In the first three chapters of this book, I laid out my vision for a revolution in sales and marketing—a future with no forms, no spam, and no cold calls. I hope I fired you up about playing offense and forging your path as a leader within your organization. We also drilled down into why we're doing this—not for the accolades, but for the holy grail of results: predictable revenue growth. I've talked about the journey you'll need to take to achieve these outcomes, and in the previous chapter, I broke down all the specific processes and tech capabilities you need to make it happen.

Now that we have that solid foundation built, it's time to roll up our sleeves and put our bold new vision into action. So how exactly do we do that? I've boiled it down to six steps:

1. Align on a revenue operating model.
2. Find the red.
3. Design your go-to-market plan.
4. Execute using the five-step account-based formula.
5. Inspect what you expect.
6. Communicate and repeat.

I'll spend this chapter breaking down each of these steps so you'll have a detailed, repeatable process for creating truly customer-first, account-based, insights-driven sales and marketing programs.

Step 1: Align on a revenue operating model

If what we're after is revenue, and specifically reliable revenue that increases (aka, predictable revenue growth), it makes sense that we would need to start by defining our revenue operating model.

At a high level, a revenue operating model is a framework for how you're going to make money. I like to call it a revenue operating model (rather than a revenue model) because this isn't a set-it-and-forget-it endeavor. What you're creating is a living, breathing plan. You make assumptions, and you operate against those assumptions. So as you learn more and assumptions change, your plan has to adapt accordingly. If a conversion rate decreases, you have to increase inputs, for example. If upsells are performing better than expected, you can double down there. So I use the term “revenue operating model” to highlight the fact that we're not carving a plan in stone and blindly adhering to it; it informs how we operate, and how we operate, in turn, informs the model.

A revenue operating model is not an MQL goal or an SQL goal. It's an in-depth plan that details what you need to achieve at each stage of the marketing, sales, and customer success cycle. It requires you to evaluate your past experiences for things like cycle time, win rates, and average deal size, and using these, you build your “pipeline quotas.” You'll start by doing this at an aggregate level before drilling down into more granular detail.

The reason it's important to dial in on a revenue operating model—and to align on it across the revenue side of the organization—is that it makes sure we're all focused on a common goal, and we all understand the underlying dependencies on how to get there (more on this in Step 2: Find the Red). It ensures as a marketer you are not just throwing MQLs over the wall and “crushing your numbers” while overall the company is not meeting its plan. Too often, I've seen marketers abdicate responsibility for revenue success to sales instead of taking ownership of hitting revenue goals.

It's clear that if we want to get the entire team engaged in creating predictable revenue growth, it's crucial for sales and marketing teams to align on goals, data, and metrics. A siloed approach sets even the most sophisticated strategies and tactics up for lackluster results. That's why it always surprises me to learn that a lot of organizations aren't even tracking the metrics they need to create and stick to an effective revenue operating model.

But that's what we found in our research, even among organizations that have embraced ABM. Not even half of account-driven organizations track these account-based metrics that are vital when creating a useful revenue operating model:

• 49 percent track account win rate.
• 47 percent track accounts in-market.
• 42 percent track deal velocity.

The nuts and bolts of creating a revenue operating model

At both 6sense and Appirio, I've been lucky enough to create our revenue operating models with Kory Geyer, our head of revenue operations (you might remember him from Chapter 1). He's brilliant not just at interpreting data and using it strategically to meet revenue goals, but also at explaining the whole process to the rest of us. So I sat down with him again for this chapter to go through the nitty-gritty of what we need to do in order to complete Step 1: Align on a Revenue Operating Model.

Before building out your revenue operating model, you need to look at historical data to determine some key metrics, including your average transaction cycle time, win rate, deal size, and the amount of pipeline you create at each stage in the marketing funnel. Determining how the averages are calculated depends on the types of deals you do. For transactional-type deals, Kory recommends doing a three-month average. For long-cycle deals, you can look at your data for the past 12 or even 18 months to determine the averages you'll use to make assumptions in your plan. We typically look back six months. The details of how the calculations are made matter and need to be articulated. If your CFO calculates win rates one way and you are building a plan another, you'll run into problems. So make sure to get on the same page before you start.

At that point, you apply what you know to your current goals and your marketing and sales journeys. Looking at the amount of pipeline you've historically had at each buying stage and the revenue you've attained with those numbers, it's simply a math exercise to determine how many accounts you'll need at each buying stage in order to achieve your current revenue goals.

Now that you know what you need to hit at each buying stage, you can use these goals to inform your marketing strategy. To do that, you need to segment out to your different marketing channels like inbound, outbound, events, digital, etc., again looking at historical data for how those channels have performed and extrapolating what will be possible in the future quarter.

At 6sense, our data shows that 80 percent of our revenue comes from what we call “6QAs,” or 6sense–Qualified Accounts. These are accounts that meet our ideal customer profile and have just hit a critical tipping point: Based on the predictive scores we discussed in Chapter 3, we determined that the account just moved from the “consideration” stage into the “decision/purchase” stage in the buying journey. Our results show that this is the most effective time for sales to engage. We are constantly backtesting this, and it consistently proves to be true. So based on our revenue plan, we can determine how many 6QAs we need for BDRs to work per month in order to generate our target amounts of pipeline for sales.

For the purposes of this conversation, I want to give you a visual of the opportunity stages we use (not to be confused with buying stages, which are pre-pipeline).

Here's an example of how we use our revenue operating plan to determine quotas. You'll see we start with our conversion rates for each stage, our average deal cycle, and our average sale price. We also know the percentages that come from each of our channels. So we can then map it out with monthly quotas for each of our opportunity stages.

Benefits of a solid revenue operating model

With all this information, you can build out your sales capacity plan to determine necessary headcount for sales and BDRs/SDRs. It also gives you the information you need in order to build your marketing activity plan so you know what you need to do in a given quarter to hit your targets.

