Effectively placing your brand in front of your most important audiences, no matter where they are.

Simple in theory, but sometimes difficult to execute. Especially when you consider all of the digital noise us marketers have to complete with today. But if you can successfully get your brand in front of the right stakeholders within your top accounts, then what?

Well, you’ll need something important to say, promote, or drive action towards. Terminus can help with the whole targeting the right accounts and people part, but we’re also here to help with campaign ideas, design inspiration, and different use cases for this particular lifecycle stage.

So if you’re looking for a starting point or struggling to find your next creative campaign idea, keep reading. As featured in this year’s September Issue, here are 4 campaign ideas that are sure to jumpstart your next brand awareness campaign.

Idea #1: Make A Good First Impression

It’s as simple as that. Use the right technology for targeting (ahem, Terminus) and then catch their attention with creative color combos, photography, illustrative designs, or maybe a little animation. Oh, and make sure your logo and brand colors are included too so they become familiar with and/or recognize your brand. Spoiler alert: it might take more than one post or ad for this to happen. So be sure to utilize every channel available to you so you’ll have more opportunities to make a good first impression, then second impression…then eventually a revenue opportunity for your sales team.

Armstrong Flooring’s ad set below is a great example to feature for this use case. They maximize all of the pixels available with close-up shots of their product. They clearly state how they can help their intended audience. AND they make it look good with strong lettering and photography thrown into a puzzle collage template. Say what matters most, include a visual representation of your product or service, and represent your brand well. It’s as simple as that! And Armstrong Flooring has mastered this approach.

Idea #2: Share Educational Content

Be helpful. Especially if you know your audience is interested in a particular topic, create content related to that topic and find a way to deliver it to them. They’ll love you for it, develop a sense of trust with your brand, and then look you up first when they’re ready to buy. What type of content should you create and share? Think of educational resources like ebooks, white papers, reports, or anything else that can be valuable for your audience to use.

iCIMS practiced what we’re preaching here with this ad set. They’re promoting a comprehensive guide on how to attract talent. Since they are trying to help businesses attract, engage, and hire potential employees with their recruiting software platform, this is the perfect resource to share and use to establish themselves as a thought leader in the world of recruitment. They coupled it with an engaging design that includes strong typography, relevant photography, and some unique design elements in the background. And of course a prominent CTA.

Idea #3: Introduce a Product or Service

Maybe your audience is already familiar with who you are, but do they know what you do? Or do they know what you’ve been up to lately? Promoting a new product or service is the perfect way to strike some initial interest and use it to drive action towards a first call or meeting. It can be something specific like a new nifty feature (like Perq’s AI leasing assistant below) or a large announcement like an acquisition or new product line.

And if you’re going to introduce something new, make it look cool. Make it intriguing. Share just enough to grab their attention, but leave them wanting more details so they click and engage with your brand. As you can see below, animation helps with that. So does a multi-channel campaign, and a cute robot mascot that winks.

Idea #4: Promote Your Upcoming Event

Do you have an upcoming webinar, virtual workshop, or in-person dinner or party coming up? This is a great way to get any of your target accounts into your funnel and is the perfect opportunity for them to get to know your brand. If your event is educational or has good energy, that can make an impact on their first impression of your brand. Plus it provides a starting point to reach out or follow up after the event to keep the conversation going.

For you event marketers, we know how much of an investment (both money and time) you put into hosting an event. Why not maximize every channel available to you to ensure the right people are there? This includes the emails you and your coworkers send to your most important customers and prospects every day. As you can see below, the email signature represents the perfect opportunity to promote your upcoming event.

Knowing which accounts to target and finding all possible ways to engage with them ultimately leads to more pipeline and revenue for your team. And it all starts with brand awareness and a strong first impression. So use these ideas above, the 100+ other ideas in the Terminus September Issue, and the right account-based engagement platform to make it all happen. We’ll be here, ready to help if you need us.

The post 4 Brand Awareness Campaign Ideas for Your ABM Strategy appeared first on Terminus.

Mallory Lee, Revenue Operations at Terminus, and Mark Znutas, Vice President of GTM Strategy and Operations at HubSpot, discuss the intricacies of RevOps and why it’s so revolutionary.

What we discuss:

• The biggest myths of RevOps
• How the RevOps position is measured & transitioned into
• When is a company ready to invest in RevOps?
• The go-to-market and RevOps connection

The Biggest Myths of Revops

As RevOps’ popularity and adoption among businesses continues to rise, many preconceived notions about the position have bubbled to the surface. In an effort to understand the role and its unique benefits to a business, the following are some common myths:

• It’s more than Salesforce admin: Creating campaigns, providing Excel spreadsheets or reports, and cleaning up data are important parts of the RevOps role but, in no way, the entire position.
• RevOps is not that different from other operations: Compared to sales operations or marketing operations, many have made the assumption that RevOps is an entirely foreign concept. With this in mind, businesses should focus on aligning RevOps with other operations; otherwise risk RevOps becoming siloed.
• RevOps doesn’t mean the death of other operations: Similar to the myth above, RevOps does not take away the importance of marketing and sales. Rather, it helps embolden other operations as long as all roles are aligned.

”It’s more about aligning those teams and having a cohesive view of that end-to-end customer experience; and that’s really the value of RevOps.” – Mark Znutas

How the Revops Position Is Measured & Transitioned Into

Employees that transition into the RevOps role come from a variety of internal backgrounds: marketing, finance, and sales.

Because of the professional differences, it can be difficult to measure the success of the RevOps role — an employee with a marketing background might measure success differently than someone in sales.

Ways to Measure Success

How success is measured still differs from business to business, but some key areas of interest are as follows:

• Creating tight forecasts
• Having good predictability
• Suing data metrics of new business vs. terminated business
• Enabling and aligning internal operations

When Is a Company Ready to Invest in Revops?

It can be difficult to gauge when a company is ready to take on RevOps: transitioning a large company requires retraining many employees whereas training a brand new company might not utilize RevOps as much as they could if they were bigger.

With so much grey area, Mallory Lee shares a good place to start:

“It happens when you start to feel the pain of being disconnected; or you start to feel
the pain of having silos and people using different metrics to judge success.”

