Podcast appearances and mentions of nikki nixon

You may have heard about account-based marketing, all of the technology associated with it, all of the planning that goes into it, and then the cross-departmental collaboration, and thought, “That would be nice, but we are not quite there yet.” An ABM Expert, formerly the Director of #FlipMyFunnel, and Americas Account-Based Marketing Manager at Autodesk, Nikki Nixon, encourages marketers with a practical ABM approach that they can implement in their everyday marketing. If you have been trying to revamp your ABM approach or just need a nudge to get started, then this episode is for you!   Takeaways: The first step towards a basic account-based approach is to understand your ideal customer profile (ICP). Who are your best customers, which accounts are most likely to buy from you, and what are the characteristics of those accounts that you can look for in future prospects? After a business defines their ICP, the team needs to then identify the personas that they are trying to reach at those accounts. Once the personas are understood, the next step is to design an engagement strategy to reach those personas. If you are selling to IT professionals, the best way to reach them is through their peers. How can you market to their surrounding influencers and community? If you do not know your ICP, talk to sales and ask who is their best fit customer? Do not define your ICP in a silo. Be sure to collaborate with sales throughout the ABM process. Once you have run the data and worked with sales on defining your ICP, take the leap and go out and test it. You will find out more information from marketing tests to an ideal customer profile, than you would from trying to dig for more data. A great test to run to confirm an ICP, or a persona, is account-based advertising. Look to see if your hypothesized targeted accounts are clicking on your ads. Who from the account is engaging with your content? This information can help you prioritize and confirm your ICP. The more time someone spends with you, the more likely they are to buy from you. At the end of the day, you are trying to get that account to “vote for you”.  Career advice from Nikki Nixon - Believe in yourself more! Have confidence and conviction in what you are doing. Do not tie your identity to your career.   Links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikkinixon/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/techmarketeratl Faith's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/faiththemissionarydog/   Busted Myths: ABM is only for large enterprise companies. - ABM is NOT just for the large enterprises, but it is for every company that wants to apply focus to their marketing efforts. It is letting go of marketing to everyone, because there are a portion of accounts that are wasting your time and not gaining you any revenue.   Ways to Tune In: iTunes - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-hard-corps-marketing-show/id1338838763 Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/1vVLpNI1LssMTiL6Kdsamn Stitcher - https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-hard-corps-marketing-show YouTube - Full video - https://youtu.be/QWQVVlsQVc4

How do you market a company that is selling something fundamentally new and different? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, John Rougeux of Flag & Frontier talks about category design. It's not a tactic for every company, but when used strategically, category design can drive truly remarkable marketing results. John digs into who category design is right for, how long it takes, what a category design go-to-market plan looks like, and how to gain organizational support. He also shares examples of companies and marketers who've successfully created new categories. Highlights from my conversation with John include: John is an experienced category designer who has also owned and exited a business. He says that compared to traditional inbound marketing strategies, category design requires a much larger lift when it comes to educating the market. Every business has a choice to either compete in an existing market or create a new market.  If you're creating a new category, you have three choices: 1) try to fit your product within an existing category; 2) ignore category in your marketing and focus on the product's features and benefits; or 3) create a new category. John says options 1 and 2 don't work. When considering whether category design is right for you, you need to honestly evaluate your product and determine whether its simply a niche within an existing category or something that has truly never been offered before. If its the latter, then category design is really the only logical solution. Category design takes time. John says you should expect to spend six to nine months just designing the category behind the scenes, and then once you roll that out publicly, it can take another few years before it really takes hold. Category design needs to be a business initiative, not simply a marketing strategy, because it affects product roadmaps, sales and more. When executing a category design strategy, it is critical to focus marketing messaging on the problem that your audience is experiencing and the outcomes that they will experience as a result of your solution rather than how the product itself actually works. The companies that have been most successful at category design have evangelists whose job it is to go to market and talk about the problem and why there is a new solution. Its also important to build a consistent conversation around your new category. That might mean holding a big event (like HubSpot's INBOUND or Drift's HYPERGROWTH) or building a community, like Terminus's FlipMyFunnel.  If your company is venture-backed, it is also important to get your investors on board with the idea of category creation so that you have the funding to support the strategy. There are examples of category design all around us. Some of the bigger and more visible ones are minivans and music streaming services. The category wasn't created overnight, and in many cases, people don't even realize its a new category, but we see it is as fundamentally different from the status quo, and that is what successful category design looks like.  Resources from this episode: Visit the Flag & Frontier website Email John at John@FlagandFrontier.com  Visit John's personal website Purchase a copy of Play Bigger Listen to the podcast to learn more about category design, when it makes sense, and how you can use it to dramatically improve your marketing results. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is John Rougeux, who is the founder at Flag & Frontier. Welcome, John. John Rougeux (Guest): Hey, Kathleen. Thanks for having me on. John and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: Yeah. I'm really excited to have you here for completely selfish reasons. I am deep, deep into the weeds, trying to learn everything I can right now about category creation because it's something that I'm kind of working on for a little project at work. And I stumbled across your name. I think it was in a LinkedIn post mentioned by Sangram Vajre at Terminus, and he mentioned you as somebody who's doing a lot of work on category creation. And I immediately thought, oh, I need to have him in on the podcast. And here you are. I am so excited, so welcome. John: Thanks. Thanks. I actually want to come back to something that you said a minute ago. You mentioned this was a little project for you, so I'm going to pick your brains about why it's not a big project. Kathleen: I think I might just be downplaying it. John: Okay, all right. Kathleen: It's a huge project. John: All right. Kathleen: Yes, yes. It is a giant. In fact, it's probably bigger than I think it is. No, it's- John: Well, Sangram told me a few weeks ago. He said, "If you're not doing something that scares you a little bit, then you're not setting your sights high enough." So I think you're on the right track there. Kathleen: Yeah, no, I think my whole career has been a succession of choices that consistently terrify me. So hopefully, that means I'm on the right track to somewhere. So you have an interesting story. You started out or your career really grew in B2B tech, and you worked in some companies that were looking at category creation as a potential strategy and it seems that that wet your appetite and led you to where you are today. Can you just talk a little bit about your background and how it got you to where you are now and what you're doing now with Flag & Frontier? About John Rougeux and Flag & Frontier John: Yeah. Yeah, happy to. So the thing that I like to tell people is that I always wish that I knew about category design earlier in my marketing career. I think it would have helped me be more successful and make better choices and think through the strategy of what I was working on at the time a lot more thoroughly. So the reason I say that is in 2013, I co-founded a company called Causely. And I won't get too far down into the weeds of what Causely does and the business model, but we were basically using cause marketing as a way to incentivize people to take action. And specifically, we were looking at incentivizing referrals on social media. And at the time, I was looking at marketing through a fairly narrow lens, like a lot of people do maybe when they are kind of earlier in the middle of their marketing careers. We were looking at things like you know how do you improve the performance of an advertising campaign? How can you write a better better blog post? All of those kind of tactical things. And I didn't realize at the time that what we were doing was something categorically new. People didn't have context for what that meant, what they should compare it to, what value they should expect, what things should it replace or not replace? And so we had a reasonable trajectory. We scaled the business to a few thousand locations. It was acquired. But when looking back on it, I know that if we had had this lens of category design of how do you describe something when it's different than anything else out there, I think we could have gone even further. And so when I joined a company called Skyfii in 2018, I had started to kind of understand what that meant, so I had read Play Bigger. I read some, the works by Al Ries and Jack Trout that talk about how if you can't be first in a category, design any category you can be first in. And at Skyfii, that business, it's a publicly-traded SaaS company out of Australia and they found that they were participating in a fairly commoditized space. Or I guess to be more accurate, the perception was that they were a competitor in a fairly commoditized space. And their business had evolved past that and the product did all sorts of other things that were much bigger than the category the market thought they participated in, but they didn't really have a framework for talking about that. And so we went through a repositioning exercise where we defined a new category that better reflected what they were all about and and how people should kind of relate to that. And that was a really, I think, powerful and challenging exercise to think through.We've got something new in the market, but how do we describe that? How do we tell the right story? How do we tell the right narrative so that people know how to relate to it? Why category design is a fundamentally different approach to marketing Kathleen: This is so interesting to me. There's so much I want to unpack here. I guess, starting with something that you kind of started with, which is that there is this typical marketer's playbook, right, where people come in and they think, "Oh, we need to top, middle, and bottom of the funnel. We need to create