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Speaker 1: (00:00)
Get started, um, Keilan, if you wanna hit the record button, and then we'll go ahead and do an intro. We're recording. Sweet. Uh, well welcome everyone, uh, today. Uh, I'll, I'll do an intro here in a second. Um, but it is us from us today and Drift. Um, and we're gonna talk today about unifying your sales and marketing with an account-based engagement strategy that accelerates revenue, uh, which is a whole bunch of words that we will define and expand on and do everything else. Uh, but first I wanna welcome Mark and I will, I'll give you the mark, the mic mark to do a little bit of an intro, uh, on yourself and your background. Uh, but we have Mark from Drift.

Speaker 2: (00:39)
Thanks Connor. Nice to be here with you folks. And we do wanna make this, uh, conversational. So please have the chat open if you wanna ask us questions throughout it. I'm one of the marketing leaders at Drift focused on the content community education side of things. Been with Drift for about two years now. And before Drift, I was at HubSpot for eight and a half years, actually. So worked very closely with, uh, Brian and Dharmesh, someone you just mentioned, Connor. Um, building up the inbound, you know, movement, inbound marketing, inbound sales movement. Um, at Drift though, now I am focused on several things. One of them is really focused on how we can help customers and potential customers understand how, like revenue acceleration, which we'll talk about today, and account-based engagement type strategies go together and, and how you can use Drift to create a better buying experience, make your sales team more productive, um, and just really personalize the buying and customer experience, which is really Connor essential to account-based engagement.

Speaker 1: (01:43)
Absolutely, and I think this has been really fun for us to put together because I think that so much of the account-based engagement strategies that you guys are both advocating for and, and sort of doing a lot of thought leadership around and providing tool sets for, I think it really ties into, uh, a lot of what we focus on on the rev op side. So I, I'm Connor, uh, I run apps to today. We are a rev ops consulting firm. Um, we're a HubSpot partner, a Drift partner, a Salesforce partner, um, and we help companies build out, uh, the tech stacks and the underlying business process and technology to deliver on the types of strategies that we're gonna run through today. Uh, so with that, we'll jump to what we're gonna cover. So I won't, I won't read these off individually, but what we really wanna start with is explaining, uh, what, what we mean when we talk about an account-based, uh, engagement strategies.

Speaker 1: (02:26)
Um, how they're sort of different from some of the A B M approaches that, uh, a lot of you may have had exposure to before. Um, we're also gonna go through why this matters and, and really the value that you can be bringing to your organization by embracing this type of an approach. Uh, and then really highlighting the drift recipe, which Mark submitted to the 2021 Rev cookbook, which if you haven't taken a look, uh, please do. It's super cool and fun. Uh, and Mark and his team did an amazing job, uh, as did, as did Caitlin, who's on our team and, and put that together, uh, sort of driving this webinar. So we're gonna go through that recipe in detail. Uh, and please, please ask questions along the way. Uh, we'd be more than happy to answer them throughout, uh, if they're pertinent. And then, uh, we'll go through everything at the end as well.

Speaker 1: (03:07)
Um, so I, I think the first, a really good place to start is defining if, if you're familiar with, with a b M and account-based, uh, strategies, then, uh, we really wanna define what is a, b, e and, and kind of what makes it different. So as a starting point, if we jump into the ABM piece of this, um, if, if you're unfamiliar with account-based marketing, it's, it's been a little bit of all the rage the last year. So I think it's, it's starting to wane a little bit, but was was the hot ticket. And so when we talk about an account-based marketing strategy, um, really what this means is, uh, looking at entire accounts and entire companies and, and broadening marketing past, uh, one individual. So marketing team's really taking their look from instead of, how can I get this one person to engage in something or this one person to download something, or this one person to book a demo to, how can I sort of expand that marketing interaction across everyone in an individual company and then actually target specific companies.

Speaker 1: (03:59)
So not just blasting out, you know, collateral or marketing initiatives all over the place, but really focusing on how can we make sure that the companies we want to sell to are a good fit, are great for our business, are the ones that we're going after. And really looking at marketing to multiple roles within a business versus that one individual. And so I think this is something that we, we've done previous webinars about, we talked to postal about. Um, it's definitely still relevant, but I think what's been really exciting in, in working with Mark and, and the rest of the Drift team is how they've been able to sort of embrace taking this further to what they're calling account-based engagement. So, uh, I'll give you the mic and, and let you talk a little bit about this piece.

Speaker 2: (04:32)
Yeah, thanks Connor. I, I think one of the things that we should talk about is like account-based marketing. If you go back, one slide is really about like aligning marketing and sales. And, and I think a account-based, you know, uh, engagement is really about aligning, but then actioning the engagement together, not just across marketing and sales, but also your customer success or service team. And it's, it's exactly what you said, which is still engaging all of the buying, you know, committee or the buying team within account and then finding other, you know, places in that account where future buyers could exist. Um, but it's also really making sure that we're using the right channels and the right offers, which really looks, you know, to, um, if you look at bullet point number two speaks to that. And you are really trying to do this to help you increase your pipeline, both from a new account acquisition standpoint, but then really about trying to make the account successful and find opportunities for future growth.

Speaker 2: (05:42)
Cuz this should not just be account-based marketing, which normally is, it's a pre-sales thing. It's no, you're putting the center, the customer, it's the center of the entire customer experience. And you're creating these digital experiences, hopefully soon, more in-person real life experiences that speak to individuals within this account that are either current customers or might be future buyers that you need to engage with. So I think, Connor, when you think about account-based engagement, it's really the full lifecycle. And one thing that I think we'll get into today is like how important good data is to both account-based marketing and account-based engagement. Not just from an account identification standpoint, but again, the way to in, in which you should action that data through the, um, information you have, but also through the, the things that you see happening when people from these accounts engage with your content, visit your website, open up your emails, watch your videos, engage with your brand, how should your sales team and then customer success team be responding to those points of intent and interactions. And that's another big piece of, of making a successful account based engagement strategy that come to life.

