Five Steps For Successful ABM Campaigns

Particularly for awareness campaigns, people get stuck on how to measure progress. And so because we selected the right accounts in step one and learned about them in step two, we knew before the campaign went live where these accounts sat in their awareness of our product line. So we did see higher proportions of those accounts move from early stage of awareness and consideration into a higher intent buying stage. This is Revenue Makers, the podcast by Six Cents investigating successful revenue strategies that pushed companies ahead. Saima, so we’re jumping into the five step approach to ABM campaigns. Is it just five steps? That seems too easy. Everything is five steps. You just go one, two, three, four, five, you’re done. I’ve been looking for the five steps to the winning the lottery. I haven’t figured that one out yet. And, again, this is five steps that we at Six Sends came up with. This is not the definitive five steps of the history of the world that will get you the greatest campaign you’ve ever created, but it’s it’s a structure that we use. I think it works pretty well. It might not be the definitive worldwide, but what is definitive worldwide? Anything. I think if you are executing an ABX campaign, if you follow these five steps, you’ll be in great shape. Yeah. So before we go one by one, let’s just go through them all real quick. So you everyone who’s taking notes, because everyone who listens takes copious amounts of notes. So there are five, as we mentioned. First is selecting the best account. Yep. Once you’ve selected them, step two is to know about them. K. Lots to know, lots of data out there. And then the third is taking that information and engaging with the accounts in the right way. And we talk about engage. We talk about all the different ways you get in front of accounts, advertising, email, events, all that fun stuff. Yep. And once you’ve engaged with them, guess what? You’ve gotta make sure that sales is aware. You’ve gotta collaborate with sales, include them in as part of the campaign. Frankly, it shouldn’t be a handoff as opposed to, you know, maybe both teams working in conjunction, marketing and sales together. So collaborate with sales. Yep. We gotta have some skin in the game for sure together. And then five, near and dear to our hearts, tracking real stuff, the data, the metrics, all the things that are happening to show whether or not the campaign is successful, you’re hitting the right account, hitting the right accounts, and so forth. Love it. Five simple steps. So listen. I think in theory, people get it. It makes sense. They’re pretty self explanatory. Why don’t we take a campaign that we’ve run internally, a omnichannel, you know, multiple months, multiple steps of a campaign that we executed last year and make it real for everyone. I like it. Let’s do it. So here we go. So this campaign was a competitive takeout for a competitor that I will not name just for the sake of being safe. We brought out a sales intelligence product last year, which included contact data, kind of all the things that you would see in Wait. Success has contact data? So, yes, we do have that product, and that was that was new last year. And so we we obviously wanted to get the word out. And we wanted to get the word out to competitors. Well, not to competitors. We wanna get the word out to competitor customers. Say, like, if you got a renewal coming up, maybe talk to us. I think the other point to add here, and this is going back to just campaign design. Right? We’re gonna hit the five steps, but we were newer newer in the space last year. We’ve obviously made great strides since last year, and it it’s a one of our fastest growing product lines. But we had to introduce a new product to market. We needed to unseat an incumbent at the end of the day, right, which is not an easy thing to do. And so this campaign had to kind of cut through the noise and really grasp people’s attention. Yes. And we went a little bit off the rails with some of the creative, but it was fun. But it still followed these steps pretty closely or to the letter, I would say, for the most part. So Step one. Selecting best accounts. So in this case, in order for us to select the best accounts, we focused on again using our own data to understand who are the accounts out there that are using these other sales intelligence contact data products and so forth. So techno graphics Yeah. Hopefully, you have access to or you can look into getting access to techno graphic data. If you’re in technology, hugely valuable data to understand, like, who’s using your competitive products? So we built a segment starting with your ICP, of course. So the ICP segment a segment lives in sixth sense as a source of truth. It is a list of accounts. That’s the filter criteria number one. Alright. Number two is the techno graphics that you mentioned. Right. And just bear in mind with an XEP segment, whether it’s six cents, whether it’s another platform, whether it’s manual, however you wanna do it, you wanna have your universe defined. Next, we say, okay, we wanna see customers of and enter, in our case, it was all of the keywords or all the competitors for all the different sales intelligence products that we’re going after. There were