content and attract people," this and that. And when it comes to category creation or trying to market something that is different than anything else people are used to, that playbook doesn't really work. Because as I'm quickly learning, especially looking just at the top of the funnel, traditional top of the funnel marketing, it's like well what is that problem that people are having and they start to look for a solution. And the challenge you have is that if the solution you're offering is something they've never heard of, it's such a steeper climb to try and gain their attention. It's like they don't know the right questions to ask even, if that makes sense. John: No, that's absolutely right. And I always like to mention a really thoughtful post that Mike Volpe, the founding CMO of HubSpot wrote a few years ago because it lays such a great groundwork for any discussion around category design. And the blog post simply says that look, every marketer has two choices on their strategy. They can pick an existing category and try to carve out a niche within that category. Maybe they can dominate that category. But basically, they have to pick a space and then do the best they can within that space. Or they can try to design a new category. And when you look at kind of the underlying product or business model and you really take a close examination of what it is and whether it's different or whether it's something better, you almost don't have a choice. If you're doing something that is new that people don't have a framework for, you really have three choices. So I want to pack these for you. So choice number one is you can try to shoehorn this new thing you've built into an existing category. And we'll come back to why that doesn't work in a second. Number two is you can just talk about the products, like features and benefits but not really think about a more underlying narrative for that. And then number three is you can design a new language, a new framework, which is called category design. And so here's why number one and number two don't work. So again, number one is if you try to shoehorn something new into an existing category. The reason that works against you is that people will make the wrong comparisons for what you're supposed to do, how you're supposed to be priced, how you deliver value. That just works against you. Secondly, if you just try to talk about the product itself but don't provide a larger context, you're not giving people, you're not giving them really any framework, and it makes it difficult to understand what you're all about and why they should be interested in you. I'll give you a great example. A friend of mine works at a company and I won't mention the name of the company, but they combine two different categories kind of in an existing platform. So one of these is VoIP, Voice over Internet Protocol communication software, very established, known space. The other thing they do is they have these marketing automation functions that they add to their software to at least in my view very disparate types of software, but they combine them together. And so far, they haven't really given their buyers a context, a category for what this thing means. And so they're basically letting people to their own devices to understand and come up with their own conclusions about what that is. And that just puts a lot of work on your buyers when they have to think about who they should compare you to when they need to think about what department is this even for, or what products does this replace or not replace? That's generally too much work for people when they're trying to understand something new. And like you said, Kathleen, if you're not telling them what questions they should ask, then chances are they're just going to be too confused before they'll even really be interested in having a conversation with you. Kathleen: Yeah, and there's two other aspects to what you just said that I think are really interesting, which I'm beginning to appreciate more with the work that I'm doing. One is that human nature is such that people want to slot you into something that they already understand. They don't want to have to think outside the box. So when people hear about something new, that their natural inclination is to try and categorize it in with things that they already know. And that's a hard thing to battle because you are literally battling human nature. And the second thing is if you do allow yourself to be put into a category that already exists that maybe isn't really truly what you're doing and you are actually successful in selling your product, you will wind up having a lot of problems with churn once you do sell it because people are still going to be thinking that you are like that other thing that you're not actually like. And they're going to be looking for your product or your service or whatever it is to solve for them in the same way that other thing does, when in reality your thing does not solve those problems. So it's like you're setting yourself up for a very long horizon of failures that you might not see at the outset, but it's kind of a you're failing before you've even begun. John: Yeah, that's a great point. And yeah, people do... They tend to... The world is so complicated, and there's so many things that we have to deal with and try to understand that we use this rule of thumb of categorizing things. Sometimes we do it explicitly, like smartphones are a great example of a category we all know about and buy them and we know why they're different than a mobile phone. Sometimes we just do it implicitly. We don't necessarily have the language or the terms to describe that category, but we know that we try to group likes things together because it makes it easier to understand the world. Kathleen: Yeah or we use analogies. So many times, you hear things like, "Well, that's just the Uber of," and then they list a different industry. Or, "That's the Airbnb of something else." John: Yeah, that's right. Kathleen: And so we're constantly trying to put these things into comfortable mental frameworks, which I think is fascinating. So you mentioned there were three things. The first two, I think you covered. And then the third is really designing a new category. John: The third is designing a new category. That's right. That's right. When does category design make sense? Kathleen: So how do you know... I guess the first question is how do you know when that's the path you should be taking? John: That's a great question because I've heard from some people that they have this idea that every company should try to design a category, and that's really not the case. It applies to some companies. But for many other companies, like if you're developing a CRM, a better version of a CRM, don't try to build a new category around that. So yes, so the way you would look at that is there's no formula you can put into Excel and calculate and churn all this out, but it really comes down to does the thing that you've built, does it solve a problem that has not been solved before? Or does it do so in a way that the world isn't familiar with? So is there a new business model behind that? Is there a new delivery mechanism behind that? It really comes down to those two things. And maybe if you want to look at it at a more fundamental level, you could ask yourself do the existing categories that my market is familiar with, do they accurately capture the type of thing that I'm offering? If they do, then one of the reasons you may want to choose to carve out a niche in an existing category is that people are looking for established products in established categories. People are looking for marketing automation software, they're looking for smartphones, they're looking for video communications tools like Zoom, like we're using today. And so, if you say, "Hey, we have the right tool within this category for this specific market or for this specific need," that can be very powerful. And arbitrarily forcing yourself out of that category just because you like that idea of category design is going to work against you. Now, that being said, again to kind of flip it around, if you find that the categories and the language that are used to describe existing products your market is familiar with just don't capture what you're doing or they limit it in some way, then ultimately you need to find a way to break out from that and that's what the process of category design is all about. What does it take to create a new category? Kathleen: Now, one of the things that I've come to appreciate just the more I look at this is what a big lift creating a category is. As you said in the beginning, this isn't a little project, right? I would love it if you could just talk a little bit about sort of expectation setting. If somebody is listening to this and they're thinking this really sounds like it could make sense for me, from your experience and what you've seen and you've talked to people who've been involved in category design, how long does it take before you can really expect that the market will recognize a new category? John: Yeah. It's a pretty long-time horizon. And so I mentioned Mike Volpe at the beginning of the call and I'll mention him again and Kipp Bodnar, the following CMO of HubSpot mentioned the same thing I'm about to tell you. And they told me that when they first started talking about inbound marketing, it was like standing in the middle of a town square on a soapbox just shouting into the wind with nobody paying attention. And that was the case for two to three years before that phrase really started to work its way into the lexicon of marketers. Salesforce, they pioneered, not so much CRM but cloud-based software. And even today, they still talk about other applications to cloud-based software that's 20 years later. And another example might be... So at Terminus, they talk about the account-based marketing gospel. And maybe this kind of hints to the challenge of how difficult it is to build a category. Sangram used to be there, I think he was their head of marketing if I'm not mistaken. He's definitely a co-founder, but his role is chief evangelist. And so they recognize that to really get people to be aware of and to understand and use this terminology around account-based marketing, they've had to invest very heavily in evangelizing that market or that message out in the market. Kathleen: Yeah. The other story that I've always found interesting... I followed all the ones you just mentioned really closely. And then the other one that's been fascinating to me is Drift because they came on the scene. And if they're listening, they may take issue with what I'm about to say, but look. A big piece of what their product does is live chat, website live chat, and then they have chatbots. Well, those things have been around for a while. That was not anything new, but they were really smart and they coined it as conversational marketing and they really focused more on, not so much the how and what the technology does, as what it enables the business to do, and kind of wrapped a methodology around existing technology in a way that made it feel fresh and new. And it was pretty genius. And I feel like they actually moved really quickly by comparison to a lot of the other examples I've seen. So it's interesting to me why in some cases, businesses are able to gain traction faster than others. John: Yeah. I would have to think that a lot of it has to do with the culture and how quickly or rapidly that business has gone through change in the past. And the other thing we should probably discuss is just the timeline of everything that happens before you share your new category with the world. I was talking with... There's an interview I did with, let's see, Anna and Cassidy