So, while there might always be some regret on not integrating RevOps earlier, a business can take comfort in knowing that refusing to take on RevOps ever is infinitely more damaging.

The Go-to-Market and Revops Connection

The question of how go-to-market and RevOps are connected is tricky and will continue to change over time: Does RevOps answer to the go-to-market team or is it the other way around?

Why Not Both?

The connection between the two varies from business to business and ultimately depends on how much importance has been given to RevOps. The question might also be tough to answer because the two roles seem to be merging.

“I think they’re just so connected, that they’re almost the same thing.” – Mallory Lee

Time will tell what RevOps will look like in the near future; but what can be counted on is RevOps’ ability to continually align a business — acting as the engine to a business model.

To continue the conversation, visit www.linkedin.com/in/mallorylee/ or www.linkedin.com/in/markznutas/.

This is based on an episode of the #FlipMyFunnel podcast. Check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or here.

The post How RevOps is Integrating into Existing Company Structures appeared first on Terminus.

What did 2020 teach you? 

I have a number of guests joining me live to share their biggest lessons from the year that was, as we look ahead into 2021.

Here’s what we’re unpacking today:

• Lessons from 2020
• Tips for heading into 2021

Confession #1: pulling back on video

Darryl: When COVID hit, I thought that production quality of webinars and live streams would drop, so I made the call to pull back until when I assumed this would all be over. 

I thought people would relish the comeback we would make after the pandemic. I didn’t expect what actually happened, which was for virtual events and dynamic social communities to blow up.

Confession #2: being ‘too hands-on’

Michael:  While in my head, I was being right beside folks, I started to realize that I was creeping in a little bit on my team’s ability to execute on their own vision.

I was getting too close – too stuck in the weeds. At the later stages of Q4, I managed to pull myself out of it a little bit though.

Darryl: I’ve had employees come into my office, when I was VP of Marketing, and tell me “Dude, you’re killing us. You correct everything we do. You’re so much better than we are that you’ll always find something to correct. When are you going to trust us to do the job?”

I didn’t think I was doing that but when that moment came, I understood how it affected the team’s morale and confidence. They’re unable to move when they expect you to take over.

I changed my style at that point and jumped in only when there would be something critical. If they did underperform, I would use that as a teachable moment instead of me correcting them all the time.

Confession #3: to hire or not to hire?

Judd: I’ve talked to a lot of people who thought they’d be in a downward trend, but there’s actually growth.

Many of the confessions relate to this in the sense that there’s a fear of growing when the world seems to be shutting down. If they’re pushing forward, they’re doing so tentatively and it ends up even costing them.

I’ve often heard, “We should have pulled the trigger.”

People waited too long, thinking that the best people would become available to them when the market opened up again. 

Confession #4: starting from scratch

Lisa: Prior to 2020, I had earned my reputation working for other leaders who would ask me along with them as they entered new roles. 

As 2020 was my first experience of being without a job, it presented me with the time and space that I needed to think deeply about what I loved, where I really wanted to be with my career and what I needed to do to get there.

No longer having a reputation to precede me was a learning experience for sure. I had to re-learn about team engagement and management. 

I discovered that the only way for my team to get what they needed, to get their jobs done, was for me to pave the way. I had to be that connecting thread across all the different layers and parts of the company.

Darryl: What I can add in there is that the Head of HR and the Head of Finance are worth connecting with in that kind of situation: you’re new; you don’t know anyone; you haven’t yet established your reputation.

Those two people can help you with insights into your current people and budgets. They help you find the right new people worth including in your team.

Confession #5: “I didn’t ‘work the floor’”

Kira: My in-the-office behavior didn’t come with me to Zoom when I began to work from home.

All of the information and opportunities to help people, that I collected from walking around the office, disappeared. Zoom created a comfort zone where this no longer happened, and my personal brand suffered as a result.

I limited myself to only scheduled conversations, becoming less helpful and memorable to people. Now I know I need to focus on business development and arranging my day.

Judd: I think  personal brand is one of the biggest most imperative focuses for Marketer moving forward into 2021.

If you’re not focused on developing it in the right way then you’re going in the wrong direction. It’s not just external, either. It’s imperative for your own growth; to do your job properly. 

I hope more people take the reins on their personal brands this year – Marketers are the worst marketers of themselves.

Darryl: Collecting that data and connecting with the aim of helping people is even more important as a consultant. When the CEO/CMO hires you to overcome a specific challenge, you’re hearing only their perspective on the issue at hand.

Making that effort and reaching out to other people for insight will develop more relationships. It also helps with the up-sell goal that you have as a consultant in the space.

Confession #6: true colors emerge in difficult times

Glenn: There’s a famous quote from Maya Angelou: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

I’m not going to name anyone. It doesn’t matter who you think of, either. Co-workers, friends, family: in times of chaos and stress, like we’re living through right now, our real personalities surface.

Keep your eyes and ears open.

Confession #7: doubting remote work

Gaurav: I didn’t think remote work would be successful for marketing teams. Now I think it really works.

Because the entire world was shutting down in March of 2020, we paused for two weeks. We switched back on and decided it was a gamble worth our while. 

We’re still learning but it’s been a good year for us.

Key takeaways

1. Don’t let fear take over. Be the best version of yourself and keep going.
2. Togetherness: if we can continue to come together and support one another, we’re in for a good year ahead.
3. Community: go out and find people who share your passion and can help you achieve your goals.

This is a #FlipMyFunnel podcast. Check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or here.

And if a thriving community of growth-oriented marketers sounds like your kind of place, be sure to check out PEAK Community.

The post CMO Confessions & Resolutions appeared first on Terminus.

There’s a growing realization that features and functions don’t win market share alone, which means more marketers are getting a seat in the c-suite. 

And whether you’re already there or want to join them… 

You need to remember that a rockstar CMO’s job is creating ART. 

In this takeover episode, Barb Mosher Zinck speaks with Ian Truscott, Founder of Rockstar CMO and Head of Content at iManage, about why great marketers turn content into ART. 

The ART of marketing

If you want to rise to the level of CMO, you obviously need to be taken seriously by the c-suite you plan on joining. 

Even if you are already there, you’ll likely want to prove your value in the role. 

That takes a laser-focus on improving the metrics that really matter for marketers in a business — not the vanity metrics that many marketers mistakenly key in on. 