One of the benefits of having your goals planned out to such a stage- and channel-specific level is that if there's a disruption to one of your channels—oh I don't know, maybe a pandemic that brings all events to a grinding halt?—you can now look at your revenue operating model and say, “We were supposed to have X accounts at Y buying stage coming in from events, so how do we pivot and get those numbers up in other channels?”

When you start at the very top with big data at your side telling you where to focus all the way through your marketing and sales processes, it has a multiplicative effect on conversions all the way through that funnel. And that has a tremendous effect on ROI. At 6sense, since we have predictive models (a necessary capability, as I outlined in Chapter 3), our revenue operating model game is significantly upgraded and way more predictable. We use AI and big data that are tested, proven, and proven again. That means guesswork—and made-up lead scoring—don't enter into our predictive equation.

This is an important concept as it explains one of the more controversial points in this plan: that MQLs need to go away. I understand that MQLs feel predictable since you have a lot of historical data on them. And the truth is that once you do away with them, you may actually end up with fewer accounts that are predicted to be in-market or at that magical 6QA stage. But that's okay, because the accounts you'll be working with will be much higher quality than MQLs, and they'll have a far better likelihood of closing.

Another point I want to make: Depending on your organization size and structure, you may need to have more than one revenue operating model. For instance, at 6sense we started out with one revenue operating model. But then we added a commercial segment, which has a totally different deal size, velocity, and selling motion than our enterprise segment. To align with our sales motions, we now add a new revenue operating model for each new segment we introduce.

That's Step 1. And while it may seem basic, you'd be surprised at how many organizations don't do it. And as you can see, it's critical if you want a data-driven and aligned plan to meet revenue goals. Once you have this nailed down, you can move on to Step 2: Find the Red!

Step 2: Find the red

We marketers often fall into the trap of adding more and more to our collective plate— more campaigns, more initiatives, more exciting ideas that we just can't wait to put into practice. It's what we all love about marketing because it's invigorating, creative, and fun. But we need to focus that energy on the places the business needs us the most.

If we want predictable revenue growth, we need to follow the revenue operating model and look for shortcomings so we can keep improving. This is what I call “finding the red”—in other words, looking for spots in the plan that either aren't performing or are at risk of falling short.

This concept will be familiar to the sales folks out there. I learned it back when I was in sales, and we would do deal reviews to determine the probability of successfully closing a deal. What I learned is that the best salespeople don't tell you all the reasons their deal is going to close; they tell you all the reasons it isn't. They look at their deals and see a minefield of “red flags”—or everything that could possibly go wrong. You might think that sounds like a negative, but as a sales leader, I loved the red. I taught my reps that bringing the “red” forward was a GOOD thing. Red means you're thinking ahead. Red means that we can look to fix it before it happens. And the more granular you can get in identifying your red flags, the better.

Now, as a marketing leader, I coach my team to do the same. In fact, it's key across the revenue team—we must always look for the red. And that means that more is not always the answer. More campaigns, more events, more initiatives—those are all too often geared toward filling our pipelines with useless MQLs and not focused on the ultimate goal: revenue. But the reality is that marketing can and should have an impact at all stages of the revenue operating model. If we're not set up to increase net new pipeline, or partner co-sells, or any other element of our revenue operating model, that's a red flag. We need to identify it, bring it forward, and address it.

This is why understanding the revenue operating model and aligning focus areas in conjunction with strategic plan (V2MOM), customer insights (IICP), and category vision are absolutely critical to success.

Where should you be looking?

Clearly it's important to find the red in your revenue operating model. Benchmarks can be a great place to start. Insight Partners has some great ones on their website, and I also love all of TOPO's benchmarks. But I've found the best benchmark is yourself. Start baselining and set your sights to improve. So where exactly do you look? Well here's a visual of all the places we look in our account-based funnel to find holes, gaps, leaks, or any place we could do better. In each of these stages, we ask, “What can we do to improve this specific conversion rate?”

I like the way the consulting company Winning by Design encourages people to find the red. They challenge sales and marketing folks to answer the question, “How can you double your revenue?” The obvious answer is to double your number of leads. But a better answer echoes what I've been arguing for in this book: You double your revenue by improving the prospect and customer experience. You identify the most critical moments for them and ask yourself how you're performing in those critical moments. Are you performing magically? If not, that's your red. And if you're able to perform even 10 percent better at each of those critical moments—and therefore up your conversion rate at each stage—you can double your revenue without bringing in a single new lead. Again, more is not always the answer.

Digging into conversion rates

One good place to look for the red is in your sales velocity. Generally speaking, if you want to grow your revenue, you need to increase your sales velocity. Chris Codelli, the director of sales and marketing at Marlin Operations Group, Inc., explains how he uses the sales velocity formula to calculate the rate at which an organization is closing business—and how the formula itself helps identify opportunities for improvement.

Chris explains, “I find that the real value of the formula is in its construction, as it reveals the four factors that companies can impact to grow sales productivity (i.e., increase their sales velocity).” These are the four factors, according to Chris:

• Increase number of new opportunities
• Increase average selling price
• Increase win rate
• Decrease sales cycle length

Of these, Chris says that increasing win rate—or the conversion rate across the funnel— has the greatest impact since it's the variable we have the most control over.

“Increasing conversion rates starts with making sure we are engaging with the best possible set of targets (ICP, buyer personas) and then involves applying skills and processes in an effective and efficient manner. These are all factors that a company can control,” Chris explains. “The impact of increased conversion rates at the top of the funnel has a multiplier impact downstream that is very meaningful.”