about six or seven of them that were right in our real house of these are competitors that we definitely wanna try to unseat, get in front of, so forth. So, again, building that right in pretty straightforward to build that within the platform. From there, we would also add in some other okay. We wanna make sure that we’re not getting in front of our customers already. If this is in this particular case, we’re doing a prospect account a prospect campaign. Anything else around like, are these accounts that already exist in your CRM? If they don’t, there could be a no process of, okay, let’s go find those new accounts. But we’re gonna just sit with all of the data that we’ve already pulled into our CRM. And in this process as well, depending upon and we didn’t in this campaign, but other campaigns you might wanna take a look at where the accounts are in their buyer journey. So if you’ve got any sort of stage based data as well. In this case, we wanted to hit a pretty wide selection of accounts. So we’d actually left the stage out of it because again, one of the big parts of this and we talk a little bit later about measurement was pure brand awareness getting it from these accounts. So it was a pretty large group of accounts, but the techno graphics were key. So, Adam, as you were kind of finalizing the selection of the accounts, do you know ballpark how many accounts were in this campaign? I think it was between ten to fifteen thousand, a fair number. Okay. And was it North America only, or was it global? We do play in EMEA. Yes. In this particular case, this account this one, we we kept in North America. Okay. We did do another later, but we stepped this one to North America. Alright. So we’ve got the best accounts now. They are accounts that we, you know, meet our ICB criteria. They are current users of this competitive platform. And we have all the data already for them. So Alright. So step two means know about them. So we’ve got the account list, which is great, but knowing about them takes it a step further. And within any account based approach, you want to meet those prospects where they are in their journey. Right? So knowing about them is number one, understanding what is their level of intent, right? Are they in early awareness stage with sixth sense or are they actively maybe looking at us if not for this net new product line, but for something else? So just understanding their level of awareness of sixth sense is is an important one, so we look at the buying stages. We also look to see, are any of these accounts already engaging with us anonymously or, self identifying? So are they on our website? If they are on our website, which pages and content is resonating with them? That’s a great hint for us on the types of things we should be talking about when we do our outreach. If they’re not on our website, can we capture what keywords they are interested in and are researching on three and a half million other b two b websites that sixth sense partners with. Right? And so what keywords are resonating with them? Keywords can be named things like competitive platform names, competitor names, and so on. But in this case where we were looking to drive awareness, some of the pain point specific keywords become really interesting. Right? Yeah. Accurate contacts data. We wanna know when someone’s interested in researching that. And I will say being able to get really granular for specific keywords and pain points is really, really important for us. It’s something that really only six cents provides down to that level of granularity where customers have unlimited keywords that they can enter into the platform and track. And so we went pretty deep on some of the keywords that we wanted to track for this campaign. And then once we’ve got our audience, we wanna know, okay, which of all the keywords we put in, which ones are folks actually researching. And then finally, knowing about them, another angle we look at is, are they interacting with any existing marketing automation or CRM campaigns? Sixense offers free Bombora topics. We have a partnership with Bombora to so all our customers get free Bombora topics. So we are also able to see, are they surging on any key topics that are of interest? All of this obviously helps us understand where they are and craft the message, but it informs the content strategy of how we are going to speak to them. You now have your topics, your content strategy for the campaign. And probably going forward, and we use a lot of this information because it was early on in the life of this product to help define our content strategy beyond this campaign and what kind of content we wanted to create for this essentially new audience for us again. Because again, we we traditionally were selling into marketing, at least marketing first. Sales was certainly coming along during a sixth sense sale and certainly users of it. But now engaging directly with sales from the beginning was a new motion for us, and we had to create a bunch of new content to sort of address a different buyer, a different mobilizer, different sponsor, all sorts of the things. So hugely, hugely helpful. Step three. This is your time to shine, Adam, because I know you all had a whole lot of fun with it. So talk about how we engage with these