Luckily, there are really only 3 fundamental areas all of your metrics should be built around — and they turn marketing into ART: 

1. Awareness 
2. Revenue
3. Trust

“Marketing needs to remember that its role in the business is to do three things: Get awareness. Get revenue. And get trust.”

And, in an age when businesses are obsessed with growth hacking, let’s just look at these in terms of growth. 

Awareness

This one is mostly self explanatory — if new customers aren’t aware your solution exists and that you can solve their problems, then they are going to look elsewhere. 

If you want to grow, you need awareness.

But awareness is also ensuring not just that you are known, but that you are first in mind when your customers encounter that problem. 

Revenue

This is perhaps the most important for the aspiring or newly-crowned CMO looking to prove themselves to the c-suite, where revenue is the central concern. (Of course, changing the order is a bit of a problem — we’d get stuck with a lot of RAT or TAR wordplay, neither of which have quite the same appeal.)

If you say you want growth, you ultimately are saying you want to increase revenue — otherwise, what’s the point of growing? 

Trust

Trust is everything. Without building trust with your customers, all the awareness in the world won’t help you grow your business. 

Trust is how you turn awareness into revenue. 

If you are going to grow, it’s because your customers trust you to solve their problems. 

Finding your tribe

Successfully building art is the ladder to the c-suite and the way you build ART is through content. 

But not all content is created equal.

To illustrate, let me give you a scenario: 

Your company trains a cat to wear a tux and play the piano — then your marketing department places that video front and center on your website.

You’re going to get a ton of attention, right? You’ll have more visitors than you ever thought possible. 

But how many of them will actually be interacting with your brand? 

Yeah, probably next to none. You created great content, but for the wrong audience. 

You need to discover your tribe. 

“Discover who your tribe is and really lean into those people. This may mean creating content that other people won’t like, but they may not be your people.”

This is why content gimmicks don’t work. You need to be catering to your buyers — their needs, their problems, and their interests. 

And that might exclude some people, but who cares? If it does, then those weren’t your buyers in the first place. 

You want your content to set you up as a trusted leader in your community. Thought leadership gets you awareness, builds trust and, ultimately, drives revenue. 

On word of caution, though: Don’t go overboard branding your thought leadership content. 

Many potential buyers will be weary of the information if it seems like a trap to take their money. Similarly, buyers and influencers may be unlikely to share the content if they believe it makes them look like they are shilling for your organization rather than finding the content valuable. 

The shadow business within every organization

Content builds ART. ART is foundational to the growth of any organization. And that growth is how marketing is becoming more relevant at the upper echelons of business. 

And while, yes, it is marketing’s primary responsibility…ART is too important to be siloed in one department. 

That’s why in the most successful businesses, content is everybody’s responsibility. 

“There’s a shadow business inside of every business: the production of content.”

After all, no matter which department we’re in, we are all working to grow the business, right? 

So, if content is how you do that, everyone has a part to play in creating it. That’s why Ian refers to it as a shadow business in every company. 

If you want to create the best content you can, you need to break down the invisible walls forming your organizational silos. 

The more information each department has on the why behind the tasks they perform for other departments, the better equipped they will be to help your marketing team craft killer content. 

The best way to turn content into ART is together. 

This is a #FlipMyFunnel podcast. Check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or here.

And if a thriving community of growth-oriented marketers sounds like your kind of place, be sure to check out PEAK Community.

The post Ian Truscott Talks Content Management & Building AR‪T‬ appeared first on Terminus.

As a marketer, you’ve probably faced some misunderstanding about what you do — probably from your colleagues in sales. 

Marketers can lament about being misunderstood…  

Or they can take ownership of their role. 

In this Takeover episode, host Casey Cheshire speaks with Tracy Eiler, CMO at Alation, about how an “account pursuit” approach can help marketers take ownership of their role and perceptions about it. 

Dancing with dirty data

Before diving into account pursuit, we need to crush a pervasive marketing myth. 

“The myth that I would love to bust is that we have to live with dirty marketing and sales data. It’s a myth that needs to be debunked.”

Marketers will often complain about duplicate, inconsistent, and incomplete entries in their data — otherwise known as “dirty data.”

Yet, all too often, marketers just accept that this is pain they just have to live with. Or, if they do try to do something about it, they only fix bits and pieces of the problem (usually manually and in an ad hoc fashion). 

It may just seem like an inconvenience, but it’s actually costing your company. Often millions of dollars are lost through easy-to-fix issues like datasets needing to be merged or de-duped. 

Sure, it’s never going to be perfect, but it can be a lot better than what it is. 

And it’s not that complicated to fix the problem.

These days, there are all sorts of services that can clean up your data infinitely better than occasionally manual repairs. 

So, why is this happening and what does it have to do with account pursuit? 

Well, misconceptions about the difficulty of the task abound. But, when it comes to account pursuit — and aggressively targeting all the personas you need to target — then dirty data is a sign of an existing problem and a promise of future ones. 

The existing problem is that nobody in marketing has taken ownership of fixing the dirty data issues.

The future problem is that this is really going to mess up your account-based approach to marketing. 

Account pursuit vs. ABM

So, why does Tracy prefer account pursuit to ABM as a term? 

For the most part, it’s to clarify the focus of your account-based efforts. 

“In healthy companies, sales and marketing — usually partnered with someone in finance — are going to do an ideal customer profile analysis.”

Tracy prefers account pursuit because it implies more than just marketing tactics and factors in the fact that there is a customer lifecycle that doesn’t end when the new customer signs the deal.

Account pursuit, to her mind, means that the pursuit continues to make sure the customer is onboarded and getting value, which then earns you the right to have an upsell conversation which, in turn, earns you the right to have an advocate conversation. 

Pursuit is your commitment to the lifetime of a customer. 

She likes to think of the funnel as an infinity symbol signifying these steps:

1. Find
2. Engage
3. Close
4. Grow

In this model, it’s not only targeting new logo accounts your organization sees as its ideal customers, but it also carries through as they are a customer. 

And account pursuit is not just limited to sales and marketing — it incorporates customer success and experience into the mix. 

This not only clarifies the aims of an account-based approach, but it cements the company as one unified entity in the mind of the customer. 