at a company called Narrative Science. And they expected just the category design process itself to take about six to nine months. This is before they released language out publicly. And at Skyfii, that was our experience as well. And for that situation, that company, I think they were founded in 2012 or 2013. So they were five, six years into the business and there had already been a lot of discussion around the space that they started in, which was Wi-Fi marketing or Wi-Fi analytics. And so anytime that you're going into a space where the culture already kind of thinks and has a mental model for what their business is, the process of reworking all of that and getting everyone on board, especially the leadership team and perhaps even investors, getting them on board with that new message in a new way of thinking about the business, it takes time. And I would argue it should take time. Because if you rush the process and you ask your team to start using maybe even radically different language about what you do, people need time to really think through that and maybe they need to push back or challenge you a little bit or ask questions or provide suggestions. There's just this change management process you have to go through. And if you rush through that, people are not going to feel like they're a part of that process. And then ultimately, that's going to undermine your efforts in years one, two, three and further as you're asking your team to help you share that message. And at Skyfii, Skyfii is publicly traded in the Australian market and so they have investors and they have a public... They're very thoughtful about the message they put out into the market. And so they really wanted to take the time to make sure that message was right and that it made sense. And so, yeah, it took us, I don't know exactly how many months, but yeah, around six to nine months to really start that discussion and then get to a point where we were comfortable with the category name and the underlying narrative to support it. Why category design needs to be a company-wide effort Kathleen: Yeah, and I think there's... To me, one of the most important things is consistency because you kind of said if everybody is not on board and everybody isn't speaking from the same playbook, all it takes is one or two people to diverge and talk about your thing and language and terms that puts it squarely back in with all of the other things out there that... And it destroys your effort. John: Yeah. Well, and this is probably a great segue into another really important point about category design, which is that it's not a marketing project. Sometimes, it can be spearheaded by marketing, and marketing will often do a lot of the legwork, but it's not something that's relegated or exclusive to marketing. It has to be something that that CEO is involved in. It affects the company vision and is affected by the company vision. They kind of play off of each other. It affects the product roadmap. It affects what the sales team says. It affects what you might tell investors. So if your CFO is in charge of investor relations, he or she, they have to be on board and educated on the message. That's another misconception I heard a few times and it was... Personally, I thought it was a marketing initiative when I first read about it. But the more I dove deep into it and the more people I talked to, I realized it's actually a bit more of a business initiative, more so than a marketing one. Kathleen: Yeah, that's a great point. Having that buy-in top to bottom, it's really important. John: Yeah. What's been your experience at Prevailion in kind of leading your team in that discussion? Kathleen: So it was interesting because I came in really excited to make this a category design play. And shortly after I came in, we hired a head of sales, who also had some experience with category design and saw that that was a really strong play for us. He and I had both read Play Bigger, and we just kept talking about it until we basically beat the rest of our leadership team down into buying copies of the book. They've all now read it. They're all super excited about it, and it's great because it's given us a common language and framework around which to talk about what it is we're doing. So we're still really early stage, but I think we have that excitement and that buy-in in principle at least is there. And now, we're at the stage where we have to figure out our plan. What does a category design strategy look like? Kathleen: So along those lines, let's talk a little bit about somebody who's listening and they think, "Yep, this makes sense for me. Okay, I'm going to set my expectations. I understand I need to get top to bottom buy-in." What are the elements that you've seen in your experience from the companies that you've studied that have done this that contribute to successful category design efforts. In other words, what would be a part of a company's plan if they were looking to move forward with this? John: Yeah. So I'll mention two things that come to mind. So one I touched on a moment ago, but it's making sure that the CEO and the leadership team are involved and to the extent that they feel like they have a stake in the success of the project. What I mean is it's not enough for them to say, "Sure, that sounds great. Category sounds great, Mr. or Mrs. CMO. Go for it. Let me know how it turns out." That's not sufficient for getting buy-in. So getting them to be a stakeholder and have a real level of participation, that's absolutely key. And there's an interview I did with Chris Orlob of Gong.io, where we talk about that in more depth. So if you want to link to that, I'm happy to- Kathleen: Yeah, that would be great. I would love that. John: Yeah. The second thing is category design, it's all about talking about a problem that you're solving and less about the product. And so one thing I always like to say is that problem... Let's see, so your solution, your product. Solutions don't exist without problems, right? And then problems don't exist without people. And so you have to go back and understand the people that you're trying to work with and serve, and understand the problem you're trying to solve and the language they use to describe that problem, and the context for which they're trying to solve that problem or maybe they're not even aware that it is a problem or they think it's unsolvable. The point is you have to really understand the problem first and use that to lead your messaging. If your category is all around, here's why this specific product is so great and it's called this category, you're kind of missing the point. When you look at the language and the marketing that companies like Drift, for example, do, 80% of it is on the problem. Drift likes to talk about how the buying process has changed. Buyers are not interested in waiting hours or days or weeks for someone to respond to them. They want a response now. And you even see that word, "now", used.  Kathleen: Yes. That word, that one word... I went to HYPERGROWTH. I think it was not this year, but the year before. I went this year too. John: Okay. Kathleen: The year before, their whole keynote at HYPERGROWTH was all about the one word, "now." And it was so powerful, the way they distilled that down I thought, really, really simple but effective. John: Yeah, yeah. And they've written a book around conversational marketing. If you've used Drift products, you can kind of see some tie-ins but it's really about the problem that they're trying to solve. And people smarter than me have said lots of times that if you can articulate that you understand the problem better than anyone else, then people will assume you have the best solution. You don't have to work so hard to talk about every single little feature or benefit that you offer. Showing that you understand the problem creates empathy with your audience, and then again, they'll assume that you have the best solution to address that problem. Kathleen: Yeah, that's interesting that you talk about that because I think that's a really easy mistake for marketers to make, which is to say that, especially when you talk about B2B technology, it's really easy to fall into the trap of talking a lot about what the product does, how the product works. And I think many times, that's facilitated or even encouraged sometimes by the customer asking, "What does the product do? How does it work?" John: Right. Kathleen: And yet, I think the challenge as a marketer is to try to really get ahead of that and take control of the conversation and steer it towards not only the problems as you say and really deeply understanding them, but the outcomes that come from the use of the products. There's problems, and then there are what is the outcome for the user? How does it make their life better? How does it change them for the better? If you think of those as two different poles, and in the middle, lies the product and all the stuff it does, if you can keep the conversation more at the periphery on those poles, then I think you can be really successful. But that's tough. John: No, I've never heard it described that way, but that's a really clear way of describing that. And it's funny you mention that because I was having the opposite experience just this week. I was there was looking for a new email client for my computer. And that's a pretty established category. There's a million email clients. And in that context, you don't need to talk about the problem of communicating with people. Kathleen: Right. John: You know what email is. You don't need to talk about the outcome so much. There were a few features I was looking for and I was trying to find a client that had those features. And so you can talk about that a little bit more upfront when the category is established and people know what the category is, what it isn't, what it's supposed to do. But to your point, Kathleen, if that category doesn't exist and you're really trying to sell a vision around solving a problem, emphasizing what the problem is and then emphasizing the outcomes are really what's necessary to get people interested in just having a discussion around this new idea. And then from there, they're probably going to ask, "Okay, this sounds really good. Tell me about that product itself. What does it actually do?" Then you're in a perfect position to go into those details because they're ready for it. And they get the larger idea. Kathleen: Yeah, and that's where I think the traditional framework of top, middle, and bottom of the funnel comes back into the discussion, right? When you do get towards that middle to bottom of funnel stage, you can get into the weeds of how it works. And I know in our case, for example, it might not even be the same person we're having the conversation with. Our ultimate buyer isn't going to ever care so much how it works. They're going to hand that part of the decision off to somebody on their team and say, "Validate this for me." And it's almost like we've talked about it. We just need a spec sheet, but that... It's kind of like when you're going to a conference and you get the convince your boss letter, but in reverse. We're selling to the boss and the boss needs a convince their engineer letter that they can just hand to them and say, "Here, take this. It's in your language. It'll answer all your questions." Right? To me, that's the steps that we need to go through, but if we get too stuck in the weeds of convincing the engineer early, we're never going to get to convince the boss. John: Yeah, that's right. That's right. Building your category design go-to-market plan Kathleen: Yeah. Well, have you seen... So there are those foundational elements of how you talk about what it is you're doing, how you talk about the category, how