Building a Team for ABM

This term GTM engineering, I I have a strong, strong belief that everybody’s gonna have a clay resource internally that knows, you know, across all the go to market technologies. So less on the marketing side, but more on, you know, supporting the sales team and being the bridge between sales and marketing. This is Revenue Makers, the podcast by Six Cent investigating successful revenue strategies that pushed companies ahead. Hey, Sima. So you’ve interviewed a few people in your day, I’d imagine. Right? A few. Hundreds of years of interviews. Right? So oh, that is me. I’m sorry. Anyway, Okay. I’m all bad at We haven’t haven’t had that old conversation in a while. I’m sorry. Anyway, so we’ve got a interesting and a little different topic today in talking about how to recruit your team for go to market, for ABM, for a lot of different things, and a really great guest with some pretty interesting perspective on it. Let’s be honest. You know? Even the best platform in the world, the best tools in the world need a great person that will actually execute and run the programs, think strategically, and make all the magic happen. And so equally important is really having the right talent in place. Yep. So we have Max Spanier, who’s from Sloan Staffing. It’s his company. He’s basically built a practice out of helping marketing teams, go to market teams, staff specific roles in including account based marketing, marketing operations, sales ops, and a lot of different things. And we talk a little bit about this new up and coming GTM engineering role that’s starting to become really hot. So and the other thing that was really interesting is we talked about staffing, but then we actually made it into how Max’s company themselves actually uses ABM to find new customers, which I thought was a really great use case as well. Let’s dig in. Let’s do it. So, Max, ABM is just good marketing at this point. I think, you know, having to convince companies to adopt an ABM approach is less of a challenge. I think the bigger challenge is now around making sure that teams are able to do it effectively. And all of that starts with having the right people executing on the programs, and that’s where you come in. Absolutely. Yeah. And you both know this. ABM isn’t new. I was a sales rep at Marketo, and this is back in twenty seventeen, and Marketo had an ABM functionality within their system that we were selling to customers. And that’s why I started this business six years ago from Marketo. It’s ABM, again, isn’t this new concept, but you need the right teams in place to implement these programs and and go one to one, one many, one to few, whatever that case may be. You know, the technologies are there to guide you and aid you in these programs, but you need the right people. You need the right people to bridge the gap and be change agents internally to get the buy in from sales and marketing to be on the same side of the table. Yeah. So you’re in an interesting spot because and then this is unique. You’re running a staffing company specific to this world. Give us a little background on Sloan and then what your approach is. Yeah. Love it. Yeah. So I’m not a staffing guy by any means. I was sitting on your side of the table six years ago. I started my career working for Scott Brinker who created the Supergraphic in Martech. Great dude. And, I had no idea what Martech was in twenty thirteen. You know, I’m coming out of college with a finance degree around, you know, two thousand eight, two thousand nine. Not sure what I wanted to do, but I found marketing. I got into marketing technology. I started selling an interactive content marketing platform. I was there three years as one of the top reps, and then I got recruited by this company called Marketo. My dream jobs, quote, unquote. After the Adobe acquisition, it kept happening, right, in deals where you’re trying to sell a company Marketo, but they’re using Constant Contact or they’re using HubSpot, and their internal CMO is saying, hey, Max. Hey, Marketo team. This is great, but who the hell is gonna run this system? Right? What’s the team that I’m going to need? Is it one person? Is it three people? What’s the training process? So that, like, status quo kept coming up and more and more in these conversations. So I set out. I I talked to my wife. I said, why don’t we start a recruiting agency? I ended up hiring a few Marketo candidates for my customers totally for free just to expedite that deal. And I had a buddy in recruiting, and he goes, do you know how much money you could have made on that placement? So that light bulb moment went off. And about six years ago, my wife and I just took the plunge into entrepreneurship, and, thankfully, we did. To date, we’re a small business. We have about fifteen people in our team, but we’ve hired over a thousand go to market folks for b two b software companies all around the world, all thanks to sixth sense, you know, with the partnership that we have with your team, all thanks to the Marketo, you know, partnership that we have, which is why I’m at Adobe Summit right now. But the landscape has changed tremendously. Right? When I first started this, there wasn’t really the job title account based marketing. It was demand gen. But we’re starting to see more and more every two, three, four years where these new job titles are coming out and there’s new functions are are being built, and it just strengthens the the need for tools and platforms like Sixense within these organizations. And then the people to run them, of course. You’ve