Understanding (and being understood by) sales

We’ve already mentioned the importance of marketing owning its challenges — as in the case of dirty data — but it’s worthwhile to dive a little deeper into the problem when marketers don’t do this. 

Namely, marketing gets woefully misunderstood. 

How many times have you had a conversation with someone in sales who doesn’t seem to know what you do — or worse, thinks they can do their job better than you? 

In fact, 60% of sellers think that marketing’s primary job is branding and events (or “colors and parties,” depending on who you ask).

Okay, now be honest: How many times have you thought the same way about sales? 

Maybe you aren’t guilty of it yourself, but statistics show that 25% of marketers think they can do a better job than sales leaders.

Yeah, you can’t. 

“Shame on us in marketing for not explaining our value and what we do more transparently to sales and in a way that they can understand.”

If we take the dirty data example, some marketers might wonder why they need to own the issue in the first place — maybe it should be sales, right? 

Well, sales has a difficult job ahead monomaniacally pursuing revenue in the quarter ahead. That’s why it’s up to you to take ownership of the problem. 

It’s also why your perception of sales as bullies with short attention spans doesn’t quite hit the mark. 

They really don’t have any extra time to spend on you — but this misconception as to why makes it so that, even when they do, why would they want to?

If you want to pull off a successful account pursuit, you need communication with sales to be great. After all, you need both teams working together to pull it off. 

But that can’t happen without empathy for the hard work each role takes. 

So, if you want to deliver value for the entire lifecycle of a customer… 

Heal the divide and go hug a salesperson. 

Or, at least, try to see where they are coming from. 

It’ll help you both out in the long run. 

This is a #FlipMyFunnel podcast. Check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or here.

The post How Account Pursuit Differs from ABM appeared first on Terminus.

In the latest episode taken from B2BSMX, Seleste Lunsford, Chief Research Officer at Emissary.io, speaks about the 4 most successful account-based strategies for sales and marketing.

1. Identify the accounts with the most potential

For future investment, you want to get the most out of your dollars, so you need to identify the accounts with the most potential.

That means any account that is likely to actually adopt your product or service much broader or wider than you expect from them. 

Identifying these accounts is key for finding opportunities that lead to a reduction in acquisition costs — or preserve priority relationships you’ve already established — and means you will use your resources more effectively going forward. 

One way to identify these accounts is through thorough research, like intelligence reports.

“Quantitative research is what our sellers are really looking for.”

These intelligence reports should give you insight into business policies, competitive landscape, buying behavior, and even the culture traits of a given account.

2. Expand your existing accounts

The same research that you use to identify high potential accounts will help you when it comes to this step. 

If you have the actionable intelligence from thorough research, you’ll be able to find new avenues to serve these accounts. 

There is one consideration to keep in mind, however: You still want your sellers to be selling.

Which means it might be helpful to outsource engagement to advisors who can engage these accounts and find their needs, providing actionable insights to your sellers. 

“This is the year of the existing customer in the sense that, since a lot of organizations are more risk averse, they’re more likely to look to their incumbents.”

3. Take a bottom-up approach

Everything you do should be geared towards helping your customers become more successful. 

This helps build trust, and they will perpetuate the use of your service. 

Instead of selling a product, you should be solving problems that allow your users to succeed.

To do that, you need to find key decision makers to target, but also key users to gain insight from. 

How are users succeeding with your product? 

Finding this out not only gives you the key info you need to help others succeed, it also lets you find those users most likely to champion your product or service. 

4. Get executive access

This is trickier in the post-pandemic world, but in order to most effectively get word out about how you can solve problems — and organizational buy-in to let you solve them — you, of course, need to target the people who can make it happen. 

This means using business-level messaging, figuring out the best way to formulate a deal for a particular account, and actually understanding the best communication channels to leverage. 

Measuring success

As with any successful ABM approach, you’re not going to get an instant win, but if you use these strategies effectively, you should see some long-term success. 

Of course, as with anything, you need a clear understanding of what success looks like to get there. 

So, it’s important to map pipeline-generation to the sales organization and actually tying the impact you are having to a revenue number. 

After all, how do you know you’re succeeding if you can’t measure it? 

This is a #FlipMyFunnel podcast. Check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or here.

The post 4 Successful Account-Based Strategies For Sales & Marketing and Why They Deliver Results appeared first on Terminus.

Marketing automation is vital for every marketer not trapped in the dark ages. 

Yet, despite its importance, there isn’t a whole lot of information on the subject out there. 

But that doesn’t mean you have to tackle the challenge blindly. 

In this Takeover episode, guest host Ethan Beute speaks with Casey Cheshire, Founder & CMO at Cheshire Impact and author of Marketing Automation Unleashed, about the secrets to successful marketing automation. 

The biggest myth about marketing automation

Before we dive into the nitty gritty of marketing automation, it’s helpful to crush the most pervasive myth about it… 

Marketing technology is an ongoing process, not a one time thing. 

“Marketing technology is not done being set up when the implementation is complete. Implementation is just the start.”

The tools used in marketing automation are game-changers.

But not if you just implement it and never adjust. 

Marketing technology needs to constantly adapt to your situation to be truly effective. 

Implementation is only the beginning. 

And that’s because once you implement, you need to constantly test and evaluate what is working and what isn’t. You need to iteratively improve on your systems. 

Why you need marketing automation (and help implementing)

Okay, so with that out of the way… 

Why do you need marketing automation in the first place? 

This may seem like a stupid question. But surprisingly, there are plenty of organizations who haven’t joined the 21st century and embraced the miraculous futuristic tech of marketing automation.

And that means they are wasting a lot of time and energy that could be better spent on more important tasks. 

“Doing marketing — especially in B2B — without a marketing automation platform is blind. It might as well be the Mad Men days.”

Marketing automation allows you to free up your marketers by assigning the menial, non-creative tasks (that, let’s be honest, most of them hate doing) to a robot. Or software, I guess…but that doesn’t sound as futuristic. 

It’s not that these tasks aren’t just as important, it’s just that the brilliant creative minds on your marketing team only have so many hours to tackle the toughest challenges of the job. Automation lets them work on these tricky tasks without needing to sweat the small stuff. 