Speaker 1: (07:01)
And I think what we, what we really love about this and, and I think the piece that gets, I know our whole team excited is like, we love the tech piece of this. We love how the systems infrastructure works. What's that business process? How does everything tie together? And what's super fun about, I think all of the account based engagement stuff is like for our team, we get to figure out how to stitch together the CRM data, with the marketing automation data, with your web data to create and surface these experiences. And it really becomes cross-functional where if marketing is only engaging in something, it can only go so far and think looking at that entire customer journey and, and how your core system stack supports it, uh, it is really the underlying piece to, to bring this to life.

Speaker 2: (07:40)
I agree. If you go to the next slide, we can see that, well, before I explain this in, in a, in a little bit of detail Sure. From Boston Consulting Group, I wanna ask everyone though in the chat how, if you feel comfortable, and you can just give us percentages, but like, how much of your revenue in the next 12 months, or it could be bookings, so bookings or revenue in the next 12 months is planned to come from new business versus expansion business. So existing customers that you're looking to expand, right? Like 80 20 says Ryan, right? So even if it's 80 20, you're still gonna wanna have some type of a company based engagement strategy. 20% of that revenue saves $5 million. You're trying to get a million of that, of those dollars from existing accounts. So what you're gonna want to start to do is move into this notion of really understanding what accounts that are now customers should become much more important at the strategic level, right?

Speaker 2: (08:35)
So you, you're looking at, um, this graphic maybe, and you're saying, all right, well, traditional lead generation, which at the bottom right, it's kind of volume-based, Connor, you kind of go after everyone, right? It's not very targeted. ABM is really in the middle, right? It's ABM slash abbe together to some degree, right? And now at the top though, you are really focused on making these v i p type of experiences and you're trying to create custom customer journeys for different people in these accounts pre and post sale, right? And you're trying to tie that data back together from both first party and third party data that you have about someone, but then use the right tools such as real-time messaging, such as video, such as, um, email stills is a great channel to use for account-based engagement, right? Once you have developed that relationship and you wanna expand the relationship in some way, um, yeah.

Speaker 2: (09:31)
Like Gina Connor, 60% new business, 40% existing accounts. I think Gina, that's amazing. Um, I heard that a lot talking to a lot of different businesses, both small to enterprise size businesses. And I think in the company-based engagement strategy, which we'll go through today and help you kind of understand a bit more is, is gonna serve you well because you're gonna wanna really make sure that out of the 40% of your existing accounts, you have a way to score which accounts you should be spending more time on, which have a higher propensity to potentially upgrade and expand.

Speaker 1: (10:03)
And I think to, to echo a piece of that as well, one of the things that really comes to mind for us is like you spend so much time getting those new customers, gaining their trust, getting them into your system, delivering value to them. And then the approach that you take in the amount of investment you make in your sales and marketing machine often doesn't get reflected on some of those strategic accounts and how you actually drive renewals in a new business and additional sales. And that's to your point, just another piece of that customer journey and the piece of your customer journey to an audience that is your least expensive to acquire, cuz you already have them. And the impact of those strategies is going to be much higher. And I think we see this across, like if you look at just basic, basic open rate data versus who you existing have as customers versus who are the people that are prospects in your database. And you'll see those trends, I think apply across all of the a b e metrics as well, which is people that already are engaged with you and already customers of you, you're going to engage with your content at a much higher rate, which makes the efficacy of the investments you make there just so much higher.

Speaker 2: (10:59)
Agreed. And one last thing on this slide, if you wanna start to kind of grade yourself on how you're doing holistically with, with abm slash now into a b e, look at the lefthand slide, lefthand side of this slide where it says key elements underneath the personalized engagement headline. Look at those three bullet points, account identification and prioritization, engagement and personalization, strategy and execution and performance tracking. How are you doing at those things today? And how are you doing at those things from a pre and then post-sale lens? And just, just do yourself, like, you know, give yourself some, some grades with your team an audit and that can help you understand, um, where you might need to, you know, invest more money and time. Uh, maybe you did a lot on the account identification prioritization, but you haven't spent enough money and time focusing on say the number two, the the engagement and personalization strategy. So we've already said it, Connor, it's time to take action, right? Like it's no longer about aligning account-based engagement. Is is acting as one unified customer, re you know, revenue team that is, is going to market together both from acquiring a new customer to your point, but then also making that those customers super successful, super happy, those surprising delight moments and really being able to, um, go in and, and sell them more value, sell them more solutions, um, based off of their past success.

Speaker 1: (12:29)
Uh, great. I think to jump into the, the piece of this sir, for why this matters. So, so Mark, your team pulled some of these, but I think the main piece of this is like if you invest in this, um, you will see results.

Speaker 2: (12:40)
Yep. Yeah, I mean, take a look at these stats. Um, serious decisions, 15% higher profitability, 19% faster revenue growth when they align marketing, sales, and customer success. So aligning the, the three core revenue generating teams and really using retention and that upsell to accelerate your revenue, not just getting better on the pre-sale side, which, which you know, we'll talk about and there's a ton of opportunity, but really focusing on existing accounts, uh, not focusing on all of your existing accounts, but the ones that are gonna have the highest, highest likelihood to be good, um, contenders for additional, you know, you know, feature sets. You could, you could sell to them, uh, fu future solutions basically.

