack channel for that market, the outbound team for that MA market. And essentially they'll go round robin. the sales team will go round Robin outbound to those contacts with messaging that is complimentary to our ads, complimentary to the landing page that those ads are driving to. so if they go to that page and bounce off that page without converting, they get that email that also leans into that same reason that probably led them to click the ad. so yeah, it's basically feeding the prioritization of, our outbound efforts.

Davis Potter 26:10

That is huge and I actually do want to take a moment here and dig in that a little bit more. Because the majority of conversations we've been having with clients and others in the market, there's such a big challenge with getting realtime insights over to sales. It's not only just realtime insights, because sharing over mqa is one thing in timely, quote unquote mqa, but actual contact level engagement with contacts who are most likely to be part of the buying group. Is an entirely different thing. what does that almost operating procedure look like and how did you put that together with sales and what I'm thinking is you have all of these ads that are getting the engagement, you have these landing pages. we need to touch on in a moment that you're piloting or have just started with tofu. How did you create this? How did you enable sales on the Slack group and, what does that whole process look like and what's what does governance look like as well?

Justin Lopez 27:13

Yeah. Yeah. I think, the best way to start answering that question is going back to how we started, which was exactly what you mentioned of presenting them an MQA, a marketing qualified account, and, Giving them feedback Hey, someone in Charlotte, North Carolina at Bank of America, visited our banking pricing page. go after them. And they would go into either, yeah, one of the various different tools. Six Sense ZoomInfo, LinkedIn sales Nav, goes to Bank of America. You got 5,000 employees because the company's headquartered there. you try to find the titles. You got 40, 50 people coming up and it's okay, this is a lot. I'm not sure who to really go after, so Fast forward to letting them know that it's the CSR manager, the corporate social responsibility manager, or the, the comp compliance officer at this bank that clicked this ad and that coming into Slack, you're giving them two totally different things to run with. so It's, yeah, it's it's apples and oranges in that case. And, yeah, sales can spot that difference and, we're way more inclined to actually action on that. The other thing is, remember we had that, like I mentioned at the top of the call, we have buy-in from all across the senior leaders in the org. So I trained the sales leaders, VP of sales, head of sales, inflow two workflow before I rolled it out to their reps. So like proper enablement, you're going top down to get approval on is this SLA? Okay. I want speed to lead to be like immediate to no more than Eight hours in a business day. I really wanted as close to like instantaneous. but I wanted, like I, I went top down, got their buy-in. So in terms of getting, Alignment on the team creating these slack channels specific to those markets, having the sales reps in, but also the managers of the sales reps in those channels to see these really high, high ICP fit people that recently clicked an ad that is talking about our solution that they clicked. They didn't necessarily raise their hand like an MQL coming inbound, but. It's definitely a really hot signal and worth going after, for a team that, is spending a lot of time outbounding. so yeah, making the shift to, contact level data that I was providing them with to run off. Was huge. and then of course getting top-down buy-in, because the sales leader, sometimes in one of the markets, the sales leader will tag the rep before the rep actually actions on it. So it's just so funny. I feel bad, like I don't wanna. cause any stress for the reps, that just goes to show like how much, buy-in there is from, senior leaders in the org. So if you can get to that state, like I think that is a game changer. I don't think I would be in my career talking on this podcast being where I am if it wasn't for having that alignment. And if, yeah, it would be, yeah, it's a tough battle. but showing those results, starting small. To an MVP state, and presenting some wins is the way to get to that point, and that's what I did. But it's by any means, not a six month quarter, or even a year. this is, three years in the making. To get to a point of what kind of buy-in we have across the go to market teams.

Davis Potter 30:29

The difference between, hey, this overall account and, hey, look at these contacts. Couldn't have said it better than better myself. And it's something that. The market is really starting to wake up and shift towards, especially I think the technology and capabilities are really catching up to that whole theory of actual account level. And another question that I have, you have ads, but there are all of these other. Go to market engagement touchpoints that marketing is helping to drive. Maybe they attended a webinar, maybe they attended an event. Does this Slack group only support ads or does it have other engagement touchpoints as well?