Automation technology can schedule and send emails, it can keep track of the information you’ve gathered from prospective customers, and it can make your life a whole lot easier. 

Implementation…with a running start

So, we’ve already covered that implementation isn’t the end of your automation journey  — it’s the beginning. 

Still, it makes sense to have some help getting there. 

There is a dearth of information out there on automation and — though Casey’s book is helping to change that — this means many companies experience some growing pains on their way to implementing. 

There’s that saying that you have to learn to crawl, then walk, then run, right? 

Well, in business, sometimes that time scale is too long (and too expensive). So, it helps to seek out a consultant to help get your automation up and running.

With some expert advice, you can learn what has or hasn’t worked for similar organizations in the past and skip some of the worst growing pains. 

That means, when you finally do implement, you’re already at a full sprint, ready to challenge Usain Bolt in the 200m finals of marketing automation. 

The 3 steps to success

So what does a successful marketing automation strategy look like in practice? 

You just need to remember 3 things: 

1. Capture
2. Nurture
3. Automate

Capture

This is where you collect data. Everything from who’s landing on your website to what qualifies as a great lead. 

This typically starts with forms — magical forms — that encourage prospects to give up some of their data in exchange for great content. 

But be warned: This doesn’t mean you can just launch a thousand questions at everyone who ends up on your page.

That’s like proposing at the end of the first date. And, unless you’re in a Rom Com set in Vegas…that’s a terrible idea.  

“Don’t try to one-night-stand your prospects. They deserve better than that.”

The best approach is to take many dates to ask your questions. If you are married, I guarantee you didn’t ask for a blood type and SSN on the first date. 

If you aren’t…well asking that on the first date might be why. 

And there is data that backs up limiting your initial questions to the bare minimum. In fact, you will get up to 15% more leads by trimming out the overly-forward questions. 

Instead of thinking “What data do I need?” try asking what experience your customer wants. 

Nurture

If you have leads who aren’t ready to buy for whatever reason at that time, you need to make sure that when they are ready, you are the first place they turn to. 

That’s nurturing. 

And many organizations get this wrong. 

For instance, if you get a response to call back in 6 months and wait until then to ever contact your prospect, you’re likely wasting a call. 

A lot can happen in 6 months.

But if you make sure to keep in contact, share helpful information, and show you care about solving the problem your prospect faces, you will be the first they turn to when the time comes. 

Automate

Okay, I get that it’s a little weird to have “automate” in the steps to getting great automation. But bear with me. 

Automation needs to have a strategy to be effective. 

Which means you need to meticulously plan out what can be automated and what only your team members can do. 

We already looked at the importance of automation in freeing up employees’ time — which is the main purpose of automation in the first place — but you need to make sure it’s actually doing that. 

That’s where strategy comes in. 

In particular, making sure to accurately capture a lead score as well as a lead grade.

Casey gives a great example of how miscalibrating automation without these 2 elements can backfire:

Imagine you are only going off of a lead score based on hits to a website, etc. You then yell at sales about how this is the biggest lead ever and if they don’t call it you’re going to uninvite them from your nephew’s bar mitzvah. 

Then sales calls and it turns out to be a student who was doing research. That’s not a good lead. That’s a terrible lead.

Well, now sales is still mad that you never give good leads and your team will keep complaining that sales never follows up on leads. 

So, mend the rift between sales and marketing by making sure to have a strategy behind your automation.

Get out there and automate

These steps should get you well on your way to great marketing automation. 

But the most important thing to remember is that strategy comes before everything else — and that strategy will need to adapt over time. 

Just doing more activity doesn’t necessarily lead to more results. 

That activity always needs to have a purpose behind it. 

This is a #FlipMyFunnel podcast. Check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or here.

The post Capture, Nurture, Automate: Marketing Automation Made Simple appeared first on Terminus.

Now let’s skip ahead to the present (and future) with an account-based strategy. If leads are now not the main goal for your marketing and sales team, what should you focus on instead to measure success? And how can you optimize your program to create more qualified sales opportunities, faster? We’re so glad you asked.

First let’s look at what a basic funnel looks like for account-based teams (a more in-depth overview can be found here). This funnel might be a little more complicated or nuanced for your particular business, but this should be foundationally similar to most sales processes.

Sidenote: While we’ve had many requests for average baseline conversion rates, we want to go ahead and say it out loud: every company is very different and establishing baselines would do more harm than good. Rather than look at what others are doing, find out for yourself. If you’re just getting started, choose reasonable baseline conversion rates. If they’re too low, congratulations, you just blew past your target. If they’re too high, you’ll have a good sense of what areas you need to optimize the most.

Target Accounts

Target Accounts: The number of accounts you’re targeting when running a coordinated campaign. This could be a number in the thousands if you’re going after a broad set of companies with low commonality (e.g. ‘manufacturers located in the US) or just a few companies (e.g. your ‘white whale’ account list).

How To Measure Target Accounts: Easy! Count the number of accounts on a given target account list.

How to Optimize Target Accounts: It’s important to remember a main priority of any account-based program: focus on tight segments of companies to which you can deliver personalized campaigns. If your list is too broad, the conversion rates that cascade from here will be weaker. Here are a few ideas that can help:

Run a Content Audit:

Understand the marketing content you currently have and the types of industries or personas for whom it was created. Be ruthless in your appraisal! You might think your content is great for everyone but the golden rule in ABM is: if you’re marketing to everyone, you’re not really marketing to anyone. This can help you filter out companies in your target account list or create a more specific segment of similar companies.

Diversify Your Segments:

It’s okay (and preferable even) to run multiple simultaneous campaigns at varying levels of personalization and investment. The ITSMA ABM pyramid can give you an idea of how to invest into different segments, which will help you tighten up your target account lists.

Leverage Intent Data:

Target account lists don’t have to be static. In fact, they’re better if they’re dynamic with target accounts automatically flowing in and out of campaigns based on the various intent signals they’re demonstrating. Whether they’re researching topics germane to your business, researching your category on G2, or putting out psychographic signals, you can harness all of this data to create razor-sharp, dynamic target account lists.

Engaged Accounts

Engaged Accounts: The number of accounts in a given target account list that are clicking your ads, visiting your website, opening your emails, or showing any other digital interaction with your brand.