Speaker 1: (13:27)
And I think this also matters. I mean, something we work with a lot, um, and I'll, I'll go into this piece, we don't need to jump back, but I think one of the things we work with a lot just anecdotally on that part is, um, as as companies grow, as they move up market, they add more products, you guys have added more SKUs and more products into your solution offering over the last couple of years. And I think we see this across the board and being able to have a strategy in place to be able to activate those products is gonna be key to continue to grow the business overall, right? If you're a single product company, that still matters, but I think it becomes, it, it it's a compounding factor. The more skews, the more products, the more service lines you add, the, the more you can provide that engagement and that customer journey across the entirety of their lifecycle, the higher probability you're gonna be able to interject those products and services across each part of their moving through.

Speaker 1: (14:11)
And even better if you have multiple products, cause you now have multiple customer life cycles for each one and they all sort of start to contribute to each other. Um, I I, I think to, to also expand across this, right? And this is something that is just accelerating at a really rapid rate, which is when you look at an account-based approach, uh, it's bigger than marketing. And I think there's really two elements of this, right? The first one is, um, B2B has multiple stakeholders. Often the person you are talking to or your sales team is selling to aren't the only people involved. And there are, not only are there people behind the curtain that you never see and you never engage with that their entire engagement with your company is gonna be the collateral your sales team sends them. The meeting recordings that you're creating and providing and the tools you use to do those.

Speaker 1: (14:51)
You mentioned Gong when we were sort of at this waiting point, right? But being able to provide documentation of here are the conversations we've had and expose those to people that weren't in the actual call. Um, we see with customers that use a lot of those tools that you have more people than are associated to any of the opportunities in your c R m interacting with and viewing those recordings and, and people that you may never even actually have a conversation with that are still getting exposure to it. And so the quality of the collateral you create and the quality of the marketing assets you're putting out drive that sale beyond just the sales conversations that you're having. And I think the other piece of this is, is for personalization and driving this further down the deal cycle, um, most technology driven businesses today are doing at least email personalization, maybe some light web personalization.

Speaker 1: (15:37)
But typically we find that that experience ends after someone comes through and fills out a form and now you're just another lead in the bucket and all of a sudden you go from somebody that marketing has spent a lot of time and energy trying to personalize and engage and have a really one-to-one conversation with, to now you're another lead in the C R m and I'm calling you and I'm asking you about things and I could be bypassing that entire experience and really tailoring something to you as the customer, as the prospect that's already engaged with our brand. You've already given us information, you've already given us data and there's tons of stuff you can already find out. I think there's, there's nothing more frustrating than being in a buying experience. And I, I encounter this as I'm sure you do all of the time.

Speaker 1: (16:15)
You're, you're talking to an sdr, you're talking to marketing, you get on the phone with sales and it's like, man, all these things that you're trying to talk to me about, you not only do already people at your company know, but they're publicly available and you should be able to be enriching them in your system. And we should not be having a conversation around what it is we do or how many people we have or what our tech stack is because all of those are things that you could already know. And expanding that across the entirety of that customer journey is just going to yield not only better outcomes, but more importantly a better customer experience for the person that wants to buy from you.

Speaker 2: (16:49)
Yeah. Yeah. I'll give you some real examples. We can go to the next slide. So, you know, one thing that you gotta do is you do, you gotta first define your ideal customer profile. It's like we've done that at Drift, right? And you can use, um, you know, a lot of firmographic, maybe technographic information to do that. Um, and then you have to, you know, within that I CCP you have to define those accounts that you really wanna go after. And, you know, with an A B M strategy, you have, you know, the broad account list, um, and then you have, um, you know, reps, you know, named to those accounts typically. Uh, and then you have like a dream account list, like, like we call like the Drift two 50 list, which is still, you know, named accounts for account executives, but those are gonna be treated in a much more specific way as they go through this customer journey.

Speaker 2: (17:33)
So that's what we've done at Drift. The thing that we've also done at Drift though, to take now this to the, the Encompass engagement, uh, standpoint, is we've reinvented our website thanks to conversational marketing and conversational sales so that the, the website is not built for marketing anymore. Um, it's built for the, it's built for the buyer and it's built for the seller. Um, cause a lot of the times people hear like, oh, you gotta personalize this, you gotta personalize that. Personalization in a lot of ways is about the marketer giving the salesperson or the account manager, which is more post-sale, the information they need to act on someone's interest with, for, with your business, with your product. So here's an example. So, um, we ungate all of our content at Drift. Uh, we do that for many reasons, but one of the things that we, we do is we, we score which content is more likely to help turn a visitor into a customer.

Speaker 2: (18:28)
And we do the same thing for our, our customers. We're getting better at understanding which content leads to customers that are gonna be more successful long term. So on the pre-sale side, when someone comes to the the page, uh, it's actually a digital book that we have. It's free called The MQL is Dead. So you see MQL on this slide, we actually think it's dead. What we do is we say, Hey salesperson, you have one of your accounts visiting that page. And marketing is gonna be able to first personalize that visit to that page based off of um, who owns that account and how many times they've been back to the website and which stage of the journey they're in. And then we're gonna also marking's also gonna be able to then notify that salesperson, that account owner of that visit and get them if they're free to react to that visit in real time.

Speaker 2: (19:17)
And typically that's done through a messaging experience, right? Either on the website or off the website or if that doesn't work and and they connect and the timing's not right, do they could quickly follow up to do, uh, a meeting or schedule a meeting down the road or take that offline and do it by email if there's already an existing relationship in place, right? So what I'm saying is you really need to think through personalization, not just from like marketing dynamically changing the content on the website or doing things with email or across these different channels like unifying the channel where they came from in the website experience. You're using personalization at the human to human level. Cuz everything we do in B2B is human to human. We're just selling to more humans, to more people. That's what accounts, you know, based engagement American is all about. Um, so it's just, it, it's, it's making the engagement more specific to each person within that account focusing much, much more on the sales engagement that should be happening because, you know, that's a probably, uh, a good account to, to turn into a customer.