you begin to gain share of mind. And then there's the actual go to market. And I've seen a lot of information written. For example, in the book, Play Bigger, which we've mentioned a few times, which is kind of like the Bible for category creation and other places. They talk about the concept of a lightning strike, which is just really a big kind of splashy go to market. It could be an event. It could be some other, something else that really makes an impression on the market and gets it talking about your thing. What have you seen or have you seen anything that has worked really well as far as like quick, well, I don't know if quick is the right word, but very high impact kind of strategies for really making an impression on the market? John: That's a great question. I'm not sure that I've seen a ton of really great examples beyond the few that we've discussed. So back to HubSpot, I don't recall a big... They have their INBOUND event, right? I don't recall that having a huge kind of blow up the world moment at the time when that conference first came out, but they've certainly been consistent and they made it a very conscious decision not to call it the HubSpot User Conference or even put the word HubSpot in there. It was about inbound, something bigger than themselves. I've seen Terminus, they have focused on this idea of a community of people who are interested in account-based marketing. Sangram told me they started with a fairly small event, relatively small event. And they've kind of built it from there. But that's more of an ongoing exercise, I guess, an ongoing process. Drift has their HYPERGROWTH conference. They came out with a book called Conversational Marketing. That's probably the biggest kind of high profile thing they did that was explicitly around that category. I think one of the things around lightning strikes is that, at least the way they're described in the book, is that they feel like they could be appropriate for a VC-backed company, or maybe a publicly traded company who's launching a new category and wants to really make that big splash and can afford to do that. I would say if you're earlier on and you don't have millions to drop on a big event or a massive campaign of another nature, it seems like other companies can can be successful with more of a process-driven approach of who are we trying to get to care about this category? What are they interested in? Where do they spend their time? And how can we just have these conversations with them on a repeatable basis? Because, like we were talking about earlier, it's not like once you name your category, the whole world suddenly cares about it and there's all these... Gartner doesn't give you a ring and say, "Hey, I guess we're going to create a Magic Quadrant because we saw your lightning strike. That's good. This is so great." Everyone who I've talked to anyway, who's done it well, has had to dedicate consistent resources over time to really get people to understand it and think about it. Kathleen: Yeah. You're talking about something that strikes very close to home for me because I've looked at those examples too and I had an opportunity... I've interviewed Kipp Bodnar. I've interviewed Nikki Nixon, who was one of the first leaders of the FlipMyFunnel community for Terminus. I interviewed Dave Gerhardt at Drift. So I've had a little bit of an inside peek into some of those companies. We didn't talk about this topic specifically, but what did strike me about all of those conversations and all of those examples is, as you say, consistency but also not just consistency, volume. There's a difference between, "Hey, we're going to consistently blog once a week, and it's going to be a great blog," and that's just an example. All of these companies not only have been super consistent, but they have turned the volume dial way up in terms of the amount of content they're creating around their category. I think every one of them has written a book actually, because Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah wrote the book, Inbound Marketing. You mentioned the book that Drift wrote. Sangram has written a couple of books. I don't know if that's a requirement or it's just a coincidence, but I think it certainly has helped. But it's also a reflection of that turning up the volume. We're not just going to write a bunch of blogs and use this keyword on them. We're going to write the book on our topic and really own it. And to me, there's something to that. If you're going to do a category creation play, you don't necessarily have to have the biggest budget in the world. Maybe you're not going to throw a HYPERGROWTH type conference, which is a cool conference. But you are going to need to really be prepared to just saturate the market with content, flood people with educational content around what is that problem you're solving, why it matters, why it's new, and why the new approach is better than the old one. John: Yeah. And that comes down to having patience and the right time horizon. And like you were asking about earlier, if your expectation is that category design is something maybe you can do for a few months and then you can go about business as usual, that's a wrong time horizon. And it will take months or probably years for people to really get what you do and talk about it, independent of conversations with you. And you have to have the content to support that, whether that's an event or a blog or a book or a podcast. And I think you also have to make sure that your investors understand that vision. They understand that you want to create something big, you want to create a category that you can dominate and design to your favor. And then if you do that, five to 10 years from now, you will be in a very good position. But also understanding that the first few years will have a different trajectory than someone who's just really trying to scale growth right off the bat at a very high level. Kathleen: Yeah, I feel like you just brought the conversation perfectly full circle because we started talking about how important buy-in was, top to bottom. And you can think of top to bottom as like CEO to the bottom of the organization. But honestly, if you have investors, that's really the top. Your board has to be totally bought-in because you'll get a ton of pressure. I mean we do have investors. We just got a series A round, so I'm dealing with this right now. And we're very fortunate that we have a really bought-in board, but I completely agree with you. It's also fascinating, you mentioned earlier analysts. That's another thing. If you're working with the analysts, what are the expectations you should have there? Because I recently read a quote that was like, "Gartner will never create a new market if there's only one player in it." Right? Because what's in it for them to build a Magic Quadrant for one company? They're not going to do it. So by definition, if you truly, truly are creating a new category, your thing is new and different and not like anything else and you "don't have any competition" which is like the bad words to ever say... Because even if you don't have competition, you have perceived competition. There's nothing in it for an analyst to say, "Well, this is a new category because a lot of work to produce a Magic Quadrant or a Forrester Wave." They're not going to do it for one company. So that goes back again to the conversation around time horizon. So it's such an interesting play and not for everyone certainly. You mentioned a couple of really good examples from the marketing world, Drift, HubSpot, Terminus. Can you think of any examples from outside of the marketing technology world that are really great examples of category creation? So if somebody is listening and they want to kind of look out in the wild and see who's doing this well, who would you point to? Examples of category creators John: Yeah. Yeah, that's a great point. Once you understand what category design actually means, you start to see new categories all over the place. So I'll mention two. So in high school, Kathleen, I drove a minivan. It had wood siding, I hated it, and it was just the dorkiest car you could drive. But at the time, I didn't know- Kathleen: We have to come back and have a conversation about that in a minute. John: So at the time, I didn't know that minivans were actually representative of a new category in the market. And I can't remember when they first came out. I think it was maybe the mid-80s, and I mean there were these full-size work vans, but people didn't conceive of this van that you would use to haul your family around. It was a completely new category. And it continues to be... I've come full circle. We've got a minivan today, another one. And so anyway, that's kind of a great example. You see that in automotive all the time, so hybrid cars. The Prius was a great example of designing that category. Tesla now for electric cars, SUVs as well. So that's one. And then another one is, I was actually thinking about this on the way to work this morning, the way that Apple and Spotify have really created, I guess, a new category around how music is distributed, I think, is another interesting example. And I think it's a... The reason I bring it up is category design isn't so much about a specific name or a specific taxonomy or a word that Gartner has capitalized. It more has to do with the business model and the way people look at a space. So when Apple launched iTunes, they completely changed the way music was distributed from buying a full album to buying individual songs and to needing to have the physical copy of the media to having a digital copy you could take anywhere. And now, I would argue that maybe Apple or iTunes created that category. They are the first to do that. But I would also argue that it's really Spotify, I think, if I'm not mistaken, I think their user number is larger than Apple's for Apple Music, they're the ones who have actually designed the category. They're the ones who said, "This is what streaming music looks like. This is what you're supposed to pay. This is about how many artists or songs we're supposed to have available. This is how we're going to curate music to you." And that's a completely new way of using music or listening to music. I don't know what the official name for that category is. Maybe it's just called streaming music. It's not something I'm an expert on, but that was a very long answer to your question but those I think are two that come to mind for me. Kathleen: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I do feel like we're surrounded by category creation. And it's happening even faster than I think it used to because of the pace of technological change. We just don't necessarily recognize it as such. But when you have that framework through which to think about it, you do start to see it everywhere and it's really interesting to watch. And I think it's kind of like the whole frog that boiled in the water analogy, which is actually a terrible analogy when you really think about what you're talking about. But the notion that- John: Who's actually tried that by the way? Do you know anyone? Kathleen: No, God, I hope not. That's like, don't they say serial killers start by torturing animals? No, no, no. Do not boil any frogs. But the whole idea being it's happening to us. We are experiencing category creation. It's just that it's happening at a pace that we don't like see it. It's not like a yesterday it didn't exist, and today it does. That by the time the category has happened and has become commonplace, it just feels like it's been there all along kind of. It's really interesting. I think there's probably a whole psychological aspect to this that hasn't even been mined in a way that it could. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: But all right, shifting gears because I could talk about category creation forever, but we don't have forever. Inbound marketing. We talked about really what the podcast is about, and I love talking about category creation as part of it. Because when you talked about consistency and HubSpot and Drift and Terminus, really they were all phenomenal examples of companies that really did inbound marketing well. So when you think about inbound marketing as it is today, is there a particular individual or company that you really think is killing it? John: I'm going to say that it's really like a style of inbound marketing that I think is starting to get a lot of attention and it's this idea of having an evangelist be a voice for the company. And the reason I think this is so interesting is because, like our world is, there's so many messages we get from brands today, both on the consumer side and on the B2B side, that I think people have a real... They started to see that you can have a brand say anything, right? It's a construct. But when you have a person who's a real human being talking about the vision and the values and what their brand represents and how it might be able to help, to me, that's a much more authentic way and it's just very relevant in the world today because I feel like people just crave more human-to-human interaction. So a three examples of that. We've mentioned a couple already, so Sangram and Terminus does that very well. Dave Gerhardt does that. He doesn't have the title of evangelist, but he's much more of the face of the company I think even than David Cancel or others. And then, Ethan Beute at BombBomb is doing that really well. Kathleen: Yeah. John: I know you had him on a previous episode, and yeah. I know there's others out there, but those are the three that come to mind. I see their content very regularly. They all do a different job. They have their own styles. They have their own voice, but they're very authentic. And I think they're adding a lot of value for the respective companies through what they do. Kathleen: I totally agree. Those are three great examples. And picking the right person or settling on the right person to fill that role is such a critical decision for the company. It has to be somebody that truly, deeply understands, as you said, the problem that the audience is experiencing, but that also can come across as charismatically and passionately believing in that shift that needs to occur to create that new category. So it's an interesting mix of skills that you look for when you try to find your evangelist. John: Right, right. So does this mean you're going to step up and be the evangelist at Prevailion? Kathleen: I don't know. We actually... I'm really lucky. And one of the reasons I joined the company is that we have this amazing team of really smart people, who are also very invested in participating in marketing. So our CEO is unbelievable. He could sell ice to the Eskimos, not that he would. That makes him sound like he's a smarmy sales guy. He is so smart and he really has been in the market a long time and knows it, and he's also incredibly well-spoken. So while I would love to get up and talk about it, I think I'm really lucky that I have an executive team that is full of people who could probably fill that role better than I could. John: And you know what? I don't think it's entirely an either or situation. Some of those companies I've mentioned, they have someone who's maybe has the largest following or the loudest voice, but there's others on the team who can contribute to that. And I think that's what's really exciting, is it's not just one person, but you can have a whole series of people on your team evangelize for the company. And I don't know about you, there's something about when I just see the people behind a product that I'm thinking about using. I feel so much more comfortable having that conversation and and exploring what they do than I would if I was just reading pure brand messages. Kathleen: Absolutely. It all comes down to trust, right? And if you feel like you can trust that person who is the chief spokesperson, somehow or another there's a halo effect from that that shines down on the brand. And it really saturates the brand with that feeling of trustworthiness, that makes you want to buy from them. John: Yeah, that's right. Kathleen: Yeah. I love it. Well, digital marketing is changing so quickly. This topic of category creation is so fascinating because conceptually it seems like something that will stand the test of time, but then how you implement it obviously will change over time. With everything changing so quickly, how do you personally stay up to date and stay educated on all things marketing-related? John: Yeah. For me, both listening to and hosting podcasts has been a big driver of my growth. And so conversations like this one with you are really helpful because you and I could swap ideas. The episodes I've done... So I co-host a series on the B2B Growth show around category creation. I also did a series on FlipMyFunnel. That's given me the chance to talk to people who have done more category design work than I have and learn from them in the process. And for me, that's been so much more valuable than anything I could read or stumble across in a newsletter, not that those things aren't valuable. But having one-to-one access to experts, there's few things that are... I'm not sure if anything is going to beat that. Some of those conversations have led to ongoing relationships, where I've been able to ask questions and dive deeper into other topics. And so that's where I found the most valuable use of time, is just having conversations. I love to read, love to listen to podcasts, but anytime I could just talk to people and listen to them and then talk through my own ideas, man, I'd do that every day if I could. Kathleen: Amen. I just filmed a LinkedIn video about this, about how I learn. And the number one way I learn is through hosting this podcast, which when I say that to people, I know that that's not something that's going to be feasible for everyone. Let me just spin up a podcast so that I can learn. But it is the most amazing vehicle because you get to meet such incredible people like yourself, pick their brains, really get into detail that you can't get into in other ways. And it's amazing how much I take away from it. Second for me is I love to listen to Audible business books on 2X speed as I do my commute. John: What are you listening to right now? Kathleen: I am finishing Crossing the Chasm. And then before that, it was Play Bigger, From Impossible to Inevitable, and I come back. I'll listen multiple times to books because I feel like you absorb more the second time. John: Right. Kathleen: So yeah, lots of good ones. There's never too many books to read or never too few books, I should say. I always have more. John: Right, no shortage of content, yeah. How to connect with John Kathleen: Thank you. That's what I was trying to say. Well, if somebody has questions about category design and they want to reach out, learn more about what you're doing, or ask you a question, what's the best way for them to get in touch? John: Sure. So you could email me at John@FlagandFrontier.com. So that's J-O-H-N@FlagandFrontier.com. You can also just put in John.Marketing in your browser, and it'll bring up a really simple page with just my contact info. Sometimes that's easier to remember. Kathleen: So smart. That's great. I love that. John: I can't believe no one bought that domain, but it was there so why not? Kathleen: Genius. John: It's easier than spelling my last name. And then you can find me on LinkedIn as well. I won't attempt to spell my name here, but if you want to link to it in your episode- Kathleen: I'll put that in the show notes, absolutely. John: Yeah. You know what to do next... Kathleen: Great. Well, I have really enjoyed this. I've learned so much. I feel like I probably could have made this podcast three hours long, but nobody wants to listen for that long. If you're listening and you liked what you heard or you learned something new, I would really appreciate it if you would take a minute, go to Apple podcasts, and leave the podcast a five-star review. That is how other people discover us, and that is how we get in front of a bigger audience. So take a minute and do that. And if you know somebody else who's doing kick-ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at WorkMommyWork because I would love to interview them. Thank you so much, John. This has been fun. John: Yeah, my pleasure, Kathleen. And hopefully, we can have another conversation later on as you go further into your own category design process. Kathleen: Yes, about that and also about the minivan that you drove in high school. John: All right, sounds good.

The Inbound Success Podcast launched on August 28, 2017 and today marks the 100th episode, and 100 straight weeks of publishing interviews with high performing marketers. On this week's Inbound Success Podcast, I'm taking a break from interviewing guests to share with you 13 trends that I've observed from the 99 interviews I did throughout the last two years. Listen to the podcast to learn more about the 13 things that the world's top-performing inbound marketers are doing, and get links to the specific episodes where you can dive deeper into each topic. Transcript Welcome back to the Inbound Success podcast. My name's Kathleen Booth. I'm your host, and this is the 100th episode of the podcast. I thought this was a great opportunity for me to take a break from the usual routine of interviewing some of the incredible marketers that I get to speak to every week and look back on the last 99 episodes and try and digest some lessons learned. I've had the incredible good fortune of speaking to some really amazing marketers in the last two years as I've done this podcast. It's given me an opportunity to meet people I otherwise never would have met, to learn some things that have really kind of made a difference for me in the way I think about marketing, and have prompted me to take a second look and reevaluate the way I've been doing some things. So, thought it was a great opportunity to share some of those lessons learned with all of you. How The Inbound Success Podcast Got Started But first, I wanted to just take a moment and tell a story about why I started the podcast. It was about two and a half years ago that I had my own marketing agency, Quintain Marketing. I had had the agency for 11 years. I'd gone to a lot of marketing conferences and listened to tons of podcasts, and watched webinars, always looking to make myself a better marketer. I had a lot of clients that I wanted to help. I also wanted to market my own agency and do better every day. I always would listen to these folks talk about the marketing work they were doing and the incredible results they were getting, and so infrequently felt that there was anything really tangible that I could take away from it and immediately use to improve my own marketing. This podcast was really an attempt to solve for that. It was me trying to scratch my own itch, and in doing so hopefully helping some of you. The interesting thing about this has been that it has certainly done that for me, and it has also done so much more. I already mentioned that it's enabled me to meet so many people I otherwise would never have met. There are a lot of people in the marketing world that I really admire and respect. And having the excuse of saying, "Hey, would you like to come on a podcast?" is a great way to meet someone new and to meet and to form that relationship, so that's been great. I've also met some really incredible people that I didn't know about through my guests when I ask them who else is doing a really great job with inbound marketing. And those relationships have been amazing. One of the most amazing and incredible things about this is that it changed the entire course of my career. One of first people I interviewed when I started the podcast was Bob Ruffolo, who is the founder and CEO of IMPACT. Now, I work at IMPACT. The reason is that before we started to hit the record button for the podcast interview, we were just talking about how things were going. I was telling him that I thought I might be ready to make a change, and that led to me selling part of my company to IMPACT and joining the team. That's been a really major shift in my life and a great one. I've learned so much. I get to work with some really smart people every day and do very, very interesting work. All this has come out of this little podcast. And most importantly, I've learned a lot about marketing. As I said, that was my original goal. 13 Lessons From Interviewing 99 High Performing Marketers So without further ado, I looked back through the 99 episodes I've done before today and really saw 13 themes emerge. That's what I'm going to share with you today. 