How To Measure Engaged Accounts: [Engaged Accounts / Target Account List]

How to Optimize Engaged Accounts: This particular conversion rate is the most volatile and, at times, unpredictable stage in the ABM funnel. Let’s look at some of the things that can cause engagement rates to fluctuate.

Advertising Reach:

Not all targeted advertising vendors are created equal. Even in normal circumstances, the match rates (the companies attempting to be targeted and the companies successfully targeted) can fluctuate based on the volumes of data that go into that targeting process, the automation in place to keep that data fresh, and even the means by which they’re targeting (IP vs. Cookies). However, in the new paradigm where work-from-home is much more common, it’s very possible that your ad vendor’s match rates have plummeted. Terminus was almost eerily prepared to adapt to COVID.

Advertising Creative:

This is where the art and science of ABM comes together most beautifully. Your ad creative is limited to your imagination, giving you endless possibilities to improve. We don’t have time to run a full ad creative clinic in this blog post, but the copy you use and the design of the ad can have an incredible impact on engagement rates. For some design inspiration, check out this year’s September Issue, featuring over 100 Terminus customers’ best looking (and best performing) ad creative.

Target Account List Size:

Personalization drives engagement, full stop. If your target account list is too big it almost certainly means that your ad creative is too impersonal, causing low engagement rates. Tighten up your target audience and provide them with more tailored content and messaging.

Take a Surround-Sound Approach:

The average professional spends an absurd amount of time online and the bulk of that time is spent in three places:

• Their inbox
• Social media
• The rest of the Internet

Don’t constrain your brand awareness campaigns to just one of those channels, spread it across all of them. The more places your ads show up, the better chance you have of engaging with someone.

Opportunities Created

Opportunities Created: The accounts that have engaged with your brand (both digitally and in person), have shown interest, and have been qualified as a legitimate revenue opportunity.

How To Measure Opportunities Created: [Open Opportunities / Engaged Accounts]

How to Optimize Opportunities Created: The tricky thing about optimizing your opportunity creation rate is that it doesn’t all happen in the vacuum of the marketing department. Creating an opportunity almost always involves intervention from the members of your sales team (or your customer team if it’s a customer-facing campaign). However, there are a couple of things you can do to help your sales team help themselves to improve this rate.

Ad Retargeting:

Retargeting your ads to contacts and accounts that have already visited your site is a great way to further saturate them with more economical ads. The more engagement that’s being created by your marketing team, the more context and urgency your sales team will have in reaching out to them and striking up a conversation.

Account Engagement Modeling:

Just like old-school marketers have built MQL criteria, account-based marketers should build similar frameworks to help control the number of accounts your sales team is working on. Work collaboratively with your sales team to help establish a shared definition of an engaged account. Does an account clicking on a single ad count as an ‘engaged account’? Probably not. Does an account with dozens of clicks, visiting several different web pages, including two ‘high value’ pages count as an engaged account? Probably! When sales and marketing agree on this, identifying and creating legitimate opportunities becomes a smoother process.

Create Better Outreach Strategies:

Successful marketing teams work hard to create highly personalized and immersive experiences for their target accounts, and so should the sales team. Marketing can help sales by giving them as much relevant information as possible about their engaged accounts. Do the website pages they visit establish a pattern about what aspects of your product/service they’re most interested in? Do you already have relationships with other members of a visitor’s company that you can leverage for a warm intro? Are you creating direct mail or gifting strategies together to get more people to take a demo? This is the moment where sales and marketing teams create new pipeline together, so give 110% of your energy to this stage of your funnel.

Sales Velocity

Sales Velocity: The average number of days from when an opportunity is created to when they become a new customer.

How To Measure Sales Velocity: This can be measured simply by averaging the number of days an opportunity existed before closing, but you may want to apply some more measurement discipline to this. Consider creating cohorts of opportunities– by segment, company size, etc., so you can measure the velocity of different sorts of companies.

How to Optimize Sales Velocity: If 2020 was the year of “customer retention”, we’re going to go ahead and call 2021 the year of “pipeline acceleration.” While speeding up sales may not have a meaningful impact on your business, or seem like something marketing can help with, both couldn’t be further from the truth. Even if you shaved a couple of days off of your average sales cycle, that time adds up! By the end of the year, you could be giving your sales team full extra weeks worth of selling time and if you’ve ever been in an end-of-quarter crunch you know how valuable that can be!

1. Remember the Double Funnel

Regardless of whether a new opportunity was sourced from your ABM program or it came through an inbound channel, as soon as it exists as an opportunity you should give it the white-glove treatment your target accounts get. That brings us to the second way to increase sales velocity.

2. Develop Stage-Based Campaigns

Assuming your sales team uses disparate sales stages to monitor pipeline health and progress-to-quota, you can use those same stages to automate marketing campaigns tailored to their position in the sales cycle. As opportunities progress, swap out awareness campaigns for ROI campaigns like case studies and showcasing your reviews. Consider the various personas that join your buying committee later in sales and start targeting those roles with ads on LinkedIn as well.

3. Make Sales and Marketing Teams Best Friends

One of the most beautiful parts of an account-based approach is that it removes the friction between sales and marketing teams. With everyone focused on the same target accounts, you’re suddenly pulling in the same direction. Use this to your advantage and have ongoing conversations about the active deals your sales team is working. Brainstorm ways you can help them pull open opportunities over the line and celebrate each other’s work when it finally happens.

Closed/Won Deals

At this point, there’s not much more to optimize. Your increased win rates are a function of you tuning up everything that came before it. The optimization ideas we gave you are just the tip of the iceberg– there are so many different ways to improve your conversion rates at every stage of your buyer’s journey, but the best thing you can do is dive in. Start small and remember that every little optimization will start to add up. ABM isn’t going to be an overnight success, but after some experimentation and collaboration, it will become a transformational go-to-market strategy for your company.

Stay tuned for another post on optimizing and measuring ABM success – next time we’ll focus on customer retention and expansion.

The post How to Measure and Optimize Your Entire ABM Funnel appeared first on Terminus.

Will we ever see 100% of companies practicing ABM?