Speaker 1: (20:17)
I think to expand on that with I just a small anecdote before we jump forward that, uh, you, you'd sort of touched on and I think where Drift does an amazing job is the experience we worked on to the customer, uh, using Drift also with outreach was, uh, having sales reps have outbound, uh, email cadences driving to people communicating some value or some pain point, uh, and then being able to have the link that someone clicks in that email that brings them to the site, not take them to a form to go fill something out, to like maybe get a follow up from somebody, but immediately land have drift pop, and then have messaging from that sales rep that emailed them about that email that they clicked on. Um, which is just not only something that's, that's very cool from a technology angle that that gets us excited, but I think more interesting to your point of it's really human to human, which is no longer I'm getting an automated email, it's directing me to a page, I'm filling out a form and now someone's gonna get back to me and instead someone reached out to me to share some information.

Speaker 1: (21:13)
I am interested in having a conversation with them about that information. And that's something that gets facilitated through Drift immediately on the site with the person who's reaching out to me. And that despite it being the, the same underlying technology driving to that, it fundamentally changes that experience, which I think is really exciting.

Speaker 2: (21:31)
Yeah, I mean it's kind of what you're talking about on this slide is exactly the example you just gave. And this is what we try to do with, um, you know, our platform and the solutions we offer, which is we have this this framework called the the Conversation marketing blueprint. I'll explain it at a high level because your example highlights it perfectly. We, we always start with the who. So the audience, a good marketer, a good salesperson, a good customer success person is gonna start with like, who am I trying to reach out to? Who am I trying to connect with? Who am I trying to further develop a relationship with? Then what we can see is who's coming to the website based off of where they're coming from? So are they coming from email, are they coming from social media? Are they coming from paid?

Speaker 2: (22:11)
Are they coming from an interaction they had with your content through content syndication? Are they coming through direct? Like we can literally tell who's coming, where they're coming from, which has gotta allow us to do better targeting and then what they are engaging with. So in your example, it's like, oh, I'm engaging with this piece of content and it's like, if I already know who you are, if I have your email address and have your name and have more information about you, it is insanity to ask for anything else at that point. Like, and if you know it's a good, uh, fit account, why would you put any type of friction or any type of barrier, you know, in front of them? You, you wouldn't, and in fact you would actually make sure that salesperson can act on that in real time. And if they can't act in real time, then you might have someone, uh, we call them conversational development reps or, or SDRs, business development people that are focused on handling inbound chats.

Speaker 2: (23:02)
So people coming to the website inbound from one of these channels, maybe because of outbound, but they're coming to the website and they can cover for that person who might be busy. And if that person's busy, we all of course have like chat bots, we can use chat bots, can do automated scheduling, they can do automated, um, uh, leave a message, uh, you know, notetaking capability and they can guide people to content. But like you have these three layers you can fall back onto, um, in terms of how the engagement should unfold. You know, it's, is it a human to human engagement, a human to chat on engagement or is it just per purely just the, the buyer, the customer reading something on their own at that moment and then someone's gonna follow up with them next day because they see in their account list, Hey, this account came to my website and they showed high level of engagement.

Speaker 2: (23:45)
I should, I should follow up with them, I should reach out to them. Uh, and that's what a good account based engagement strategy does. That's what O'Connor our account, uh, managers do. So we do this on the post-sale side with account managers. They have their accounts, some of them are more strategic and important than others, and they're literally seeing which of these accounts are coming to the website, what drift insider content, are they consuming? Are they consuming their certifications? Are they consuming training videos? Are they going to our knowledge base? And like they can see all of the people from that account doing that over a certain time period, and then they can respond accordingly.

Speaker 1: (24:19)
Something that I think is, is interesting that you touched on in a trend that we're seeing, uh, just at a broader scale is, uh, if, if you're already investing in a lot of the marketing or the sales technology tools to do this, uh, you can extend that back into the rest of the business with relative ease. Um, if you're already, if you already are using Drift to the front end or you're using outreach of the front end, or you're using any of this, the marketing automation solutions just to drive leads and do that top level, um, extending that back to your CS teams or extending it back to some of the renewal folks like it, it's ultimately it's the same process. And I think what's really interesting for us is, especially with tools like Drift or Outreach, when we go and we, we extend their functionality back to the, the renewal assess like, oh my God, this is amazing. Like this is totally working. And for us it's like, yeah, absolutely. You're, you're, you're doing the same thing. Like it's just you're later in the cycle and if, if you already sort of believe in the efficacy of these things at the top end, extending them to the rest of the team is, is absolutely gonna yield outcomes, which I think it unintentionally brings me into sort of your guys' example here, uh, which I'll let you speak to on on the ptcp for the next slide.

Speaker 2: (25:24)
Yeah, yeah. We, we've talked about a few examples, a few workflows slash use cases, if you wanna call it that. Um, ptc, right? Big enterprise business, amazing business. Gotta give a shout out to the, a shout out to the team of ptc. Um, yeah, I mean they, they've just done Omega transformation in terms of their digital, uh, engagement across their website, across their channels. Um, Mariana, who's the SVP over there, um, of marketing, she's done just amazing things with, with, um, the customer experience and her team. So her challenge was to be more intelligent, you know, use better data, use better, more personalized automation to, um, help marketing contribute more to the bottom line. Like really contribute not just to like lead creation, uh, and of course pipeline, but like contribute all the way down to revenue. And that's what account-based engagement, in my opinion, it's all about like you're focused on the revenue number, then of course you're focused on pipeline, but you're not focused on like the NQL or the lead, like you're focused on driving real, um, business impact.