For Tara Corey, vice president of marketing operations at Qlik, inspecting win rates was key to finding the red—and thus improving their overall success. She and her team determined that 35 percent of the company's leads converted less than 1 percent of the time. But when they applied predictive models, they went from MQLs to 6QAs. The 6QAs converted at two to three times the average rate. By prioritizing qualified accounts using predictive scores, the Qlik team was able to stop spinning its wheels chasing leads that were unlikely to convert, and that freed them up to spend more time on outbound prospecting. In fact, with AI-driven insights, Qlik was able to reduce the time the team spent sorting through and following up on leads by between 30 and 40 percent.

Chris says something about conversions that's a little esoteric, but it really resonates with me. He points out there are two definitions for the verb convert. When we're talking about conversion rates, we usually focus on the first definition: “to cause a change in form, character, or function.” But Chris proposes that we might be better served if instead we focused on the second definition: “to change one's religious faith or other beliefs.”

I love this! What we really want when we're seeking conversions is for buyers to become believers in us, our organization, and our solutions. We want them to want to take the next step in the journey with us. And it's a really good way for sellers and marketers to give themselves a customer-first gut check: If you were in your customer's shoes, would the experience you're giving them change their beliefs at this step in the journey? What about at the next step? And the next?

If the answer is no to any of those, then you've found your red. By fixing it, you'll increase your conversion rates while also vastly improving your customer experience.

I know this is a little evangelical for a business book—but I'm passionate because I've seen it work! And while I don't want to come across as cultish, it's important to say this: If you don't believe that this level of focus is the right move for your organization, and if it's not something you're ready to religiously apply to everything you do, it's okay to stop reading now. If you prefer to keep your focus on scoring leads and attributing every MQL to the appropriate ebook download, this approach is not for you. And that's okay. But if you are willing to put in the work, to re-examine every step in your process, find the red, and improve it, you will see results time and time again.

Step 3: Design your go-to-market plan

If you're still with me, I'll take it to mean you're all in! You've aligned on your revenue operating model, which means you have your quotas spelled out for pipeline, bookings, upsells, renewals, etc. It also means you've come up with your sales headcount plan, you've found your red, and you know the key spots in your process that you're going to improve.

Now it's time to create your go-to-market (GTM) plan. Your GTM plan spells out the specific campaigns you're going to run in order to achieve the revenue operating model you've established. Consider it your capacity plan—it ensures you have the coverage needed to meet your goals.

Which brings me to my next point. No team, no matter how well-resourced, has unlimited capacity. Your capacity will vary based on the size, skills, and resources of your team as well as your deal cycle time. But whatever your capacity is, you need your GTM plan to spell out how many campaigns you can implement and how complex those campaigns can be. In order to scale campaigns based on complexity, length, and resource needs, it's helpful to break them into tiers, with the first tier being the most resource-intensive, the second tier being less so, and the third tier, once it's up and running, more or less operating in the background. I'm going to tell you about the three tiers we use at 6sense, but if you have a smaller team you may only be able to manage two tiers. You'll figure that out when you start mapping out your capacity.

Tier 1 campaigns

Tier 1 campaigns are the types of campaigns we marketers live for. These are what I call “mind-blowing moments.” Others call them “lightning strikes.” Whatever you call them, the idea is the same: Tier 1 campaigns are designed to knock people's socks off. Ideally, these will create a ton of pipeline and revenue, but they'll do more than that: They'll drive market awareness and drive your category plan forward. If you want to create or lead a category, Tier 1 campaigns are key.

So what falls under the category of a Tier 1 campaign? Think the big stuff—significant product launches, acquisitions, funding, important industry trade shows, your own conference, and so forth. These are the campaigns that are so high-impact that people talk about them for years to come. They're so big that most teams will only be able to pull off one or two per year (if that).

Tier 2 campaigns

Tier 2 campaigns are more bite-sized. Tier 2s are point-in-time projects that are geared toward increasing pipeline or engagement in a focused account segment.

Some examples of Tier 2 campaigns are running a competitive takeout, amplifying an event, launching a webinar series, or doing a co-sell with a partner.

Tier 3 campaigns

Tier 3s are your bread-and-butter campaigns. They're the ones you run to programmatically build and accelerate pipeline. They're initiatives that are always running without requiring a huge effort.

Your persistent digital presence is an example of a Tier 3. Sometimes the initiatives you try as a Tier 1 or Tier 2 that end up being wildly successful graduate to become Tier 3s. Assuming you have an account orchestration platform and the ability to set up dynamic segments, Tier 3s basically just work on their own. All they require from your team is a periodic refresh. For instance, every quarter you might look at your Tier 3s and see if they need fresh creative, new content, etc.

What every campaign has to have

It would be easy to look at this tiering system and start filling your GTM plan with a few campaigns from each level and call it a day. But we're more strategic than that, right?

We know that every campaign must have a business objective. Every single thing we do needs to tie back to a specific business goal. Typically these campaigns are about generating pipeline (though Tier 1s need to do more). Specific goals might be to increase win rate by X percent, to increase deal velocity by Y days, or to meet a certain customer adoption objective.

In addition, every campaign should tie back to an account segment. Depending on segment and objective, the number of accounts you're targeting will vary. I'll get into that in greater detail in the next section when we dive into execution.

If you're not explicitly stating the business objective and account segment you're targeting with each campaign, it's really easy to just start dropping things into the plan without giving them the thought they deserve. Force yourself and your team to define the business objective and examine the data for each campaign before committing to it. We have a saying around here: No segment, no creative.