placed over a thousand people, and you have a bird’s eye view of trends. Or, you know, if you’re just starting to scale a program, and I’m sure we’ve got marketing leaders listening in who are about to embark on a journey like that. What is your advice? What are the first one, two, three profiles that you need to make sure that you have? And, potentially, you have these folks on your team already, or you need to go and look for, other folks, but what are those really important building blocks to a great account based marketing team? Somebody that’s done it before. Right? So I think a lot of times, CMOs, they think sixth sense is gonna be the savior. Right? They’re gonna come in, and they’re gonna turn on ABM, and their leads are gonna just start flowing in and and inbounding because they’re running ads across, you know, specific intent keywords. But, you know, let’s start with first the small marketing team. Right? Maybe more on the commercial segment within six sense. A CMO that is bought into the concept of ABM, but they’ve never done it before, they buy Sixense. The first hire is somebody that’s done it before. Doesn’t need to be a super senior resource. Right? Maybe somebody that’s done it within a similar industry or marketed to a similar persona, but that knows that journey and can aid in that process and can, you know, really figure out some of the blind spots that they might see with their implementation, right, or their ongoing strategy. So that’s more on the smaller side. When we go upmarket into more of the enterprise or strategic, chances are you have, you know, folks that have run ABM, that have run, you know, different demand gen programs with intent and with platforms like six sense. Then it’s just really thinking about, well, what does the team look like? Right? Partnering with different, you know, agencies in the ecosystem like a MarketBridge or like a two x, so I know I’ve been on the podcast before. But then what are the blind spots? Is it marketing operations? Is it content? Is it somebody that’s really focused on the integration side? So really just, like, taking a step back and looking at, you know, what does my team look like? Have they done it before? If not, we need to find somebody that has. You can look at look at a candidate resume. You know, you get the conversations. You know? Okay. They’ve got they’ve got the skills. Right? They’ve got the hard skills. They’ve done it before. But, obviously, the hardest part, I assume, for a staffing company has gotta be the soft skills. Right? Because, again, you could find somebody who’s got the amazing credo. But is there is there anything that you use or anything that you’ve seen from your perspective that makes people extra successful in these types of roles, whether it’s operations, ABM? So soft skills are hard. I mean, I think, you know, unfortunately, at the end of the day, you’re hiring a person, and that’s the problem with recruiting. My product is a person. It’s not a software that does x y z. People have lives. They have families. They have things that are going on. So I think soft skills are really important. Right? Really understanding from a CMO, what’s the culture that you you have? Is it a remote opportunity? Are you flexible? Are you okay if, you know, somebody has a family and they, you know, have to drop their kids off at school every day? Right? So really trying to take that type of of soft skills from a CMO and what they’re looking for and really translate that with that specific candidate or candidates. Right? But then again, we just gotta look at key indicators. Right? If it’s a, you know, commercial segment or an enterprise segment, Sixense customer, you probably want folks that have done that before. You know, maybe somebody that’s only worked at large organization, it’s not gonna be a match for a hundred person company. But then, you know, we always try to look at personality. Would this person get along? But you both have hired so many people. I mean, at the end of the day, you know, it’s just about conversations. And you gotta use your gut a little bit, but the benefit of working with us versus just posting jobs is is we give options. So thinking, you know, partnering with a recruiting agency like like a Sloan, you’re able to really fill the top of the funnel from a exact candidate profile where you’re not so worried about, does this person have the skill sets because everybody that we’re putting in front of our customers have those specific skill sets. Now you’re really just focusing on the personality. Right? When I first started this business, all we did was Marketo recruiting. You know, an average time to hire in Marketo and Moss is ninety plus days. And the more people have these positions open, you know, they start a search. They say, I want Marketo. I want Salesforce. I want six months experience. Forty five days in, they go, well, maybe somebody from out with Eloqua, maybe somebody with Dynamics, maybe somebody because they just get frustrated. They want this seat filled as soon as possible, and and they just want a good person. So, Max, what sorts of trends are you seeing? I mean, you mentioned this early on. There’s just new job titles and job roles being created that didn’t exist four or five years ago. But what other trends are you seeing in in terms of hiring in the b to b martech space? This brand new role called GTM engineering. And I don’t know if you’re talking about this internally, but this platform called Clay just came out of nowhere. Right? My belief is that every b to b software, every b