Justin Lopez 31:13

Yeah, great point. they are only getting, they're only actioning off engagement from, those ads.

Davis Potter 31:21

Yeah, it's I think that's really where we're going and I love the Slack group connection, behind this. And so the next step, we have the ads component. You have tofu, and I know you're new with the tool, but how are you thinking about personalization, actually using tofu, and how are you thinking about doing that at scale across thousands of accounts?

Justin Lopez 31:45

to my earlier advice of starting small, I think, it was brought up at the user group we went to in San Fran of like personalization going wrong and like instances of companies going viral off, like really bad outreach, probably like AI generated, like slob, so Definitely don't wanna be there. So I level set with the team. We are starting very small because personalization is a different beast. it was top of mind for, for our team to experiment in. So that's where we're at. so starting small is the best way. But the personalization is the focus of it's on the account. and then it basically will send those email templates to your, marketing automation platform, HubSpot, Marketo, and then your email. Expert in-house or email marketer would go in, qa the emails, make sure formatting looks good, and then you can deploy it to anyone at that target account list. so yeah, it's, it would be very hard to do that at scale manually. doing it, at scale, automated. You worry about, the issues with the personalization, like the flaws in the ai, hallucinating or just like sounding too, ai, but starting small with a subject line, CTA, like that's how we're starting now. so we'll see. But I'm, cautious about that one just because it can go sideways quick.

Davis Potter 33:04

Yeah. Wow. Oh, okay. So this, when you were walking through that, another question sparked, which is this whole ABM orchestration engine. How much of it is running with human oversight, as in you pick the accounts or even your tools are helping to identify and service them. Do you, is it like you press a button and then the full orchestration flow works and then you're just sitting over the top managing it and optimizing and reviewing?

Justin Lopez 33:39

Yeah. Yeah, really good question. we are definitely on an autopilot, so like we have this thing always on. It is a true orchestrated model where we have the workflows. dynamically identifying these accounts, enriching them, serving ads. It is an autopilot mode. However, to keep the human in the loop, we have, subject matter experts for at each stage of the pro of the, process. and then we have weekly calls. There's two weekly calls where we're connecting and talking about, optimization opportunities, issues with any of the workflows. feedback from sales, that's a big one. feedback from me, the digital advertising, person on the ABM team. yeah, we, we have a human in the loop at all times. and we have weekly syncs talking about this stuff, but it's very much. An autopilot always on campaign right now. and then the goal is to let that run, continue those optimizations. But then now I can pivot. I'm like going really wide on the one to many. And then my point is eventually to, to get to a point where I can start dabbling in some, like one to one potentially. I know you covered that on a recent podcast, I think your latest episode, so I was really intrigued by that. So I, it's a bigger lift doing the one-to-one. I have good partnership with sales, so that's, that's what I'm hoping to be able to do. While this is on an autopilot, mode.

Davis Potter 35:01

Do you think that's where ABM or marketing in general is gonna go? Where we have, I, I love the term autopilot, by the way. trademark that one because I. It. I'm almost thinking about, okay, is there some component of autopilot for growth ABM and then for those really high ROI potential, or if you have a smaller market, you know you're hitting the accounts that warrant justify really strong in investment and time. Will we end up. Having a future state where you have this autonomous autopilot layer and then where we're spending more of our capacity is actually on some of those, either deals, some type of deal based ABM where it's, okay, we need to help accelerate this, add some support to get it over the finish line, or one-to-one, one to few. We're really going in on enterprise ABM, where we have growth ABM that's more, autopilot. do, I'm just throwing that out there after.