A solid GTM plan eliminates “random acts of marketing”

Creating a solid GTM plan with a tiered system is a great way to hyper-prioritize what's really important to your overall goals and strategy. When you understand your capacity, down to the exact number of campaigns per tier your team (and budget) can manage, you're able to ensure you're only saying yes to the absolute best campaigns that will help you meet your objectives. Here are some of the reasons this approach is so effective:

1. We all know how “random acts of marketing” can take over if you don't have guideposts in place. Looking at your capacity through a tiering lens ensures you don't spend all your time on a bunch of little dippy things that don't add up to much—a webinar here, an ebook there. When you create your GTM plan, everything needs to be grouped under a theme or business objective. Your plan gives you an immediate visual of how each thing you do reinforces and amplifies everything else.
2. You keep customer experience front and center. With your GTM plan in front of you, you can zoom out and ask yourself, “Is this a plan that creates value for my audience? Are these campaigns adding value to my customers and future customers?” If the answer is yes, onward. If not? Time to get back to work.
3. It's motivational for your team. No one gets jazzed about getting another pile of Asana tasks dropped on them every day—but everyone wants to be part of doing cool stuff. A well-designed GTM plan outlines all the cool stuff and gives context for why we're doing it. Suddenly all those tasks make sense and take on a higher purpose, since they all fit into an overall plan.
4. This GTM framework allows marketing, sales, and customer success to confidently see if there are enough campaigns hitting the market to meet our revenue plan. And just as importantly, it lets them see why their ideas or requests that are outside the plan are not getting done. I've said it before; if people can't see what's happening in marketing, they'll happily fill the void with their own ideas for things you should do!
5. The tiering system provides shorthand for the team to use. When my team hears that a campaign is a Tier 3, they know it means they do X, Y, and Z. We're not starting from scratch. That sort of baked-in understanding makes it easier to manage workload and expectations.

Step 4: Execute using the five-step account-based formula

You've aligned, you've strategized, you've planned, and you've planned some more. Now it's time to turn all that hard work into fun—let's execute some campaigns!

When it's time to execute campaigns, naturally we're still thinking in terms of ABM. So every campaign is account-based, not lead-based. That means we'll use that five-step ABM flow that I introduced in Chapter 3:

Now, if you have the tech that I outlined in Chapter 3, you can lean on it for a large chunk of the process. The right tech does a lot of the heavy lifting, but of course, it won't do everything. You and your team need to define the key elements of any campaign:

• Your business objective
• Your budget
• Your content and creative
• Your prospect experience (meaning activation channels like direct mail, email, BDR outreach, events, and special programs)

Let's take a look at the five ABM steps and drill down to see which parts will require humans and which can be left to the tech stack:

STEP 1 

Start by defining the business objective. Do you want to enter a new geo or industry? Do a competitive takeout? Introduce a new product or feature? You and your team need to decide on this.

Once you've done that, your tech stack will use real buyer intent and activity data that buyers are leaving behind as a digital footprint on the web to identify the best accounts for your business goal. Your AI-based platform will score activity against your current ICP, but it also continually learns what behaviors are leading to new opportunities. It should adapt and continue to surface the best accounts for you to target. It should also deliver insights into the account's buying stage, who is on the buying team, and what they care about. All those predictive capabilities come together at this stage to ensure the accounts you're targeting are the right ones for you.

STEP 2 

Your technology will provide rich insights about the accounts. It'll capture prospect buying signals from the CRM and marketing automation systems as well as digital footprints from across the B2B web. This includes search data and research activity across trade publications, blogs, forums, etc. This is where that embedded CDP comes in handy!

STEP 3 

With this data and the insights provided by the platform, you can now determine the content, creative, budget, and prospect experience. Your technology will orchestrate these insights using AI to ensure the right message is delivered to the right person at the right time on the right channel. That means no more hoping your message hits at the appropriate buying stage or to the relevant personas.

STEP 4 

I can't overstate the importance of a well-designed tech stack here. It literally makes or breaks the relationship between sales and marketing. With the right technology, both sales and marketing are on the same page knowing which accounts are showing meaningful activity, where they are in their buying journey, and what efforts are working to get them moving through the funnel. Without technology, we're using subjective measures to rate accounts (like my nemesis the MQL). An account engagement platform integrates seamlessly with your CRM, marketing automation platform, and web personalization tools to ensure you have a single source of truth across the entire revenue team. Bonus: No more “stuck leads” report!

STEP 5 

Your technology should provide real-time tracking of budget, ROI, accounts reached, personas engaged, and pipeline created/influenced. This is another way that technology helps sales and marketing collaborate, since tracking and reporting on a common set of metrics eliminates finger-pointing and unites everyone as one revenue team. An AI-based platform allows you to track new accounts that are in-market, as well as meaningful metrics like engagement levels, to understand which tactics are actually working to reach your targeted accounts.

So that's it. That's how campaigns get executed in an ABM world. If you've ever wondered how ABM can be implemented at scale, here's your answer—it's with these five steps, plus a tech stack that does the heavy lifting for you.

To illustrate how it plays out in the real world, I will walk you through three actual campaigns we've run—one in each tier—to show you exactly what happens at each step, and how we're able to achieve next-level results without spinning our wheels or burning ourselves out.

Tier 1: The mind-blowing moment

As I said, Tier 1 campaigns are the stuff marketers live for. Tier 1 campaigns are your chance to have a massive impact, and not just on your organization and market. They are an unbeatable opportunity to stretch your creativity and big-thinking muscles.

In other words, I love Tier 1s. And of all the Tier 1s I've ever done, the one that I'm most proud of was our play at the SiriusDecisions Summit, which is a huge industry event for us. And to be honest, it's one we almost didn't do. When I pitched it, not everyone on the team was on board. They argued that we were already diamond-level sponsors and doing more would be overkill.

But here's what I know about these types of events: Being just one more company on the trade show floor—regardless of your sponsorship level—is not going to make you stand out. And I knew we could stand out and make a huge splash. So I took my own advice and played offense. I trusted my instincts and decided we were going all in on this event. And I'm so glad we did. It was amazeballs—a shining moment for 6sense and for our entire team.

Let me walk you through how we pulled it off, within the context of our five-step ABM approach:

1. Select the best accounts. To start, we needed to define our business objectives. Remember, with Tier 1s you're doing more than just generating pipeline. Yes, we knew we'd walk out of this with an F-load of new pipeline, but that wasn't our only objective. Our main purpose was to create a mind-blowing experience for our customers, our future customers, and our team. Remember in Chapter 1 when we talked about the magic that happens when employee experience and customer experience meet? Well this Tier 1 play was designed to get our team completely revved up so they'd be amped to show off 6sense and put our absolute best face forward.