accounts, but I just wanna say there’s a website out there, dump your data vendor dot com, that every single listener should go and check out because it really is a great sort of representation of what this campaign was about. Yes. So we actually, in collaboration, worked very closely with our product marketing team, And they had come up with the idea of, like, hey, let’s do something about breaking up with your contact data provider. We were planning this. We were thinking at one point about a Valentine’s Day launch. So there’s kind of like, okay, we could do something there. They shared that idea with us. And the older people on the cheap, myself included, got our hands on this. And if you remember, and, Simon, I know you remember this in many, it was the world back in the the nineties of commercials with one, like, Columbia music or whatever. You could buy, like, greatest eighties, and they would scroll the songs, and they would have them playing, and it would be somebody talking at the camera about it. Then we had miss Cleo. Do you remember when you could call for your your fortune? And all this stuff came together in a very weird menagerie of things that created we came up with the idea of a dump your data vendor hotline. And the idea was like you could call the number, get advice about how to break up with your vendor, what to say to them. We had celebrity impersonators. You wanna know how to break up with your contact data provider? Listen to Morgan Freeman ease you into it. We created a video, a number of different videos, a commercial for the hotline itself, the website if you go take a look at it. We actually created the hotline, the phone number that works. You can go. You can dial. And guess what? It went to the BDRs. It went to the BDRs. It was everywhere. And so, again, like, ultimately, this is still about, I mean, great creative. It was great. It was wild. We leaned hard into the nostalgia. We did. We went very nineties. But again, we were still focused on that type of engaging in the best. And again, if you think about it, we made a couple of assumptions calls. Like that the buyers for contact data, sales intelligence, you know, sales leaders are probably gonna be a little bit around well, they were around in the nineties. They’re gonna remember this. So certainly a level of that. And then having really great and creative video assets. And we, of course, we built ads with static display ads and all that off there, but we were able to just blow that out across pretty much all channels. So certainly through video advertising on YouTube, display advertising via our platform, Facebook, LinkedIn. But, again, it was such a wild creative that it caught quite a bit of attention. We were still targeting those accounts. We were still trying to drive engagement back to the site, and we could talk more about, obviously, all the measurement of that. But this was actually the first time in running these ads, especially on LinkedIn, that we were getting just a steady stream of comments on our paid ads. And then when we went and posted these organically, it was like wild because people were just losing it over the creative, which in and of itself was great because it drove awareness. And again, that was a big part of it. It’s like, again, we wanted people to be like, hey, I want this product. I wanna see a demo. But we also just wanted to say, hey, six sense has this product now. Like, we’re here. So it was a lot of fun. And ads around like breaking up and ads about the hotline. At one point we had the build up to this was we had a breakup guide. So a written piece of content. Again, driven a lot by what we saw from research and intent and so forth. We had a breakup webinar. We had video commercials in the webinar. It was a lot of fun but ultimately we engaged in a way that was out there and different just to get that attention because we know how crowded it is out there. And the sales intelligence space is very, very, very busy. There’s just a lot of a lot of offerings, a lot of competitors. We have to make some noise. And ultimately, that’s what we did with the creative. And then I think one more point on engagement I’d love for you to hit on is persona specific. Because, yes, we have the overall intent. Yes. We have the multiple channels, the website, the hotline, the webinars, the emails, the ads, but talk about the persona specific outreach that happened here. We definitely focused in our area on sales, certainly. Right? And we looked at sales leaders themselves, VPs of sales, BDR, SDR. Again, like, if you’re leading a large not even a large, you’re leading an SDR, BDR team, you’re gonna be thinking about data. What are the right tooling for that they have for that? We really focused in on that persona very, very specifically. And in all the channels where we could do that persona targeting, six sense display, LinkedIn, that’s where we spend our time. And the interesting thing about that was we hadn’t run that much in the past directly to that persona. So that was a little bit new for us as well. But we wanted to be targeted to these accounts getting in front of them. And we’ve since done other things where we target sales, we’re also targeting marketing because obviously there’s a collaboration between that product as well. But that