1. There Is No "Secret Sauce" The first one ... And some of these, by the way, are going to seem like no-brainers, but they're important because it's important to remind ourselves of the things that we kind of already know. First one is, in most cases there really is no secret sauce to being an amazing marketer. The folks that I interviewed who were the most successful have a few things in common. Number one, they are voracious learners. They're always trying to improve their knowledge. They're always hungry for more. And they're consistent. That's huge, the consistency. A great example of that is Goldie Chan. I interviewed her. She's often referred to as the green-haired Oprah of LinkedIn. She has the longest running daily channel on LinkedIn. She's posted a new LinkedIn video every day for I think it's about two years. It's incredible. It doesn't matter where she is, what's happening, whether she's feeling well, whether she's traveling, what her access to Wifi is, she finds a way to do it because consistency is so important for her. And it's really paid off. They also do a few things and do them really well. A great example of that is Rev Ciancio who I talked with about Instagram marketing. Rev has an incredible Instagram presence. Which by the way, do not look at it when you're hungry because his pictures are all of mouthwatering hamburgers, french fries, pizzas, chicken wings, nachos, essentially everything that's bad for you, but that tastes so good. But, Rev has a fascinating strategy for how he approaches Instagram and has built an entire business around it. He does one thing, and he does it really well. Alex Nerney talked about Pinterest similarly, just a platform a lot of inbound marketers overlook, but he's really figured out a way to make it sing for him. The hungry learners who are consistent and who pick a few things and do them really well, that's really the secret sauce, which essentially isn't so secret. That's number one. 2. Listen To Your Customers And Prospects And Use What You Learn in Your Marketing Number two is they really listen to customers and prospects and use that in their marketing. Again, sounds like a no-brainer. We always talk about the need to do persona research and to build buyer personas, but I think what happens is we get very often so caught up in building the actual persona that we forget the big picture, that it's not about having this fictional profile of a person. It's really about understanding the way our audience thinks, what their real pain points and needs are, and the language they use to talk about that. A couple of the interviews I did were great examples of this. Barron Caster at rev.com who uses their own transcription product to transcribe all of the conversations they have with customers and then pull actual words that customers have used out and feed that into the copy on their website and landing pages, and that's gotten them amazing results. Val Geisler and Joel Klettke, two of the most accomplished conversion copywriters out there, both also talked about this type of research and understanding deeply, deeply the needs of customers and prospects. Paul Blamire at Atomic Reach, who is head of customer success and makes it a point to speak to new customers shortly after they've onboarded and really understand what brought them to the company and how the product is solving their needs. And he feeds that back in not only to marketing but to product development, to every aspect of the business to deliver a better customer experience from first touch in the marketing process all the way through the experience of using the company's product. 3. You Don't Need Fancy Tools Or A Big Budget Number three, you don't necessarily need fancy tools or a big budget to get incredible results. There are some really great examples of this. Oli Billson who I recently interviewed about the small events he's doing that are delivering tremendous amounts of revenue to his business. Chris Handy who talked about marketing for a Pre-K school, really small campaigns, but they just really ... They understood their audience, and they used the available tools that they had and got terrific results for the school. Adam Sand, who's using direct mail in conjunction with inbound marketing, super old school, but very effective for him. And Harry Campbell, who's The Rideshare Guy, and he's probably the top content creator in the ridesharing space. So think Uber, Lyft, Lime, Bird. He just started blogging and has created some great content and a big following. You really don't need fancy tools or a big budget. You can do it on your own with what you've got, if I go back to the first thing, if you're consistent, if you pick a few things and do them really well, and if you're a hungry learner who is willing to roll your sleeves up and apply what you're learning. 4. Connect With Your Audience On An Emotional Level Number four, the best marketers connect with their audiences on an emotional level, another thing that might seem obvious but that I think a lot of marketers get wrong. We tend to put our marketing hats on and make our marketing all about ourselves or we fall back into that comfortable place of corporate jargon, and kind of robotic speech, and use words like leverage and synergy. Nobody talks like that in real life, or not at least the people that you want to hang out with. The people who talked about this were Kieran Flanigan of HubSpot who shared their hearts and minds strategy for creating content with two types of content, content that solves a person's problems and tells them how to do something, that's really that mind's content, and then the heart's content, which taps into a pain and emotional need that the audience has. Then, Katie Stavely from Mautic. This is ironic that these are the two examples I'm giving for this one because HubSpot and Mautic could be considered two different sides of the same coin, HubSpot being a paid marketing automation, CRM, customer service platform, and Mautic being a completely free open source alternative to it. Katie talked about how important it was to be authentic in your marketing, especially with their audience, which it's all about community. It's opensource software, so your community is helping you develop your product. But regardless, the idea is to really make that emotional connection. 5. Sometimes The Biggest Wins Come From Content That Is Not Related To Your Products Or Services Number five, with content marketing, sometimes the biggest wins happen when you don't create content about your products or services. We as marketers, as inbound marketers, think a lot about top-, middle-, and bottom-of-the funnel strategies. We're always brainstorming what are the questions that our audience is asking as relates to our product or service. That often leads us to create content that is very much about us and not so much about our audience. But, I had two interviews that I thought really highlighted how successful you can be if you flip that script and talk nothing about yourself. What I mean by that is ... I'll start with Stephanie Baiocchi, who was actually Stephanie Casstevens at the time I interviewed her. She hadn't been married yet. And funny enough, she was not working at IMPACT. That's another great outcome of the podcast. Now she is. But, she talked about a campaign that she was running for a client that sold solutions for medical waste from physicians' practices. Originally, they were creating a ton of content around medical waste, and it just wasn't working. The reason is that their audience, which is really the office managers for physicians' practices, already has a medical waste solution. You can't be in business if you don't, so they weren't out there searching for any information about medical waste. They didn't even realize they needed to switch providers or that they had a problem. It was when she kind of took a step back and thought, "What are the biggest problems that office managers have? It doesn't need to have anything to do with medical waste," and she realized it was patient no-shows. They created a patient no-show policy template that office managers could use. That was a total home run. What it did was it opened up the conversation with their audience so that eventually they could begin talking about medical waste. But at that top-of-the-funnel level, they needed first to really open that conversation, and product- and service-related content wasn't going to cut it. Another person who did that really well was Ryan Bonnici, who is now the CMO of G2 Crowd, but at the time was working at HubSpot. HubSpot's a company that has a huge audience. Of course, trying to broaden the top of the funnel at a company like HubSpot is challenging. All the low-hanging fruit is gone, and so you really have to get creative. He was trying to target a small business audience. He really asked himself, "What are the problems that small businesses have?" And, again, doesn't have to have anything to do with HubSpot. He realized when you're starting your business or when you come to work at a small business, one of the first things you have to do is come up with an email signature. You're usually either copying one that somebody else in the company has created or you have to create it from scratch, and it's kind of a pain. He built an email signature generator, an online tool where you could type in some information about yourself and it would spit out a really nice-looking email signature. That tool generated a ton of traffic, leads, and revenues for HubSpot, and it cost them only $6,000 to build it, but the impact was enormous. So, great lesson learned about getting out of the habit of creating only product- and service-related content and thinking bigger. 