   From the customer experience perspective, we wanted to show current and future customers mad love. We wanted them to be clamoring to meet with us. We wanted to get in front of as many of our best prospects as possible so we could create meaningful experiences and get them crazy excited about collaborating with us.

   We used our platform to build a segment with the best in-market accounts that were an ICP fit and were going to be at the event. This was the list of accounts we'd work on scheduling meetings with at the event. And we asked the sales team to nominate their super-high-value accounts for another play we had up our sleeve, which I'll tell you about in a minute.

2. Know about them. Once we had our segment built, our technology gave us rich insights into everyone in it. We knew their industry, their top searched keywords, where they were in their buying journey, and other key information. We ran a data enrichment plan to buy contact details so we had everything we needed to get meetings booked in advance.
3. Engage the right way. Now that we had selected the best accounts and knew everything we needed to know about them, we were able to start engaging with them the right way. Before the event, this included tailored outreach that spoke to their interest, industry, and buying stage—insights that make our AEs much more likely to get a positive response than the generic, “I see you'll be at the event! Can we set up a time to talk?”

   We also created a microsite specifically for 6sense at SiriusDecisions, where we listed all our activity, speaking sessions, events, parties, etc. It also included a link to request a meeting with us. We ran ads that matched the microsite, so that our prospects were surrounded by consistent messaging from us.

   At the event itself, we knew we wanted to turn heads and get people talking. We also knew we wanted to provide massive value to our customers and future customers. So we took over a nearby restaurant and set up a private, high-end lounge, which we called Club6. It was as high-end as you can imagine, and it was a place I still want to hang out. It had a concierge, a latte bar, whiskey tastings, shoeshine … you name it, we had it. But here's the catch: To get in, you either had to be in a meeting with one of our AEs, or you had to have one of our exclusive Black Cards—and we only offered those to the high-value accounts I mentioned above. And, of course, everyone who saw or heard about Club6 wanted in. Talk about FOMO.

   But it wasn't all about glitz and pampering. We were laser-focused on our business objectives, including completing tons of meetings with the right accounts and moving them through the buying process. We set up a command center that could instantly help us make sure we were getting meetings, then second meetings, and pulling in whatever partners and subject matter experts we needed to help deals progress. Because after all, everything we needed was right there, so why wait? Rather than have just one meeting, we wanted to be able to cover five or six deal steps in four days.

   And finally, we walked into the event with a buttoned-up post-engagement plan to make sure it would live on long after we all got back home. It included case studies, which we featured in a follow-up webinar series called “Meet the Senseis.” That became a nurture track that created value for connections we made at the show.

4. Collaborate with sales. We collaborated closely with sales at every single step of this play. Starting very early, reps used the insights afforded by our technology to set meetings and design personalized gameplans for each key account with the goal of delivering a world-class experience. We worked with the head of sales to create expectations and set a meeting goal. And, of course, we asked them to tier their accounts and tell us who was worthy of the coveted black card. We had meetings with the sales team with increasing frequency as the show date grew closer, so that by the end we were entirely aligned on processes and expectations. Then we had everyone come to the event a day early for onsite training, which is critical when it comes to getting everyone on the same page.

   During the event, all AEs had dashboards of their accounts where they could look at engagement on a daily basis and try to schedule demos or follow-up at Club6. And when meetings did happen, they could take next steps right away. Because they have 6sense, the AEs also got Slack alerts on accounts that were increasing or decreasing engagement. One AE saw a spike on an account he hadn't been able to schedule a meeting with in advance, so he reached out during the event and ended up scheduling several meetings— and ultimately closing the deal.

5. Track real stuff. We went into this event saying we wanted to generate an F-load of net new pipeline, and we did. We tracked meetings scheduled and meetings completed and blew both goals out of the water. We tracked how many of the Black Cards got picked up—around 80 percent.

   And in terms of making a splash and creating a buzz? That couldn't have gone better. It showed in our website traffic from ICP accounts, which went through the roof. But it also showed in this feedback from industry leaders:

   “Stole the show at SD. Most talked about. Most attended. One to watch.” — Industry analyst

   “No idea how you pulled SD off. You look like a company 10x your size.” — Partner CMO

   “I'm jealous of your marketing.” — Competitor CEO

That's an example of what you can accomplish with a successful Tier 1. As you can see, it takes a ton of work to plan, execute, and measure your success—which is why most teams can only handle one a quarter, if that. Now let's take a look at an example of a much lighter lift—a Tier 2—and the steps involved in that.

Tier 2: The competitive takeout

A Tier 2 campaign isn't nearly as complex as a Tier 1. It's a relatively low lift, though of course it does still require time and effort. So when our team wanted me to launch a competitive takeout campaign after one of our competitors fumbled a product release, my first instinct was to say, “No, we've got a ton on our plate, and by the time we get the entire thing mapped out this will be yesterday's news.” Plus, I'm not a huge fan of competitive takeouts, which are campaigns that are designed to divert interest from a competitor and toward us. But sales was super into the idea, so I got on board. And in the end, it turned out to be a pretty successful campaign—and we pulled it all off in two days!

Here's how it went down, following the five-step ABM process:

1. Select the best accounts. Our objective was to take business from this competitor. Our platform identified around 200 accounts that were currently using the competitor's technology solution or actively researching the competitor's solution based on keyword search analysis.
2. Know about them. Our platform also identified the key personas on the account, along with additional keywords they were researching, to provide us with more detail on what they cared about. We used those insights to determine the budget, creative, and content. Based on the Dark Funnel™ intelligence uncovered by the platform, we huddled and came up with our creative. We ran a set of ads through an A/B test in 6sense and quickly got feedback on which message was resonating. And it was pretty funny, if I do say so myself.