Speaker 2: (26:30)
So what they did is they used three technologies that we'll talk about in a moment, um, and deployed this, this, uh, solution across these three technologies to create an end-to-end buying journey. Um, and it was 6 cents for the account identification and intent data. Uh, it was drift for the engagement and there was people AI to prioritize, you know, follow up and, and make the follow up more personalized. And you can see the results, right? 20,000 more conversations started. So 20,000 engagements captured, which is gonna help you know, that visitor, that engagement understand more about PTC and PTC understand more about, um, that visitor, that person drove four x 400% more, um, MQs faster. Uh, and then, you know, we, we enabled this across 17 countries, um, in terms of like, you know, we can do this in multiple, multiple different languages. Um, so that's a, at a high level kind of what we did.

Speaker 2: (27:26)
And if you go to the next slide, this kind of speaks to what PTC has done and what, you know, our successful customers have done. And Connor, I'm sure you can speak to this as well, but it's a combination of like the account, you know, strategy identification, but then scoring those accounts. So at Drift we have, uh, what we call a behavior score. So we have the like firmographic score, which is part of our ICP definition that our accounts map into. But then we have a behavior score that looks at a number of different things, engagement with the drift bot, with with with chat, um, the chat bot or, or live chat engagement with content viewing videos, um, engagement on certain pages. We, we, we score the pricing page visit much higher than any other page visit, right? There's a lot of different things we look at, right?

Speaker 2: (28:13)
And then with that, along with like what you can do in your email marketing programs through the deep integration we have with almost all of the marketing automation systems out there today and using, for us, we use visible within the Marketo experience all Adobe now to, to have a multi-touch attribution model to see during the five key moments in the journey leading up to revenue, what is the person doing before that moment? Meaning what is the visitor, the buyer doing before they become a lead? Like the lead created, you know, moment, what happens before they become an opportunity, what happens before they schedule a meeting. So we can use that data to again, further refine the customer journeys for these different accounts based off of size of account industry, the buyer themselves. Then that starts to feed into like the roles and the deals on your opportunity level within Salesforce in our case or you know, HubSpot.

Speaker 2: (29:07)
Um, and, and we really just try to use all of this data and make it actionable, right? And that's what you'll see in this, this recipe we have coming up with P T C that we we did with you folks, which is great. Um, and then we use all of this, uh, and we're not fully there yet. We're getting better at it, but we're, we're fully, we're fully committed to developing a behavior type score, a customer health score, uh, on the back end of this, right? And I'd say a gain site, for example, it would be a good technology to maybe use to help you do that. Gain site's a, you know, customer success platform, uh, company. Um, but we want to do this on the customer, customer success side as well. Um, and be more intentional about like how we deploy a campaign or a program to our customers that is in conjunction with the account management team

Speaker 1: (29:53)
That, that touched on most. Any, everything that I would've , I would've expand upon that for sure. I think that the only thing that I would add in, and I think just cuz we do lots of the multi-touch attribution piece of it, and I think a lot of people, uh, visible's great, we've seen attribution app get some, some success. You see some people using lean data. I think what, what we really look at for the attribution piece, and, and I'll, I'll not soapbox this for too long, I promise, but I think we get pulled in to build a lot of these models and I think a lot of people get really sucked into let's assign, uh, dollars and let's divide up the, the revenue for an opportunity across all these campaigns. And my, my goal is really to just like assign r o ROI to everything.

Speaker 1: (30:28)
And, and that's valuable, but I think something that you touched on i is more important, which is, w the value of multitouch attribution is not that you can start splitting up r o roi, but the value is actually that you can point to individual types of initiatives and know what they are good at, like producing. So we, we look at sort of tagging to your point, right? What types of content are people consuming before they end up booking meetings? What types of content are people consuming that contributes to opportunities moving to one? And what types of content are people consuming leading up to the a successful renewal? And if you can capture those data points regardless of assigning the dollars or breaking up those opportunity values, you can start to figure out what types of messaging you should be injecting at which parts of the customer journey, which for anyone that's in the demand gen or the marketing team in the audience, it's certainly like, oh my God, that sounds amazing. And for those of you, without that experience, like that's ultimately what your demand gen in your marketing team. Like, that's their, their silver bullet that they're dreaming of is knowing what thing do I say to which person, at what point in the buyer journey to push them forward is, is really boiling down the entirety of, of what most marketing teams would say that this is really my goal. Uh, and and that really helps you get to that.

Speaker 2: (31:38)
Nailed it. Nailed it. I mean, yeah, the dollar stuff you'll put in, but um, it's, it's more of the stuff you mentioned a hundred percent, like could not agree more. So let's go deep now, Connor, we have three slides actually before the recipe that we'll walk you through that really go deep into what marketing and sales and customer success should do. So folks, I think you'll get these, you'll get these slides after, right? We'll send these out, I'm assuming. Yes, . Um, so don't, don't, I mean, you can take screenshots if you want, but don't feel like you have to take all these notes down. Um, but I mean, I mean con we've kind of talked about number one, right? Which is gaining a deeper understanding of target accounts. So it's not just like the firmographic demographic, technographic, um, ex st information. It's like what are they doing? You know, like the behaviors

Speaker 1: (32:28)
For sure. And

Speaker 2: (32:29)
Then, yeah, go ahead. Sorry, go ahead,

Speaker 1: (32:31)
. No, no, no, I think, I think, I think that's right, right? And I think that you can, so much of this data is, is so accessible now, uh, it's really just a function of being able to tag it and organize it in a way that you can, you can get insight from it. Um, you, you don't need tons and tons of crazy tools to drive a lot of this. And I think that that's something that a lot of people think of. I I need 15 different plugins and 15 different apps to like bring this to reality. Um, drift captures some of this data. Yeah. Any marketing automation system we're doing captures this data. You totally access it and, and you can use it to drive a lot of these insights.