was really the first time that we did that to really get directly in front of again, back from the data that we had from success. So So moving into step four, collaborate with sales. Now before the campaign was even launched, sales was made aware of the fact that this was going to be coming. There was gonna be this big push. We obviously wanted the sales team to be doing social engagement with all of these things, but it goes beyond that. So we had our BDR team armed with cadences in SalesLoft that spoke directly to this. What else did we have from a sales perspective? So we had calling we had a very specific calling script. You know, we’re lucky at six cents. We have a large BDR organization. We also have an enablement team. So we worked very, very closely with them. If you checked out our episode last week, we talked a lot about cold calling. It still works, but it works the best, the right message at the right time targeted. So we really spent a lot of time on. Again, like, it was a new motion. Right? BDRs were not used to picking up the phone and calling directly to the sales leaders because this was a new product for us. Us. So we spoke a lot about that. They had cadence inside of our sales loft, which we use for our our SAP. They had talking points. Basically, we wanted to make sure that they felt comfortable with this new persona, that as all of these things were running, all of the ads and all the different types of engaging the right way was going on, that when they went in over dialing and so forth, that they had confidence to that they knew what they were talking about and they didn’t knew how to talk to the right the right folks. Yeah. And then on top of that, of course, the BDRs were maining the hotline. They were taking inbound demo requests there. And again, some of it was just fun, right, because people were hitting the connect to a live person just even to see what it was about. And so the BDRs had some fun engaging with prospects. That way, sales obviously proactively was doing outreach. We talked a lot about what the BDRs are doing, but sales, sales leaders, they were amplifying this on social and also doing outreach into existing open opportunities. So really blanketing, I think, the BDR and the AE org with information about the campaign, scripts, and collateral to help them get involved, and then obviously benefiting from some of the inbounds that were coming. Yeah. And when we get in when we move into our fifth and final step, we can talk about all the different ways that prospects were able to engage, that we’re able to measure, and then some of the more just awareness kind of things. Well, again, like, even a few months before up until after this launch, we were so so focused on this. It was a really cool thing to see because, again, marketing and sales are working so tightly together. We had the campaign. We had all these programs going on. The message was, let’s get this product out there. And I think we we did a pretty good job. Yeah. Alright. So step number five, track real stuff. And I feel like particularly for awareness campaigns, people get stuck on how to measure progress, Right? Because lagging indicators like an actual inbound demo request, those are the easy things to measure. But if this is an awareness campaign, how do you really start to understand, are you moving the needle? And so because we selected the right accounts in step one and learned about them in step two, we knew before the campaign went live where these accounts sat in their awareness of success and awareness of our product line. Right? So we had probably a high proportion of those ten to twenty thousand accounts that you mentioned in an awareness or consideration stage. And so one of the key KPIs that we looked at was, you know, six weeks, eight weeks after this campaign launched, how is that same cohort of accounts looking in terms of their intense stages? And so we did see higher proportions of those accounts move from early stage of awareness and consideration or even showing no intent at all of Target into a higher intent buying stage. So that was, I think, the most top of funnel KPI that we looked at from a, is this working? Now we had our own website, dump your data vendor dot com, and so we were able to track because Sixense has best in class reverse IP lookup and web denonymization, we were able to track which accounts are hitting that page, which pages are resonating most, what is the scroll through rate, what is, you know, the source of that traffic. And so that became a great indicator of are we driving awareness. And then, of course, some of the more bottom of funnel type things like actual demo requests and inbound calls to the hotline. And I would say this is this is one of those campaigns where we were sort of firing on in every kind of sales interaction that we have. Right? Because, again, Simon talked about accounts that are moving forward. For us, we live and die by accounts that hit that later stage decision of purchase. We call it six QA, call it a qualified account, whatever be whatever you say. So accounts hitting those, that’s when our sales team and our BDR team is saying, hey. This account’s showing a lot of activity. You know, go ahead and do an outreach. They were able to use, again, the the email cadences