   

3. Engage the right way. We ran display ads to the 200 accounts based on the insights we had gleaned in Step 2. The message was tailored to people who weren't satisfied with their current solution—but it was classy and kept things light. The call to action was to put us to a real, live test so we could prove we could perform better than our competitor.

   Our platform orchestrated the campaigns, making sure the ads got in front of key personas in the target accounts. It automatically triggered BDR outreach when accounts reached decision stage.

4. Collaborate with sales. Our platform kept marketing and sales on the same page throughout the campaign. It automatically updated the opportunity record directly in our CRM, allowing our AEs to easily see which accounts were viewing the ads, which accounts visited our website, and which accounts had responded to BDR outreach. In addition to that activity data, our sales team could also see which personas were engaging and what topics they cared about. And finally, account owners received an alert when an account moved into the purchase stage, letting them know it was time to act.
5. Track real stuff. Our technology tracked how much we spent, how we increased engagement, what open opportunities we influenced, and ultimately, the new opportunities we created.

So, how did it all turn out? Amazingly well. This was another a-ha moment for me—we were able to net incredible results with only two days of effort and a total spend of $237! We increased engagement, identified (or moved) accounts as “in-market,” influenced existing opportunities, and even created one new opportunity. We responded in a timely and agile way to changing market conditions and built all of our creative based on what we knew our audience was interested in. And because we didn't have to spend any resources arguing over which accounts to include or what our messaging should be, it allowed us to stay entirely focused on our business objective.

This is what I'm talking about when I say that with the right tech stack, agile, transformative marketing is possible. It allows you to put marketing back where it belongs—as close to the customer as possible.

Tier 3: A programmatic approach to printing pipeline

An integral part of our business is consistent pipeline generation. For this example, I'll walk you through a programmatic campaign—one of those always-on initiatives that works in the background, dynamically adjusting to target the right accounts and deliver personalized experiences. This is what keeps our business humming.

Because of our insights, we can deliver new dimensions of personalization. As you'll see in this example, we personalize everything for the account's buying stage and what they care about—dynamically and with a high degree of accuracy.

1. Select the best accounts. Our business objective is to deliver an engaging experience to target enterprise accounts. Our platform surfaced only our in-market ideal customers (the IICPs I keep telling you about), which whittled down our ICP list of 37,000 accounts to a much more manageable 2,000 accounts that were showing buying intent. And as this campaign runs, our list of accounts is constantly updated based on the signals our tech is picking up on.
2. Know about them. Our technology gives us insight into the criteria used to make up our IICP. For example, we can see that the best accounts are primarily U.S.-based, have a marketing automation platform installed (e.g., Pardot, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Marketo, Hubspot), have more than 100 employees, and are in certain industries. It also tells us their buying stage so we know when those accounts are in-market and when they move to 6QA status—that window of opportunity when accounts go from researching to ready to take a meeting.

   Using these insights, we're able to create messaging and outreach that's not just based on demographic, firmographic, and technographic data, but also timed to exactly where each account is in their buying journey and tailored to the keywords they're researching.

   The timing is especially important in this campaign since the goal is to take accounts from wherever they are in the buying journey and turn them into pipeline. Stage-based content is nothing new—we've always mapped out our messaging to buying stage. The difference now is that we don't just put the content out there and hope the prospect will find it at the right moment. Now our insights allow us to confidently deliver the right content for each buying stage at exactly the right time, across channels.

   Also incredibly important are the keyword insights we have. Thanks to our technology, we have completely revolutionized the way we create and deliver content. We are no longer guessing about what accounts care about. Our intent data give us supercharged intelligence to tailor our creative and content to align with the exact topics our ideal, in-market customers are actively researching. In this case, the keyword we're focused on is “predictive analytics,” and we create the information based on that. Remember, our goal in this no-forms, no-spam, no-cold-calls reality is to understand our customers better so we can be their preferred source of learning at every step in the journey.

   Armed with these critical insights, we set our budget and map our content, ads, value cards, and cadences to buying stage and keyword. Here's what that looks like.

   

3. Engage the right way. The right insights and orchestration capabilities allow us to engage the right way. For this campaign, we engaged using a mix of tactics. The first is display ads, which provided aircover based on buying stage and keyword.

   We then used the same IICP accounts in our Google retargeting and LinkedIn strategies, focusing on “predictive analytics” across buying stages. Google retargeting and LinkedIn amplification are basic tactics, but because we're able to overlay our IICP accounts into each of these platforms, the bid engines are able to automatically increase spend on high-value audiences, while lowering bids for lower-value audiences. Not only does this ensure better targeting and click-throughs (which matter with these platforms/ strategies), it's key with limited resources to make a bottom-line impact and ensure a consistent experience across channels.

   A big part of engaging the right way entails creating a seamless, integrated, and consistent digital experience. So when the ads do their job and these target accounts visit our website, we want to make sure that what they see aligns with their expectations—whether or not they got to us by clicking through the ad. That's possible thanks to our technology, which lets us match anonymous visitors with accounts (and accounts with buying stage and intent), regardless of traffic source.

   There are two key ways we provide a personalized content experience to our website visitors, and both are based on buying stage and intent. The first is with our chatbot, which recognizes the accounts that are visiting our site and pops in with friendly and tailored recommendations. So for instance, an early-stage visitor who's interested in predictive analytics may get a recommendation to check out our TalkingSense video on predictive analytics (learn more about our video strategy in the sidebar on page 128).

   The second way we provide a customer-first (and more effective) digital experience is with a personalized content hub. The content that an early-stage visitor interested in predictive analytics sees on our site will be vastly different than what a decision-stage visitor researching predictive analytics will see, for example. And the hub is dynamic, so as an account changes buying stage or areas of interest, the content will change to match it and usher them through the funnel toward pipeline.