Speaker 2: (33:02)
Yeah. And then on number two, we've actually used the behavior score that I was mentioning. Oh, sorry, do you go ma back one slide, sorry. Just on number two for marketing, create a comprehensive engagement strategy. We actually use the behavior score with all of our lead, uh, nurturing programs. So like we've set up our lead nurturing programs to map into the who and then the behavior score and create custom paths for that. And then that ties back to what they see on the website based off of like, again, what email they're coming from. Uh, we have a, we have many examples of this. For example, I, we have a customer, um, that I actually get their weekly newsletter from and I open it almost every time. And sometimes it says, when I open the newsletter and I click on a link in the newsletter that takes me back to their website, it says Connor on their website.

Speaker 2: (33:45)
I see, Hey Mark, thanks for checking out the newsletter this week. What did you think? Sometimes it says, what was your favorite, um, link in, you know, a story in the newsletter? What, what did you learn this week? Like it literally personalized it to that level no matter what page I go to from the newsletter. Um, so yeah, it's, it's really thinking through how you can, you know, take the channels that you're trying to get more ROI from. You're spending a lot of money on, on paid, or maybe you're spending a lot of time on email and it's effective, but if you can get one or two more points of conversion out of it or leverage out of it, it's gonna do a lot to your, your pipeline and revenue number.

Speaker 1: (34:23)
Agree.

Speaker 2: (34:24)
So, yeah,

Speaker 1: (34:25)
Jumped in sales

Speaker 2: (34:26)
Piece. What's that? ,

Speaker 1: (34:28)
We've talked about marketing a bunch. .

Speaker 2: (34:30)
Yeah, no agree. I think sales is, let's move on. Sales is, is is super like this is like, believe it or not, folks I joined, I'm actually joining a sales call right after this. I joined five to 10 sales calls a week as a marketer. Um, it's like, why do you, why do you do that Mark? Well, there's many reasons. One is like, um, I'm a responsible for a lot of the content side, the events community, but I really wanna understand how marketing can best support sales in taking a customer who is even sometimes still just in the discovery phase and taking them through the journey of understanding and trusting and feeling confident that we have created the best possible solution for them and that we're gonna be able to deliver against that solution, right? And like, how can we make sure that when that, um, when those people from that account, that sales that the salesperson is trying to close, when they come back to the website, when they come to one of our events, when they read our content as they go through the sales process, we are there to help them like understand why change, why now, and in our case, why drift that, that kind of framework, right?

Speaker 2: (35:42)
So the double down on enablement, like what we try to do is say to the sales team, here's the one campaign, the one thing you should really try to care about this month from our account based engagement strategy. Here's the one thing, go all in. Here's the, you know, we just released the state of conversational sales report, Connor, we're we're saying this month, this month, focus on that. Update your sequences. There's a ton of great data in it. Update your prospecting stuff and outreach. Update it from an SDR standpoint and an AE standpoint and use this with accounts that are maybe, you know, um, you know, I would say they're, they're still trying to evaluate the investment. They haven't like fully gone onto the justification period yet, but they're like trying to evaluate it and use this amazing data to help you, um, help them understand why in this case, you know, conversational sales is gonna help them accelerate their revenue, for example. And that goes to number three, which is like, we are working with sales to help them get closer to the buyer and the things they care about. Because at the, at at the front end of this, of this thing I was saying, I'm listening, my team is listening to what buyers care about the most. And then we're creating content and we're creating programs with the demand gen team at Drift that feed right into the sales team's hands.

Speaker 1: (36:55)
I something I love about this slide just, and it's, it's, it's getting, it's getting better overall I'd say. But one of the things that we see very often is I, what I love here is the shared, shared goals and campaigns. Um, what some of the most le the least effective, I would say most ineffective, but the least effective sort of teams that we end up working with are very often are like, marketing has a goal over here. Sales has a goal over here and there's a lot of infighting of like what counts for who and who gets credit. And you end up building and making investments in your tech stack in your strategies and like instead of figuring out what campaigns can I do that will make sales more successful, it's how can I touch every lead in the system so that it, I get credit for it.

Speaker 1: (37:33)
And I think incentives matter. And when you can align your sales and marketing team together to be working towards a shared goal, you're just gonna get far better outcomes. And marketing stops being a function of like, oh well, uh, you know, sales didn't generate that lead. I generated that lead And sales isn't saying, oh, it didn't come from marketing. Instead it's everyone saying, how can we collaborate together to build a customer experience that's going to help us meet our mutual goals. And I think that that's something that is so important and making the wrong decision in that arena can push you so far in, in the wrong direction that uh, a lot of these strategies become just far more difficult to embrace because of adding complexity to manage something that ultimately doesn't matter. Cause you're trying to get to the same place.

Speaker 2: (38:16)
That's why, that's why for a company's engagement, it's gotta be pipeline revenue and then expansion revenue, right? Slash retention. Like those are the only metrics you can look at all of the, the engagement and conversion metrics which matter. But like if we don't hit these metrics together, then we all lose . Totally. Let's,

Speaker 1: (38:37)
Let's talk Doug. Cause I think that that actually takes you right into the customer success piece, which is, um, when you're looking for the cs, a lot of people and, and we have a couple of, of posts and articles of like, customer success is sales at the end of the day, uh, we, we treat them differently. We sign in a different department, they have a different function. But the reality is when you're looking at your CS team, mitigating churn is the exact same thing as bringing in new revenue to the business. Um, and ultimately you should be equipping your CSS teams with the same level of tools. I think for some reason we always see CS B the last team to get investments in the last team to get like cool software. And we find that like the sales team at 2030 employees gets to buy cool stuff.