That’s sort of a trick question – yes, but we won’t call it “ABM” anymore. As teams continue to adjust to increasingly crowded spaces with tightening budgets, a lot of what we call ABM will simply just become smart, B2B marketing. With that said, we’re still seeing some variation on the trend curve.

For those who have fully adopted ABM, our recent State of ABM report indicates that these organizations will maintain or increase resources to their ABM programs in 2021. However, for those who have just started on their account-based journey or are looking to expand their budget to scale their efforts, getting leadership and the sales team bought in will be a critical step to a successful implementation.

Starting with ABM can be small and gradual, but understand that it ultimately represents an organizational shift. We’re here to help with that.

We’re here as advocates for those executing account-based programs, but we’re also here as a resource for the teams looking to get started. That’s why we put together this resource that can help marketing team members navigate this conversation with their leadership team and/or help VPs or CMOs sell the value of ABM to all revenue teams.

Here are the four main things to understand and/or speak to when pitching or considering a shift to ABM:

• Why the shift to ABM?
• Is ABM just a technology? Or a revenue-generating strategy?
• Why is an omnichannel approach the most effective way to execute ABM?
• What is the business impact of ABM?

Understand the Shift to ABM (and the Numbers That Show Why It’s Happening)

When was the last time “everyone is doing it!” was a good enough excuse? In order to pitch or understand the need for ABM, we know it’s important to focus less on the “who is doing it” and more on the “why”.

Over the past decade, B2B buyers have enthusiastically embraced the internet to research technologies, find solutions to their key business pains, and evaluate vendors, often before ever visiting a company website or talking with a salesperson. This digital shift has catalyzed technological advances that are helping B2B marketers engage with buyers more effectively through online channels such as display advertising, chatbots, sales engagement tools, and website personalization.

Due to this shift, many companies have turned to account-based marketing to connect with their B2B customers more effectively. This shift is a result of the B2B buying process dramatically changing. Here are a few reasons why:

• 70% of the buyer’s journey is done before outreach to sales is made. – SiriusDecisions
• Only 0.75 percent of leads generated become closed revenue. – Forrester
• 73% of B2B buyers consume between three to seven pieces of content before speaking with a salesperson. – Demand Gen Report

Your buyers are more well-informed than ever. Your marketplace is busier than ever. ABM gives your team an edge by helping to shape the perception of only your most important buyers.

In 2020, COVID and virtual work environments spurred an even bigger rush to ABM. Terminus’ 2019 State of ABM Report found that 23% of respondents had no active ABM program, while 2020’s study reported only 5.8%. That means an overwhelming 94% of today’s revenue teams have an ABM strategy in place or are planning on implementing one.

For many teams, 2020 also accelerated the shift from a top-of-funnel “leads” strategy to a full-funnel revenue strategy. For mature ABM programs, creating new revenue faster and retaining customers are now the central focus for their teams. In terms of performance indicators, these top three were more important than any other goals – by nearly double.

To summarize, we’re seeing a shift in ABM because B2B marketers are finding a better, more efficient, more precise way to drive revenue and it’s only a matter of time before ABM becomes the dominant strategy for today’s leading companies (and, we have reason to believe that it might not even be called “ABM” anymore).

Remember That You’re Pitching A Whole New Strategy (Not Just New Tech)

Ready for some truth? ABM isn’t easy. And when it’s viewed as just another tool or point-solution that can serve as a “set it and forget it” thing or “silver bullet” to all of your revenue goals and challenges, chances are you won’t be successful. Here’s how we like to explain it:

ABM should be viewed as a shift in your go-to-market strategy. It requires team alignment, planning, strategy, and internal buy-in from all revenue teams.

This takes time and probably some uncomfortable growing pains. But if teams work together and continue to optimize their strategy as they build more audience segments and launch more targeted campaigns, there’s no turning back. “It’s like having a DVR,” as said best by our CEO, Tim Kopp.

Data from Terminus’ 2020 State of ABM Report supports this. As budgets shrunk as a result of COVID-19, budgets dedicated exclusively to ABM programs were resilient, with 80% of mature ABM programs saying their budgets remained the same or increased. Even for companies that had their overall budget reduced, they were still dedicating the same amount of dollars (or more) to their ABM programs.

As the economy became more turbulent and marketing budgets shrank, high-performing companies invested MORE in their ABM programs because they’re leaner and have more predictable revenue results versus legacy demand generation programs.

Emphasize That ABM Requires the Right Tech Stack for Omnichannel Engagement

To bring it full circle for those who do want to focus on the technology, ABM requires more than just one channel, point solution, or data source. Orchestration of multiple points of engagement, tactics, and actionable data is key. That’s why Terminus offers the most channels and data sources than any other ABM platform on the market, all in one platform.

Along with a framework and strategy, ABM technology should enable the key requirements and coordination needed to deliver highly personalized and integrated pre- and post-sales customer experiences. It should help operationalize and scale cross-functional integration of teams and the ancillary technologies necessary to shift the paradigm from just generating leads to orchestrating full-funnel opportunities in the complex ecosystem of larger accounts. Put simply: it’s time for all customer-facing teams to put their most important customers on a pedestal and create immersive, thoughtful experiences for them.

To drive better customer outcomes, ABM should be both marketing and sales driven, enabled with technology and data, with content personalization by segments and key personas throughout the funnel. If that sounds a bit daunting, don’t stress. Evaluate your options and know you just need to start somewhere. And if you need a good starting point on what types of technology, channels, and data sources to consider, check out this handy infographic.

The rate of advancement in marketing is so fast it’ll make your head spin– and it’s showing no signs of slowing. It might sound daunting, but our team has helped thousands just like you climb up the learning curve.

Look at the Business Impact of ABM

Traditionally, your decision-making team has likely viewed marketing’s role in B2B as executing broad-based campaigns, whose success is measured by click-through and open rates, and, ultimately, leads generated for sales. Sales has owned account strategy and engagement, pipeline development, and revenue growth, while the customer success team has focused on after- sales support and issue response to maximize customer satisfaction and retention.

Now we’re seeing all revenue teams own all or some part of a revenue number. A clear focus on revenue also means a focus on the full-funnel:

• Growing brand awareness efficiently by focusing on best-fit future customers.
• Creating opportunities with accounts based on engagement data.
• Accelerating those opportunities to closed/won deals.
• Retaining and growing current customer accounts.