   

   

   And it works amazingly well—which we know because we can watch accounts as they progress through the funnel, we can see when and how they engage, and we know specifically which marketing efforts are influencing them. But every so often we get an account close to the finish line—then things stall. In those cases, we need to show a little extra love, and we do that with a highly personalized take on direct mail. For our high-value, qualified opportunities that have shown interest but (for whatever reason) aren't progressing the way we expect them to, we use a service called Alyce to send a personalized gift designed to grab their attention and re-engage them. I'm not talking lame squishy balls or a 6sense mug—Alyce cross-references the person's online presence to determine their interests and then curates gifts that are sure to make a personal connection. It then populates a personalized e-store with gift options most likely to resonate with the person and that the person can select or choose to donate the value to charity instead. What I love about Alyce is that we're not sending people junk, and we're not wasting money on random swag. We're sending timely, personalized gifts with a specific business goal: to move an account through the buying journey.

   This may seem like a lot of avenues of engagement for one campaign, but with the right technology, it's seamless. While it requires watching the top keywords that are bubbling up to ensure we are adapting to what our market cares about, systems are in place so our orchestration platform can handle the bulk of the work for us.

4. Collaborate with sales. As I've said, we don't focus on inbound; we focus on in-market. We know when in-market accounts “6QA”, it's time for our BDRs to start engaging. At that point, we enrich our account data to make BDRs’ outreach as efficient and effective as possible—without wasting their time tracking down company information and reading a thousand press releases and articles to get to know the account. Instead, our platform gives us the ability to trigger what we call a SmartPlay. When accounts move from awareness to consideration, marketing immediately begins building and enriching a dossier on that account, including information about the entire buying team. The moment an account crosses over to decision/purchase (6QA), the BDR team is equipped with all of the information it needs to immediately start engaging with the account. They also have information about everything that happened along the buying journey to cause that account to 6QA, and they can see all of the personas on the buying team and how they have engaged across all of the buying stages. Again, this helps them personalize their outreach.

   Sales is also in the loop, working in tandem with the BDRs to ensure they understand the entire buying team—including the content they have consumed and even competitive threats. That means sales goes into first meetings prepped and ready to talk about what they know the future customer cares about.

5. Track real stuff. This is an always-on campaign designed to generate engagement and drive the pipeline needed based on our operating model. We measure success by tracking how accounts convert at each stage of the funnel and into the sales process. We also drill down into engagement statistics across the journey to find places we need to optimize.

   Here's what we've seen as a result of our Tier 3 campaign approach:

   • Based on our view-through rate (VTR), we can see we're consistently getting the right accounts to our website.
   • Just one day after launching new chatbots that recognize accounts and personalize conversations mirroring our journey-based ads, we booked a meeting.
   • With dynamically personalized content hubs, our time on site is two to three times better than the industry average.
   • Personalized gifting has been wildly successful, netting a 70 percent better response rate than the industry average—because it's based on real in-market insights!
   • We're consistently hitting our goals for the number of accounts we want to move to 6QA as well as our opportunity stage 0, 1, and 2 goals.
   • BDRs are generating pipeline that's more than double the industry average, supporting our growing sales team and targets.
   • We've done all of this while maintaining an industry-leading CAC!

The plan in action: No forms, no spam, no cold calls

Did you notice what was conspicuously absent from each of these campaigns? That's right—the three verboten tactics: forms, spam, and cold calls. And does it look like our results suffered from their absence? Hell no. In fact, the whole reason we were as successful with each of these campaigns as we were is that we didn't piss off our customers by throwing up roadblocks to their learning, annoying them with irrelevant content, or harassing them when they weren't ready to hear from us. Instead, we followed our proven steps and made decisions based on real, data-based insights. When you do that, it's almost impossible to provide a bad customer experience. Process and insights are the secret sauce when it comes to real engagement with your future customers.

Following the five-step ABM process is essential if we want to bridge the divide between how B2B buyers want to buy and how sellers and marketers have traditionally operated. The result is a profoundly improved customer experience—and a straightforward path to meeting and exceeding your business objectives.

Now, how will you execute?

I hope these examples get your creative juices flowing on all the ways you can create amazing experiences. I could go on all day, writing up scenarios we have run and ideas for new ones. Remember, it all goes back to your business objective, budget, content creative, and the tactics at your disposal. The platform orchestrates the rest. Here are some plays to try:

Tier 1

• New Product Introduction
• Funding Announcement
• New Research Report

Tier 2

• Territory Warm Up
• Deal Blitz
• Increase ROI from an Event Series
• Door Opener

Tier 3

• New Customer Welcome Program
• Deal Acceleration Program
• Content Syndication

You've executed your campaign, but there's no time to rest on your laurels. There's always room for improvement, which we'll uncover in the next step.

Step 5: Inspect what you expect

Our CEO, Jason Zintak, is a brilliant CEO and GTM legend (and let's hope he never reads this, because he hates when we brag). One thing he taught me is to always “inspect what you expect.” What does that mean in this context? Well it's not about attribution, and it's not about measuring for the sake of measuring. Instead, it's about inspecting each campaign against the goals we set up, seeing where it performed and where it didn't, and adjusting accordingly.

What I love about our segment-focused, account-based approach is that we can measure our campaigns at a granular level. We have the means to do it, and we need to—because that's the only way we can improve our campaigns and make sure that our precious budget dollars are engaging accounts in a meaningful way and driving predictable, measurable results.

So for every campaign, we need to measure cost versus increasing or decreasing account engagement, 6QA created, open opportunities, pipeline, and bookings. This allows us to see when certain elements of a campaign are underperforming, to benchmark our overall performance over time, to evaluate (and double down on) our top programs, and to cut what's not driving revenue.