Justin Lopez 36:05

absolutely. that's the goal. with ai. C-suite boards. that was talked about, I think you were at Breakthrough, right? last year. okay. Not last year. Year prior. Yeah. so last year it was a big theme, like the new CEO came out and basically said, I've been talking to the top customers, meeting with the CEOs, c-suite boards of these large enterprise companies. AI is here to stay and we are expecting go-to-market teams to be more efficient, produce more. and if you're, you, I'm sure a lot of listeners are familiar with PE backed, VC backed companies where the goals every quarter just keeps going up. this was a result of that, of okay, how am I gonna hit these targets? we have to. We can't just keep, these like one to few campaigns. Like I need something that's working in the background. while I can focus on bigger, higher lift, but higher reward, initiatives. yeah, I think that's definitely the future. That's, it's been communicated at, top down in my organization that like everyone is expected to use ai, adopt it, and produce more. and that's pretty much, yeah, that's, yeah, what I'm doing in this role right now.

Davis Potter 37:17

Where does AI play in this? I think that is the elephant in the room that everybody who's listening or watching this, they're gonna be thinking, okay, you've got this orchestration. Where is the AI

Justin Lopez 37:27

Yeah.

Davis Potter 37:28

as moving towards autopilot?

Justin Lopez 37:30

Yeah. I would say like these tools should have, if you're using the right tools, they'll have AI baked into it. So like our account prioritization tool, we use Six Sense Like that is using ai, I think they say a trillion data points that it's analyzing for second and third party data. So yeah. That has ai. So I look at like leading with the skill that tool, the I lead with. Leaning into the strength of each software and having that be what that software serves, and then having those systems connected across those different tools. So there's AI in the account prioritization tool, there's AI in our contact enrichment and segmentation tool. So it's able to at scale once we dump it accounts, you don't have to copy that. the query string of those job titles from like a ZoomInfo or manually typing in all those keywords, like the AI is, it already knows your market fit, your product fit, and it is seamlessly, once you give it accounts, purchasing the contacts and dumping it into your CRM, that's ai. It's powered by that. that's a component. contact level advertising. I don't, don't think there's much. AI in that, it's just good, digital advertising. and then the personalization for sure has, AI baked into it. So I, and then I'm also using AI in my workflow of, Qing ad copy, queing landing page experiences. Creating, offers for different promotions that we wanna run for, like some of these, high value accounts that are coming to our live in-person events. so I use a AI in my workflow, of course. and then these tools have it. I don't think it's necessarily like one AI that's gonna solve everything. I think you find, the strengths of each tool and lean into those.

Davis Potter 39:19

What do you see for those who are maybe thinking about this ABM orchestration engine or these workflows for the first time? What are some lessons learned or maybe things to avoid when they're going down the rabbit hole of building this for the first

Justin Lopez 39:35

Yeah, I think thinking that it's an all or nothing thing, I think getting to an MVP state and then expanding, are like, that's a big, that's a big, learning that I have and that I would. preach and scream from the mountaintop. Also, not letting perfection be the enemy of progress. My first boss told me that@rugs.com out of college, and, it just stuck with me. And every time, I operate through that lens. I get the good feedback of wow, this is great. that's good, let's do more. It's cool, great. some feedback. Is better than just like the analysis paralysis of like, where do I start? start small, get to an MVP state and then scale. So that's definitely my operating motto, those two things.

Davis Potter 40:23

Justin, this has been just to let you know, this is one of the best podcasts we've done in at least the past 12 months. I, if we can get this in front of every single person in the Forge X Community and on LinkedIn, who's in ABM demand, they need to hear it. Where can people go and get in touch because I have no doubt. One, there are gonna be some questions and then two, there are going to be other people who are gonna be hitting you up to go join their podcasts or other types of speaking events because this is really

Justin Lopez 40:54

Yeah. No. Awesome. Thank you so much, Davis. Yeah, it was a pleasure. I hope your followers get a lot of, value from it. Yeah, I think LinkedIn is the best place to connect with me. so linkedin.com/justin Alexander Lopez. and I'm sure you'll link it somewhere, but, yeah, LinkedIn's the best place for now.

Davis Potter 41:11

Awesome. you're the best, Justin. Thank you so much for sharing all of your insights. I completely blown away.

Justin Lopez 41:16

Yeah. No. If, yeah, if it's any value, anything, that's, yeah, that's my hope for everyone. But, yeah. Thank you Davis.

Davis Potter 41:23

Awesome. Thanks for joining everyone.