to b company will have a license to Clay and figuring out ways we’re a sixth sense customer. We have Clay. We’re integrating a lot of different prospecting and ICP profiling with Clay and integrating into sixth sense, leveraging the intent side of sixth sense in ABM. This term GTM engineering, I I have a strong, strong belief that everybody’s gonna have a clay resource internally that knows, you know, across all the go to market technologies. So less on the marketing side, but more on, you know, supporting the sales team and being the bridge between sales and marketing. One of the things I find interesting about that is it it seems to me that that role ultimately has the ability or the opportunity to scale a lot of other roles. Right? If you have a GTM that GTM engineering place, like, your outbound team is gonna be more efficient. You know, all these different things are kind of lit up. People are talking about it. Maybe there are clients coming to me like, I need a GTM engineer, but probably they’re saying I need to accomplish a certain set of data work. How are the clients and then they’re leading maybe into that role, how what they’re asking for from requirements perspective. It’s like this bridge between marketing technologists now and sales technologists. So I think starting with the outcome of what they’re looking to accomplish. At the end of the day, right now, in in the modern b two b software company, SDRs are spending between probably one to three hours per day prospecting. So, essentially, they’re trying to limit that time spent prospecting and focusing, you know, them on the phones for those additional two or three hours per day, which is gonna increase connect rates, which is gonna increase, you know, discovery meetings booked, which is gonna increase revenue, that magic, you know, equation. But what they’re looking for, it’s so fresh. So, you know, nobody really knows what to look for, what to ask for. They just throw in their entire tech stack and say, hey. It would be great if somebody knows all of these different things. You know, Clay, Salesforce, sixth sense. Right? We’re seeing a lot of sixth sense within GTM engineering requirements, because, essentially, we’re leveraging that intent piece instead of manually going and really try to figure out who to target. There’s these flows through these different API calls that, you know, this person can provide to that sales team and really focus on these specific individuals. I think it’s gonna be evolving. I think that there’s no magic bullet right now, but we’re making a big bet that that role, there’s gonna be a GTM engineer in every single b two b organization within the next six to twelve months. There’s nothing I love more than seeing job postings asking for sixth sense skills or sixth sense certifications. It makes me happy when I see that. So, Max, I know you’re in the middle of running a study with sixth sense with Carrie Cunningham actually on the sixth sense research team, and it’s the state of account based marketing talent study. Can you tell us a bit more about that? We’ve been working with Carrie. We started this survey breakthrough back in November in Vegas with Carrie and Sarah. So, essentially, what we’re doing is we’re surveying CMOs and VPs of marketing and CROs really just to understand their internal talent teams, what it looks like to currently hire, what’s their process, how long it takes, what their team size looks like so that we can, you know, share this research with other CMOs as they go down this journey and say, well, I’m an enterprise organization. My marketing team is this size. What are other CMOs doing? How big are they building their account based marketing teams? Is it one person? Is it three people? Do they have one focusing on specific segments? So it’s really meant to be a value add as they’re going down this account based marketing journey, you know, to see what are my peers doing. And, you know, I think it’s gonna be an it it should be published within the next probably two months. But one thing that we’re offering as a value add is we’re actually picking one person, one company, and we’re gonna offer a completely free placement. One CMO or one via BPM marketing, we’re gonna find your Sixense expert absolutely for free. We’ll make sure, we post a link to that survey in the show notes for anyone who’s interested in obviously providing feedback, but also winning that placement. What’s some of the key points that you guys are looking to to capture, in the survey? Team size, how they’re approaching ABM, what their process is to hire, how long it takes, what are some gaps that they’re seeing with their internal teams and resources, how are they interviewing, what questions are they asking, What’s their approach? What’s that gut feeling that we were talking about earlier, those soft skills versus those hard skills? Right? Are they interviewing against their marketing operations or marketing technology experience, Or is it really just focusing on, like, their approach to ABM? So it’s really like this cheat sheet where CMOs are gonna be able to leverage as they approach, well, how do I hire this person? Because a lot of times, you know, like I mentioned earlier, somebody that that invests in ABM, it might be their first time, and they have no clue how to approach, you know, what do I do? Great. I can work with a partner to implement and to get it set up, but how do I train my team? What do I say? What are we saying to our prospects? How do we change our messaging by industry or by persona? It’s just gonna be like a