6. Paid Ads Are An Essential Part Of Any Inbound Marketing Strategy Number six, the old myth that paid ads are not inboundy is dead, or it should be dead. This one was woven throughout almost every interview I did. It's funny because when I first started working with inbound marketing, it was back with my old agency. I had discovered HubSpot. We were following their original methodology of attract, convert, close, delights, for those of you who've been in the HubSpot world for a long time and all. I remember many times going to INBOUND and seeing Brian Halligan stand on stage and talk about how the old way, the old interruptive way of marketing was paid ads, and people didn't like being interrupted. I think we all read that as, well, paid ads are not acceptable if you're an inbound marketer. That myth started dying, I think, several years ago, but it's worth repeating that paid ads are, I would say, not even just inboundy, they're essential to an inbound strategy in this day and age. I'll just list off a bunch of names of my guests who've talked about it. This isn't even a complete list, but Mark Rogers, who at the time was with Carney and grew The Daily Carnage newsletter using Facebook ads; Sterling Snow from Divvy who's used ads to drive leads for their platform; Moby Siddique who has his own inbound agency and does some incredible Facebook ads work with Messenger bots; AJ Wilcox, who is a LinkedIn ads expert; Ali Parmelee, who's one of my coworkers here at IMPACT who does incredible things with Facebook ads; Anthony Sarandrea; Rick Kranz. The list goes on and on. All of them attribute the success that they're getting and the incredible results to some form of paid ads. Let that be the final nail in the coffin of that old myth. Let's really embrace ads, and not just checking the box with ads and promoting our posts, but really taking a full funnel approach to advertising. Because that's the other thing that these folks talked about is it's not about boosting something on Facebook. This is about really digging in and getting good at ads and thinking how ads can be used at every stage of the funnel. 7. Content Distribution Is Critical Number seven, it's not enough to create and publish your content on your website. You've got to promote it and distribute it. This is one that I've heard time and time again. A lot of the best marketers I've spoken to say you should spend twice as much time promoting and distributing your content as you do creating it. I think for a lot of us that equation is backwards. One person who talked about that was Kipp Bodnar who is the CMO of HubSpot, probably one of the companies that is the best at inbound marketing. He talked about what a game changer it was in the last year when HubSpot really threw some muscle behind content distribution and how that impacted their traffic. This is a company that already had amazing traffic, by the way. Then, Phil Singleton. I loved my interview with Phil who is an SEO expert and an author. Phil talked about this great strategy he uses for clients where he's creating e-books, just like lots of inbound marketing agencies do. But then he takes the e-books that he makes for clients, or he takes a collection of blogs, for example, and compiles them into any book, and he publishes them as Kindle e-books on amazon.com, and also in some cases as hard copy books through Amazon direct publishing. It is so simple, and straightforward, and inexpensive. It blows my mind that more marketers are not doing this. It was a cool episode, so definitely check that out. But yeah, the lesson is don't just like write those blogs, create those e-books. Think about what are you going to do with them once they're published. How are you going to get them out in front of the world? 8. Original Research Can Drive Tremendous Results Number eight, original research can have amazing results. I had several interviews where people touched on what has come of original research. One of the people I think that that is most famous in the marketing world for doing this is Andy Crestodina. He has been doing a blogging survey for several years and really credits that with bringing a lot of attention to his agency, Orbit Media, out of Chicago, giving him a ton of backlinks and press. It's a pretty simple survey. He does put quite a bit of effort into promoting the survey itself so he can get a lot of responses, and then once he gets those responses into packaging that content so that he can turn it into things like infographics and articles, et cetera. But, it's not just Andy. Michele Aymold from Parker Dewey uses original research and data to boost her marketing results. Clare Carr from Parse.ly, they actually don't even have to do that much research because simply by the nature of the product that they sell they have access to a lot of proprietary data. She's really productized that and used it to get a tremendous amount of press. In fact, she was able to dramatically cut back the amount of content she was creating while getting better results because the data itself was so attractive to their audience, and it also helped her reduce their PR spend. Then, Rebecca Corliss at Owl Labs. They produced the state of remote work, and that's gotten them quite a bit of traction. 9. Community Is A Powerful Tool To Fuel Growth Number nine, community is such a powerful tool for marketing. This is an interesting one because here at IMPACT we've been working really hard over the course of the last two years to build our own community called IMPACT Elite, which is on Facebook. We've learned a lot about community in the course of doing that. I would say it has been a game changer for our business, certainly. We now have over 5,000 people in that community. It's a delicate balance how you run it. You can't make it all about yourself. It has to truly be about helping the members of the community and getting them to the point where they're almost running it, if you will. I spoke to several other people who have built communities and had similar experiences in terms of the community being a fundamental tool in the growth of their business. One was Bill Faeth who is a marketer who specializes in the limousine and transport business. He has Limo University, and he has a big community around that of limousine companies. Frank Gruber, who started Tech Cocktail in the beginning and turn it into Tech.co, which was then acquired, he now has a company called Established. But, he began this grassroots community all over the country of startups and people interested in the startup ecosystem and wound up building a tremendous media business from that. Nikki Nixon who at the time I interviewed her was running the FlipMyFunnel community for Terminus. Ameer Rosic who has a community focused on blockchain called Blockgeeks. And Mark Graham, who is an old friend of mine doing amazing things, he's up in Canada and has a software platform called Commonsku and has built a great community around that. All of these folks doing incredible things with communities in very different niches, I should say. For Bill, it was limo companies. For Frank, it was startups. For Nikki, it's people who are ABM practitioners. For Ameer, it's folks in the blockchain community. And for Mark Graham, it's people in the promotional products world. All of these different niches need communities and people are hungry to connect with others who have similar interests as they do. 10. The Quality Of Your Content REALLY Matters Content quality. I had a couple of great interviews on this. This is one that I'd love to talk with more people who are focused on this. In this day and age, you can't just be creating content and checking the box. You have to really create great content that is better than anything else out there if you really want to get amazing results. One person who talked a lot about this was Oli Gardner and how he is putting a lot of effort into really making the content that they create be the best that's available on the Internet. Emily Maxie from Very talked about this, too, really digging deep and creating unbelievable resources for your audience. Both of these folks are getting great results in terms of traffic, and that traffic ultimately turning into leads, because they took the time to create in-depth pieces that really added value for their audience. Seems like it should be obvious, it's another one of these, but it's really not too a lot of us. I mean, you might think your content's really good, but is it the best? When you Google that topic that you created content about, is your piece the best thing that you can find in the search results? If not, go back and spend the time and make it better. I think one of the lessons I've learned is it's better to make less content that's better content than it is to create a high volume. 11. Creating A Podcast - Or Being A Guest On One - Is A Good Way To Build Your Brand Another theme that came out was podcasting. It's sort of ironic because we're on a podcast talking about podcasting. But a lot of my interviews, as I went back and reviewed, had to do with podcasting, beginning with George B Thomas, who I've had the privilege to work with over the years here at IMPACT. He's now at Impulse Creative. George is a prolific podcaster, and he's ... It might seem easy when you listen to him. It just seems like, "Oh, there's a guy that just has a great rapport with his audience," but he puts a ton of thought into how he does these podcasts, how he structured them so that they not only deliver value for the audience, but that they have naturally built-in incentives for people to share them and to grow his audience. That's really worth listening to if you're somebody who wants to start a podcast. Andrew Dymski is another person who's been podcasting for a long time and who I've been a guest on his podcast. He's been a guest on mine. He's got some great insights. Ryan Hawke, who has The Learning Leader podcast, Ryan blew my mind just with how prepared he comes to everything. He talked about this, too, how before he does an interview the amount of preparation he does, the amount of preparation he does when he even just invites somebody to come on his podcast. This guy is serious business, and that's why he's so successful. He really has put the thought into it and turned his podcast into a business. Dan Moyle came on the show and talked about podcast guest interviews. So not necessarily starting a podcast, but if you want to get the word out, going on other podcasts as a guest. At the time, he was with a company called Interview Valet. What's been really cool for me is seeing the other side of that. I get pitched a lot by companies like Interview Valet, and there are certainly other ones as well. They'll send me an email and say, "Listened to your show. Thought it was great. Here's a guest that I think would be really good for you." That's how I've gotten a lot of my more interesting guests. There's something to that podcast guesting strategy that really I think can help you get traction and raise your profile if you're trying to build a personal brand or trying to get the word out about a product or a service. There are plenty of companies like Interview Valet that, for a fee, will take care of that for you. It's kind of like having a talent agent. I also talked to Jay Acunzo about podcasting. He is actually a consultant to other companies and helps them create, produce, and get the best results out of their podcasts. One of his clients is Drift, which comes up a lot on my show. People love Drift, always cited as one of the best examples of a company doing inbound marketing really well, and they have a couple of podcasts. Then, Jeff Large of Come Alive Creative. Lots of folks talking about podcasting. It really stuck out to me that it's not just about, hey, everybody should have a podcast, and I don't think everyone should. It's not right for everybody. But, podcasting can play a role in almost everybody's marketing strategy for sure. 12. Video, Video, Video Number 12, video. Can't have a list of trends and things that are important in marketing without talking about video these days. Some of the guests that I've had that have spoken about this are some of the more impressive people that have been on this podcast. In 2019, I opted to kick the year off with an interview with Marcus Sheridan, who is an amazing man that is a big role model for me. I currently get to work with him at IMPACT. But, he's somebody that I followed for years and I have so much respect for because he sees things about marketing and about customer behavior that a lot of other people don't, even though they're staring us in the face. One of the things that he has really seen and committed to is that when it comes to marketing and selling, we can't just tell people something. We have to show it to them, too, and we show it to them using video. He talked about how important video was going to be in 2019. I know that he's out speaking at conferences and talking about video all over the world. Also, Eric Siu. I kicked off 2018 with Eric Siu doing predictions for last year. He talked about video as well and was like, "Video's going to be huge in 2018." So in both of my kind of yearly prediction episodes, the guests that I've had have cited video as one of the biggest things we should be paying attention to. And then, of course, I already mentioned her, but Goldie Chan, who is a LinkedIn influencer and creates a new LinkedIn video every single day, has made a career around those videos. She's amazing. She travels all over the world and is sought after as a speaker because of the LinkedIn video she creates. And Dennis Yu who has turned video into a formula for building people's personal brands. It's really impressive what he does. They're these short little videos that he films. Using that medium has helped countless people create brands for themselves. 