that were given to them. At the same time, we have a concept of a sixQL because we are acronym crazy here at six cents, which is that’s when somebody hits our site and says, hey, I want a demo. I wanna learn more. And we had a specific way, okay, anyone that was coming and asking for a sales intelligence demo. So we were measuring that. So we really had a number of different ways to progression six QA, six QL. Since we were aiming for both that brand awareness and of course the direct like, hey we want we want the real the goods. We need pipeline from an advertising perspective. Just like even understanding how many accounts were reached. Because, again, we did have a pretty wide net. We wanted customers and prospects just to know who we were, just start to associate the product with us. That was actually a really important metric for us just to look at the the overall reach of these campaigns. And, of course, click through rates and and all that were important as well, but a very high level metric was helpful because we knew thousands of these accounts are starting to get exposed to the message, which was a hugely valuable part of this as well. Yeah. And then I think the one other piece maybe we didn’t mention was we ran ads. And so we we looked at ad performance metrics as well in a lot of depth, and we kind of blew all of our own benchmarks out of the water with this one. Yeah. I mean, the thing that I think this really comes down to video creative just performs better. And then crazy people video creatives, I’m gonna call it, because we did go a little bit which if you go to that website, the dumper data vendor, you can see it. So much to the point where actually I feel like it was like a day before we were gonna watch. I think I even said to you. I’m like, should we show this to some people before we go just to make sure that we haven’t totally lost our minds? That was actually, I think, probably the first time I’ve ever been like, wait a minute. Did we go too far? But, anyway, we didn’t. I think it was tasteful. Yeah. It was fun. And so we hit the five steps. In the end, I think, you know, let’s just talk a little bit about the so what and and the outcome. I think we hit a nerve in a positive way beyond just the pipeline and the interest that we were able to drive. I mean, I mentioned at the beginning of this call that product line is our fastest growing SKU at this point. So we’ve done a great job of driving pipeline for the company for our sales intelligence product line. But we had so many organic sort of posts coming out about, number one, bringing humor back into b two b, which was lovely to see because I think we laugh a lot at sixth sense and, you know, sometimes you don’t know if it’s just we’re in this bubble. You know, we laugh at our own jokes, but it really resonated externally where people just loved the fact that it was bold and there was humor involved. I think people really got that nostalgia component, and and I think somebody even posted or a couple of folks posted about how this hearken them back to a time of, you know, coming home from school and, like, sitting in front of the TV and seeing the infomercials come. So that’s the beauty of great campaigns. They go beyond sort of yes. They’ll do the job of driving awareness and driving pipeline, but they’ll also hit home and resonate with that target audience. The nice thing to say about it too is, like, we did go so crazy, but it was very much date of act. And it was very much following these steps, looking at what the accounts look like. Like, we could have done something wild and just would have been completely off point. And people would have been like, you crazy. But it was I think just the steps were so helpful to outline it, to have the data, to understand it. And it’s a really good way to keep yourself honest and just follow a process. And think about whatever you’re doing. Right? Like, I’m gonna do a competitive takeout campaign. Even if you’re gonna go after pre event for a conference or, you know, a new product launch itself that doesn’t have it. I mean, there’s so many different ways you can do this, and this was just a really good way to sort of keep our eyes on the prize while also sort of having a little bit too much fun on the side. Yeah. We’ve got a couple of other examples of how we’ve used the five steps in our campaign. Those live in six sense dot rev city dot com, which is our website, our online community. We will, in the show notes, put in a little bit of detail on the five steps. I think it as a helpful takeaway. And, you know, we encourage everyone to really apply a sort of thoughtful approach to these campaigns, hit on the five steps because, you know, they’re just very intuitive and and they’re helpful. And then encourage people to to think outside the box and know your audience, meet them where they are, and, make sure that you’ve got really great KPIs in place before you actually launch something. Otherwise, don’t launch it. Let’s be honest. And make sure you bring sales in along the way. Absolutely. Words to live by. So I will say that’s it. So thank you, Simon. That was a great review, and, thanks everybody for joining us. 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. 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