little peek into how others are approaching it, and it should be I’m really excited about it. We’ve been working our butts off on it with Carrie and Sarah in probably about two months. The data is gonna be ready to be shared. So, Max, I wanna pivot a little bit, away from staffing ABM roles and moving towards the fact that, obviously, you run a company. Are you applying account based approaches in how you identify prospects and work them? Big time. So we’ve been we’ve been a sixth sense customer now for about two years. We’ve bought in entirely. So any recruiting agency, CMO or CEO that’s listening in on this, invest in ABM. Right? We’re you know, not only are we a customer, but we’re a partner. So we have we kinda have a cheat sheet and inside access into who’s a sixth sense customer and whatnot. So we’re a lot of our marketing dollars are spent targeting sixth sense customers to get the CMO thinking about, well, hey. You know, I have sixth sense or I’m evaluating sixth sense, but I haven’t thought about the person. Right? Where a lot of times, CMOs will buy and then they hire. My whole belief is you need to start thinking about hiring as you’re going down this journey because, you know, you don’t wanna buy and then you have all this momentum and you’re excited, and you wanna get these campaigns and programs off the ground. But then you have to wait three months to get that person in, and and then now it’s four months later, and you’re already four months into a signed agreement. Right? So a lot of our ABM is really educating on the importance of thinking about that ABM strategic hire alongside evaluating or being a customer of six ounce. An interesting, say, lesson or interesting tactic there. Like, I’ll give you my brother is in he’s a CMO of a health care IT staffing company. So they’re out looking for talent for hospital systems and so forth to implement EHR systems and, you know, how HR and all that type of thing. I cannot seem to get him to think about things from an account based perspective, but I will send him a recording of this and say, like, listen. But you point out an interesting thing where you’ve got, like, in the case of working with us, a specific technology that you’re kind of focusing on. He’s got a specific set of technologies. I think that’s really for you know, it’s a good really great use case for recruiting in general because, like, if you’re just a general recruiter and you’re like, I’m just selling to whomever, fine. Tell your brother to call me. I’ll close that deal for six cents because there’s two types of recruiters. There’s the generalist that will do everything, and then there’s the specialist that’s super niche. What we recruit around at the end of the day is around enterprise technology. So leveraging and partnering with a tool like Sixense where we can understand what technologies they’re using. So let’s use your brother, the CMO of a health care IT staffing company. Right? Wouldn’t it be great if you knew which hospital systems we’re using at Cerner or Epic? Right? These big systems where you can go in and say, hey. Hey. Hospital system CTO, I know you’re evaluating Cerner or Epic or whoever it might be. You’re using x. You’re thinking about y. Have you thought about the value of bringing really solid architect and development resources that have done multiple EHR implementations? So that’s essentially the value that we, you know, help your customers go down that journey. But recruiting’s it’s just an antiquated old school industry, but, you know, it’s gonna start picking up as the competition gets more fierce and more competitive. So, Max, we have a question that we ask everyone who’s been on the podcast, and so we’ll end with that for you. What is the most ridiculous thing that you’ve been asked to do in your career? Let’s just keep this PG. But when I was at ion six years ago, I closed Microsoft as a customer. So I flew from South Florida to Seattle morning flight from Fort Lauderdale, Seattle closed Microsoft. Then I had another meeting in Seattle closed. It was Avanti close Avanti, and then they made me fly back on the red eye. So I went from south Florida to Seattle and back within a twelve hour period just to save money on the on the hotel. You know? That qualifies. I think, you know, I used to do, day trips to Chicago from New York, which at first didn’t really seem like that big a deal. But after, like, leaving my house at three thirty in the morning and getting it back at two thirty in the morning, I realized, not so much. Well, Max, this was great. Really appreciate you joining. I think a really interesting and different angle that we sort of went through. We’re certainly talking about the staffing, but then how staffing can be using account based marketing. So kind of a double edge here. That was quite good. So Yeah. And if we have any staffing CMOs, staffing CEOs, recruiting that that want to talk to me about my experience with ABM, I’m happy to have a conversation. I’m happy to be a case study about how to approach this. I live, eat, and breathe ABM. I live, eat, and breathe, you know, recruiting. So I just wanna, you know, be a value add to anybody that’s considering or thinking about going down this journey. Appreciate it. Thanks, Max. You’ve been listening to Revenue Makers. Do you have a revenue project you were asked to execute that had wild success? Share your story with us at six cents dot com slash revenue, and we might just ask you to come on the show. And if you don’t wanna miss the next episode, be sure to follow along on your favorite podcast app.