Speaker 1: (39:13)
Marketing gets to buy stuff at like 50 and like it can be denied like 150, 200 employees plus before anyone's like, maybe we should get CS something that will help them succeed. Uh, and I think that that's something that is skewed and, and the sooner you can invest in the CS team, the better outcomes you're gonna have and the more you can collaborate with them and figure out how can we take the learnings that we're getting from our sales and marketing initiatives and provide them to our CS team and how can we inform from our CS team to get better at our sales and marketing initiatives. And ultimately this is one revenue team that's working off of the same stack trying to achieve the same outcomes and figuring out ways to, to tap into that team. I think I, well I always see with marketing teams, they're like, oh, we'll go down and bother Cs so that they can give us referrals so they can give us a success story. And it's like this initiative we have to go bang down the door for. Whereas if they're pulled into the entire go-to-market team, they're pulled into that same revenue experience. Y you, you don't have to go and like harass them to get you those things. It's like, oh, you have this really cool campaign coming up. I have a really good story I can share with you that will help that be successful. And the more you can sort of combine these teams together, the the better outcomes you're gonna have.

Speaker 2: (40:18)
Yeah, one thing that's been on the rise for a long time and now like it's it's ha has to be front and center because of what has happened in the last 12 months, which is customer market and customer lifecycle investment. So I, I'm a hundred percent Gina not trying to put you on the spot. So if you don't wanna answer this, that's fine. Just, I would just encourage you to think about it. Um, how much investment have you put on the marketing side if you're in marketing for customer lifecycle and customer marketing and programs, given that 40% of your revenue is gonna come from existing accounts. You know, it's like, it's, it's really an important thing to think about. Um, you know, and I think we're still trying to figure that out at Drift to figure out the right balance, right? I mean, cuz if you look at our marketing program budget spend and then headcount, does that map up to your, you know, you know, existing account revenue?

Speaker 2: (41:07)
I know it's not exactly the same because it's always gonna cost more money typically to acquire new customer than service and, and, and upsell an existing customer. So it's gonna be a little bit different. It's not apples to apples investment. But are you underinvested are, I mean I'm, it's unlikely that any of us are really overinvested on the customer marketing side. Um, and as we all well know and you know, my time at HubSpot, you know, and we all, a lot of us are HubSpot probably, probably pretty well it's like a customer, if you have done really well, it's gonna help lower your cac, lower your cost of acquisition because they're gonna become really strong referrals and you know, the advocacy piece. So it's, it's interesting to think about, you know,

Speaker 1: (41:47)
For sure.

Speaker 2: (41:50)
So I think we can wrap it up on the a b E side. Uh, I'll go through the recipe and then questions folks, like let us know if there's questions. Um, if you go back one last slide, I think it's all about trust. If I had to put one word on this slide, it's like trust account-based engagement's gonna help you develop more trust faster with the right people, like done . Um, and yeah, of course, right? It's about finding value across the journey. We've already talked about this, putting the customer to center of everything. So let's put into practice and yeah Gina, I would say around 20 to 30% cost for customer marketing. That's pretty good, Gina, that's pretty good. That's, don't you think Connor? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: (42:28)
That's more than, more than more than we typically see for sure. That's awesome. Yeah,

Speaker 2: (42:31)
That's definitely very good . Um, alright, so let's go through the recipe. How do you use data-driven insights to turn target accounts into customers? This account-based engagement strategy? So, um, this is part of the, the rev ops cookbook, um, which I'm sure we'll also send out if you haven't seen it. And again, this is going back to ptc, PTC decided to use these three technologies, drift 6 cents and people AI to really help them create a more personalized buying experience, um, for the people in these accounts there that they were trying to first identify and then engage, uh, deeper into and then make sure that once they do engage with them, they can really make the, the buying, uh, portion of this, the, the sales cycle, the sales experience as personal to each person at that account. So let's go through each slide and show you what they did. So first what they did was they used 6 cents and, and cono, do you guys six senses? Do you folks, um, do much with them? Like, you know, I mean Six Senses is a, is a, you know, an account-based marketing platform. They're all, you know, intent data. Like do Yep. Six sense. Yeah, we,

Speaker 1: (43:48)
We see a lot with Six Senses people, people are, are 6 cents. People look at like Bombora, like different intent-based platforms. I think the, the main value of this is to find not only which accounts are really matching to your icp, but also which accounts it goes the other direction, right? They're actually interested in, in you and what you have to offer. And I think that, that these types of tools, uh, we see really enhance overall tech stack for sure.

Speaker 2: (44:11)
It's exact. I love that. Thank you for, for saying that. Cause that's exactly what PTC did. It's using yeah, your own data and your own understanding of what a good, uh, account would look like for you. But then taking all of these signals that are happening, I call 'em like digital fingerprints or footprints across all of these different other, you know, digital properties and using that to help P T C understand other accounts that might be not only good fits, but Connor, like they might be really in an active buying process that you just don't know about . So that's step one.

Speaker 2: (44:51)
Uh, step two, once these people are known and identified you, you're getting them, hopefully you're trying to get them back to the website. You're trying to engage with them in some way to get them to your website, to get them to your storefront using Drift to greet them in the most personalized way and route them and connect them with the right salesperson immediately. So this is just an example of here's something that the visitor would see this account White whale, Emily, you know, at a B2B SaaS company we work with, you know, companies like that. Oh, can you guys still hear me?

Speaker 1: (45:30)
I can still hear you're dropping out a a little bit, but if you uh, if you cut to cut video, we should be able to make it work.