Brutal Truth: If ‘leads’ are still the most important metric for your marketing team, you’re already way behind.

This translates to core revenue metrics like demos/meetings booked, pipeline generated, and ultimately new revenue generated. Along with that, teams today are also trying to increase deal size (LTV/ACV). At its core, ABM is all about unifying revenue teams around smart, targeted, and efficient marketing that can be used to accelerate open opportunities, acquire new customers, and expand relationships with existing customers. Companies that have implemented ABM have achieved faster pipeline growth, higher close rates, larger average deal sizes, and greater customer retention.

ROI Metrics from Terminus Customers:

• “Companies leveraging Terminus see a 313% ROI, 60% increase in opportunities set by their sales development team, 40% reduction in customer acquisition cost, and 20% increase in close rate.” – Forrester Consulting
• “$10 million in sales revenue in a four month period can be attributed to ABM with Terminus.” – Daniel Englebretson, Khronos, Founder & Head of Client Services
• “40% of our new business pipeline was generated from target ABM accounts. And we saw a 45% increase in average opportunity value.” – Sr. Manager, Marketing Operations, digital.ai
• “I cut my costs by half and more than doubled my results.” – Head of ABM at a business services provider
• “ABM shortened our sales cycle by 40%.” – VP of Customer Acquisition, SOASTA
• “31% of our target accounts progressed to the next stage of our sales funnel in the first month.” – Sr. Manager, Marketing Operations, digital.ai

Key Findings from Industry Leaders:

• “Almost 50% of marketing budgets is wasted on generating leads that companies don’t contact.” – Conversica
• “Accounts that see both targeted brand and acquisition messaging are 6x more likely to convert.” – LinkedIn Research
• “Almost 85% of marketers measuring ROI say that ABM outperforms other marketing investments, while 72% reported an uplift in revenue growth.” – ITSMA

Conclusion

No longer is it just about marketing owning top-of-funnel leads or sales owning bottom-of-funnel opportunities. With endless segmenting capabilities based on a wealth of first- and third-party data, more channels than any other platform in the market, and deep analytics that measure every stage of the full funnel, Terminus provides a platform for modern marketers to help their sales and customer success teams succeed. Account-based marketing and Terminus can help your company dramatically grow in more efficient and effective ways than ever before.

The post How to Build a Business Case for ABM appeared first on Terminus.

Next April’s Oscars are going to be fun because only about a dozen movies came out in 2020. At the time of this writing, I believe Sonic the Hedgehog and Bad Boys for Life are the current frontrunners for Best Picture.

But you better believe awards will still be awarded and speeches will still be given the wrap-it-up music, because as they say, the show must go on.

So it is with marketing and sales!

Each year, in partnership with B2BSMX and FlipMyFunnel, we set out to award the best of the best ABM programs. This year may have been a unique one, but we continue to be amazed and inspired by the creativity, adaptability, and teamwork displayed by this year’s finalists.

Without further ado, here are our finalists and winners for Best Acquisition Program, Best Customer Program, Best #OneTeam, and ABM Innovator of the Year!

Best Acquisition Program

Driving net new pipeline continues to be a primary use case for ABM, which is even harder in a time of economic downturn and shrinking budgets. But these teams managed to get targeted, find new ways of engaging buyers, and deliver exceptional results.

Finalists

Alliance Safety Council
Sendoso

Winner

“The teams really went above and beyond in the middle of COVID to rapidly pivot our go-to-market strategy to an ABM approach. It really, truly involved tighter alignment with our sales team in optimizing our AGILE operating model into weekly sprints, utilizing FIRE (fit, intent, recency, engagement) dashboards to drive our daily ABM outreach through marketing, and especially our BDR team.”

— Leslie Renkens, Director of Demand Generation, TTEC 

Best Customer Program

“Retention is the new acquisition” has been our constant refrain over the past several months, and it continues to bear out. But pivoting budget and energy away from net new acquisition to support customer retention and expansion isn’t as easy as flipping a switch. Our finalists this year all saw great results in customer engagement, and this focus will pay even more dividends down the line.

Finalists

Fujitsu Americas, Inc.
InVision

Winner

“When the pandemic hit, I knew that acquisition was going to be a lot tougher. One of the things our CEO discussed was making sure that we turn our attention to our customers. The most important thing for us was keeping churn low and putting our customers first. We worked with our account managers to identify those at-risk and those with a renewal for Q2/Q3 and enrolled them into a campaign with specific content and messaging.”

— Tyler Pleiss, Inbound Marketing Manager, Quantum Workplace

Best #OneTeam

No ABM success story ends with, “and our marketing and sales teams never talk to one another.” But plenty of stories start that way. The #OneTeam mentality is all about bringing go-to-market teams together as — you guessed it — one team to align on accounts, engagement, KPIs, and everything in between.

Finalists

Escher Group
Workiva

Winner

“The ABM world can be a lonely island in bringing on the strategy. It’s so much fun and so exciting to be a part of a team. This is a huge win for Degreed as a whole. We’re very fortunate to have significant support from the broader organization. It’s really an entire team play here encompassing the TEAM (target, engage, activate, measure) methodology, including the sales team being brought on board.”

— Amber Bogie, ABM Manager, Degreed

ABM Innovator of the Year

So you’re crushing pipeline goals, driving significant engagement at all the accounts your sales reps care about, retaining and expanding within your customer base, and have everyone at your organization bought into ABM. But are you doing it in a cool way? ABM innovators go above and beyond to deliver a unique ABM experience and solve complex problems in new ways.

Finalists

ExtraHop Networks
PrecisionHawk

Winner

“Jen has done so much to mobilize the Bazaarvoice team: Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, all together. We’re just really reaping the rewards of that now. We had the biggest Q1 we’ve ever seen, we’re on track to have the biggest Q2 that we’ve ever seen, and that’s from a marketing sourced perspective as well as overall for the business.”

— Kate Hahn, Director, Global Demand Generation and Retention, Bazaarvoice

Congratulations to all of our nominees, finalists, and winners on an exceptionally strong year in ABM! 2020 overall may be   but your ABM programs continue to be .

The post Announcing the 2020 ABMies Winners appeared first on Terminus.