So how exactly should you go about “inspecting what you expect”? I think of it like a tube of toothpaste. You want to start at the bottom and tightly roll up to get the every last drop of toothpaste in the tube. If you just go squeezing here and there, you're going to leave a lot of toothpaste in the tube. We want to do the same thing with every campaign we run.

For a Tier 2 campaign, here's what the roll-the-toothpaste inspection looks like:

• Accounts reached. Did you hit a critical mass of accounts you were targeting? If not, check your segment and bidding and make improvements.
• View-through rate. Was the ad interesting enough to get people to your website? If not, reevaluate the creative.
• Account engagement. Did you move the account forward in the buying journey? If not, look at the digital experience. What was on the page? Was it personalized for what your accounts care about? How long did they spend on the page? What content was consumed?
• Meetings booked. Did you have a compelling enough call-to-action? Did you hamper the meeting request with a cumbersome form? Walk through the process your future customers went through and see how you can make it easier and more attractive for them to book a meeting.
• Pipeline created. How was your BDR outreach? Was it timely? Did it use multiple channels? Did it address multiple personas? How personalized was it? Make improvements where necessary.

What you'll learn: No one is perfect

We've had some major successes using the process I've outlined in this chapter. But we've also found lots of room for improvement, thanks to inspecting what we expect.

For example, a few months ago we ran a campaign called “Do the Match.” We had super-high hopes for it because it was grounded in one of our strongest differentiators: Our ability to match intent signals to accounts.

We set about creating the campaign and defined our business objective: To grab market share based on this differentiator. We set our creative, content, and budget and got to work creating some ads, a landing page, and a CTA that allowed prospects to put us to the test. We built our segment and the insights looked great, so we pressed play.

Well, we didn't get the results we expected. We reached a lot of accounts, but when we squeezed the toothpaste tube we realized our view-through rates weren't great and our engagement and conversions were worse. The culprit? Our creative. It was just kind of blah, and it wasn't engaging people the way we needed it to. So the whole campaign suffered.

At this point we could have scrapped it, but because we took a systematic look at what went wrong, we saw that we could make some tweaks and breathe new life into it. And we believed that if we fixed the problems, the campaign would provide real value to future customers. We tried again—this time with killer creative revolving around Valentine's Day. People loved it. It had amazing results both in terms of engaging ideal customers and creating new pipeline.

Lesson learned: Creativity still matters, and don't throw out the baby with the bathwater! Sometimes a campaign just needs some small adjustments to yield the results you knew it could have.

Another example I think about when I consider the value of JZ's advice to inspect what you expect was around Dreamforce week. The Dreamforce conference is like the Mardi Gras of the tech industry. It's a great opportunity to get in front of pretty much everyone you'd ever want to meet with, but it's also absolutely massive—meaning it can be really challenging to stand out.

Well, if there's one thing I love to do, it's to stand out. So we went all in on our Dreamforce presence. We created and refined a segment with our ideal potential customers who we knew would be there. We ran targeted, effective display ads. We created an amazing microsite to help people navigate their Dreamforce experience. We ran a fun and informative social campaign about the event. We offered white-glove concierge service for our customers at our office. I presented some wildly popular sessions at various ancillary events. And, of course, we threw some kickass (and strategic) parties.

In other words, we engaged the right accounts in the right way and provided a ton of value.

During the week, we were pumped. It was going so damn well. Everything went off without a hitch. We were getting incredible feedback and praise. And we were meeting with all the right accounts. We fell asleep dreaming of the buckets and buckets of pipeline we'd be filling when it was all over.

And then … we got home, exhausted and hungover like everyone else, and things fizzled. Instead of gushes in our buckets, we were seeing drips. This did not line up with the signals we were getting at the event.

We quickly started to “inspect what we expect.” Looking at our predefined goals and our processes, we could see where our expectations and our reality were misaligned. It turned out that our follow-up was suffering in part due to timing: Dreamforce happens right before Thanksgiving, and when people get back home, it's difficult to get them on the phone. So we adjusted our post-event engagement to accommodate the new reality. We created new content experiences to allow prospects to continue to learn from us. We re-examined our cadences and added those personalized Alyce gifts for high-value prospects. And we re-engaged in the new year, once the holidays had passed and people were ready to take on new projects again.

After making those adjustments, we were back on track—and Dreamforce week ended up being one of our higher-performing programs for 2019.

Another possibility, of course, is that you'll inspect your campaigns and determine that they're not worth saving. In that case, you can rely on your data, calculate your costs versus your results, and feel confident pulling the plug if it's not performing and isn't likely to perform even with adjustments.

Step 6: Communicate and repeat

If you haven't noticed by now, I'm an open book. Not just because it's who I am as a person, but because I know transparency is essential for building trust. And trust within an organization is essential for success. It's one of the reasons I'm such a fan of the V2MOM structure—full transparency means that we're all aware of what everyone is doing across the organization, where we're smashing expectations, and where we're struggling. I can't overstate how important it is to communicate openly and honestly in order for an organization to function together as a team instead of in competition with one another.

This culture of transparency and trust is essential with everything we've covered in this chapter as well—your revenue plan, your “red,” your go-to-market-plan, your execution, and your results.

Communication is key here, but so is the right technology. At 6sense, our sales leader, our customer success leader, and I are all looking at the exact same dashboard. We're working off the same data—and we all trust the data—so we all know what's working and what isn't. We have a rare sort of alignment across the revenue side of the organization, and I credit a lot of that to our transparency, good reporting, and quality data.

There you have it. You've gone through the entire process for putting this new approach to sales and marketing in practice. But you're not done—you need to keep repeating this process, refining it, and sharing your amazing results. And if you need some inspiration, just look to the Impartner case study on page 134. When I need to be reminded of how all this hard work pays off, I remind myself of their story. They've fully embraced orchestrated account engagement and are crushing the prospect experience in ways that get me so fired up. I bet they'll light a fire under you too.