Speaker 2: (45:36)
Yeah, I'm gonna cut video. Sorry, something. I

Speaker 1: (45:38)
Think it's all good. It we're all, we're we're all working with at home internet connections these days and they can be a little limpy. I think something I love about this that, that you sort of touched on here is that the, something that happens in almost every buying cycle, right, is people ask for, you know, if you worked with companies like us, do you have case studies? And those don't get introduced until like at or after the proposal stage. And, and using this type of a tech stack lets you get that way ahead of the conversation. So it's not a, I think Drift is cool and now you're trying to convince other people in the organization, they're like, well, do they even work with any B2B SaaS companies? It's like, Hey, I think Drift is really cool. They've done a bunch of other stuff with b2b STAs companies like us. We should really be in interacting with them.

Speaker 2: (46:19)
I, yeah, it's tailoring the value proposition in this, in this message that's specific to the person and the account.

Speaker 1: (46:26)
Love it.

Speaker 2: (46:27)
And then you can see the notification that happens, right? And then, and then on this next step it's like, hey, let's help them book a meeting with the right person at your business immediately. And I, Connor I think this is personalization. Some people might not think is personalization, but like this is personalizing the buying experience and experience and making it more real time. What, what do you think?

Speaker 1: (46:47)
I think it makes it easy. Like the thing that I, I think is just like so valuable about this is that it does two things. One, it makes it just easy for your customer to work with you, which is like ultimately the, the end goal here, right? Is like, how can we make it as easy as possible to buy stuff from us? It's the end of the day like what marketing is trying to do. And I think that the, the part of this I also love is that it it fundamentally elevates the role of the SD R, right? Like instead of the SDR being somebody who's like, cool, I'm gonna man chat, I'm gonna respond to this person. Like so much of that can be managed by a bot and, and being able to put an SDR in a position of I'm focusing on building that target account list.

Speaker 1: (47:22)
I'm focusing on tailoring messaging, I'm focusing on sending the right content to the right individual versus being in a position where, uh, I'm just here to man this chat. And I think that will allow you to A, get better people in b have, have just overall better customer experiences and, and be able to have SDS really driving strategy instead of just doing things that you, you can largely automate. And we're seeing, you know, there's, there's now full apps that are solely in this space, like we see like Chili Piper or other booking solutions, but like all they do is give you a booking link. And, and the value that that ads is, is a immense, and I think I, I always joke cuz we use, we use Calendly really intensive internally on our services org and I always joke of like, I pay Calendly, I think like $10 a month per consultant on our team. And a Calendly came to me tomorrow and said, it's a hundred bucks a month now we're gonna be like, man, that is a lot more. But it adds a lot of value and I think that these pieces are, are so valuable because it is just about making it easier for someone to work with you.

Speaker 2: (48:19)
A hundred percent. 6 cents is gonna help you with the who Drift is gonna help you, uh, activate the who through, you know, engagement. And it's gonna help Drift, is gonna help you understand, um, who's coming to the website, where they're coming from and what they're engaging with.

Speaker 1: (48:37)
Love it.

Speaker 2: (48:40)
And then we talked about like the buying committee with, with Drift as well. What PTC did is they understood not only the accounts coming to the website, but who from those accounts, how many people from those accounts are coming to the website, where they're coming from and what they're engaging with Connor. Like how deep are they researching the solution? How are they looking at pricing? You know, are they on the website multiple times this past week? That's really different than just coming to the website and visiting once, you know, we all know that. But like then it allows them to act on that information and be able to prioritize reaching out to those accounts and, and really tailoring that outreach, which gets us in the next step, I believe, which is these Six Senses and people AI acting on these insights so that you can find a really fast path to revenue. So between Sixth Senses, intent based scoring, and then people AI's Predictive Deal Health, looking at like the deal itself. Hey, we can, we can tell you that this deal is more likely to close and be healthy because we know of, um, intense scores of things that are happening off the website using 6 cents.

Speaker 1: (49:59)
Love it. , I think, I think that's your recipe. I, I would love to open up for, for any other questions for anybody. I think we, we handled some in flight, uh, as well. Uh, but if anyone has anything new to sort of sort of ask on this, how to get started, uh, questions on, on Drift or functionality or tooling, uh, we would be more than happy to, uh, to address those as well.

Speaker 2: (50:19)
Yeah, please. And if you want more information too, um, I could try to find the link now, but, um, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn. I, I'll actually even give you, uh, my phone number. You might think this is crazy, but it, it does work. It's, it's 9 7 8 2 2 6 6 9 6 5. You can text me and I will get back to you, uh, as fast as I can. No exaggeration. So that's something new too. Connor.

Speaker 1: (50:51)
I am terrible about responding to text messages, but if you email me, I will always get back to you cause I am always attached to my email account. , it's actually like embarrassing. My, my, my girlfriend will often email me to like my work email because it's just a way better way to get in touch with me than trying to go through my phone.

Speaker 2: (51:08)
. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Awesome for putting that in there. That's, yeah, just let me know folks if you questions. Um, but does it look like we have any, Connor?

Speaker 1: (51:18)
I think, I think we chatted through most of 'em all the way through and usually that's, that's a good outcome in these situations, means we like touched on a lot versus, uh, things being gaps. Please reach out to us directly. Uh, thank you guys so, so much for coming. Uh, it's been fun. And Mark, thank you guys so much for participation on, on the recipe and, and giving us, uh, some terms to be able to apply to some of the stuff we're working on. It's been awesome.

Speaker 2: (51:37)
Yeah, no, we really appreciate the opportunity. Love the partnership. Love to do more with you folks down the road. And uh, everyone thanks for joining and have a great rest of your day.

Speaker 1: (51:46)
Thanks y'all.