13. Lead With Brand Which brings me to my 13th and last lesson learned from 99 interviews with incredible marketers, and that is that all of these strategies, and tactics, and approaches are powerful. But at the end of the day, the most important thing in marketing is brand. Brand is paramount. Without it, you can have some quick wins but you'll never have a true success that will last over the long term. I'm only going to cite one example here because it's the one that comes up the most. And if you listen to this podcast with any degree of regularity, you know that at the end I always, always ask my guests, "Company or individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now?" There is one company/individual, the company and the marketer who's spearheading it for them, that by far comes up more than anybody else, and that is Drift and Dave Gerhardt, who I was very fortunate to have as a guest early on. I can't tell you the number of times people have mentioned Drift, and it's not just people from the marketing world. It's folks that have come onto this podcast from all different industries, and they all cite Dave Gerhart and his work building a brand at Drift as the one succeeding the most with inbound marketing. It's not for me to say what that brand is or to really try to encapsulate what Dave has done, but I think it's fair to say that they've built a brand that's incredibly authentic. There's no artifice. There's no fancy tricks about it. They, of everybody, really reflect everything I've said about the past, you know, this list of 12 to 13 trends I just spoke about today. When I look back through this list, they are doing a few things and doing them really well. They really listen to their customers. It's not about fancy tools or a big budget. The things that make them successful don't have anything to do with that. It's about connecting on emotional level. It's about creating content that sometimes doesn't have anything to do with your products or services. They do paid ads. And it's not enough to create and publish your content, you've got to promote it. They are so good at that. They've got a tremendous community, really high-quality content, a bunch of podcasts. They use video better than almost anybody else, especially on LinkedIn. Checkout Dave Gerhart's LinkedIn presence. And they just have a really strong brand. So my hat is off to Dave Gerhart and the team at Drift for ... If I had to give out an award for top inbound marketers, I think it would go to them. Thank YOU For Listening But really, everybody that I've interviewed over the course of the last two years has been so impressive. It is just my absolute privilege to get to do this every single week. I also wanted to say thank you to you for listening. Podcasting is a funny exercise. As I record this, it's Sunday morning, and I'm sitting in my home office, which is a tiny little room that actually had to be permitted as a closet because it's so small. There's chaos happening around me in my house. I'm by myself talking into a microphone. I'll go away, and I'll turn this into an episode. It'll go live tomorrow. You'll be hearing this Monday, if you get the episode right when it comes out or sometime after, and you're out there listening. But when I create these things, it's just me in a room. To know that there are people who choose to listen to this every week is just an unbelievable honor and a privilege to me. So, thank you from the bottom of my heart for listening to this content. I hope so much that you've learned something from it and that, even if it's in a small way, it's helped you get better results from your marketing and feel like a smarter marketer. If that has happened, then I feel like I've succeeded. With that, I will say I would love to hear from you. It's been a hundred episodes. If you are a regular listener, please take a moment and contact me. I always say at the end you can tweet me @workmommywork, which is my Twitter handle, but you can also message me on LinkedIn. You can email me at kbooth@impactbnd.com. You can send a carrier pigeon. However you want to do it, I would love it if you would get in touch and let me know what you like about the podcast and what's something that I can improve because I'd love to make the next hundred episodes even better. With that, I won't belabor it. Thank you again for listening, and I'll see you next week. Or not see you, I'll be talking to you next week for episode 101.  

How are some companies using account-based marketing to shorten the sales cycle, increase penetration in key accounts, and improve customer NPS scores? This week onThe Inbound Success Podcast, Terminus Co-Founder Sangram Vajre shares his insights on the past, present, and future of account-based marketing, including who it is right for and how the sales and marketing teams of the future will be able to use buyer fit and intent data to laser target the accounts with the highest likelihood of closing. This week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast is brought to you by our sponsor, IMPACT Live,  the most immersive and high energy learning experience for marketers and business leaders. IMPACT Live takes place August 6-7, 2019 in Hartford Connecticut and is headlined by Marcus Sheridan along with keynote speakers including world-renowned Facebook marketing expert Mari Smith and Drift CEO and Co-Founder David Cancel. Inbound Success Podcast listeners can save 10% off the price of tickets with the code "SUCCESS".  Click here to learn more or purchase tickets for IMPACT Live Some highlights from my conversation with Sangram include: Sangram says that the easiest way to think about ABM is that it is focused marketing and sales activity. The best use cases for ABM are for companies with larger transaction value sales or those who are going after a smaller audience within a larger marketing strategy. ABM solves for a challenge that many companies experience. Specifically, it is a way to address situations where a company might be generating a lot of leads, but the sales team feels they are of poor quality. ABM 1.0 was about identifying the top 100 target accounts and going after those using targeted ads, custom landing pages, and direct mail campaigns. ABM 2.0 takes it a step further and uses buyer fit and intent data to automatically identify the best fit companies - the ones that are most likely to close - and then develop ABM campaigns around them. The ABM of the future could use artificial intelligence to take that buyer intent and fit data and then automatically build landing pages and ABM campaigns for those prospects. Sangram believes that in the future, marketing is actually going to own setting sales quotas because they will be the team that has that fit and intent data, which will make them more accurate in forecasting what can actually close. ABM is best suited to companies with a high degree of organizational readiness (meaning they are bought into the approach from the CEO down and they have a "one team" kind of mindset) and with larger sales transaction values. The three primary use cases for ABM are for acquisition, pipeline velocity, and customer satisfaction. Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Visit the Terminus website Visit Sangram's personal website Listen to the #FlipMyFunnel Podcast Connect with Sangram on LinkedIn Follow Sangram on Twitter Get Sangram's book Account-Based Marketing For Dummies Join the #FlipMyFunnel Community Listen to the podcast to learn how ABM is evolving and what the most successful ABM campaigns do to get results. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host):Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast.I'm Kathleen Booth and I'm your host and today my guest is Sangram Vajre from Terminus. He is the chief evangelist and cofounder. Welcome Sangram. Sangram Vajre (Guest): Thank you, Kathleen. Excited to be on the show. Sangram and Kathleen recording this episode Kathleen: I am excited to have you here. I have not had anyone come on and talk about account based marketing before. Before we jump into that though, I would love it if you could tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and about Terminus and also ABM in case people don't know what it is. Abount Sangram and Terminus Sangram: All right. Sure. And as you said, I started to cofound Terminus about four years ago and prior to that I ran marketing at Pardot, which took me to this to acquisition within a year of Exact Target acquiring Pardot and then Salesforce acquiring Exact Target. So all of a sudden I went from running marketing for 100 people company for 10 million revenue all of a sudden to running it at Salesforce which was just incredible. It was a moment where I think I realized, I think I understood the meaning of scale. At Salesforce, I really had no idea before that. Kathleen: Trial by fire, right? Sangram: Totally. Totally. It's an incredible machine. And then co-founded Terminus. Ended up writing the first book on account based marketing that was published in 2016, believe it or not. So I'm about to write my second book this year and along the way started and really built this community called #FlipMyFunnel, which is all about challenging the status quo of marketing and sales. We have about 10,000 people in that community and a lot of really fun. It's awesome to see so many people doing some level of account based marketing. And I'm happy to share more through examples or stories of how incredible things are happening in companies. Kathleen: I was really impressed with the community that you all have built. I had Nikki Nixon, who was the head of the Flip My Funnel community, on one of my earliest episodes and community is something that we at IMPACT are very focused on and so it was really interesting to me to hear that story of how it got started and how particularly through some of the events you've held, that community has grown over the years. Sangram: Community is something, I have a saying on the #FlipMyFunnel podcast we talk about is really that without a community you are simply a commodity. "Without a community you are simply a commodity" - Sangram Vajre Click to Tweet this quote And if you think about anything like Hubspot for example, is an investor in Terminus. And I remember spending time with both Brian and Dharmesh then they became an investor in our company and I asked him why are you spending so much time and money on inbound? And they said, look, if somebody has to go build somebody that's going to compete with Hubspot toe to toe, first thing they need to go need to go and do is build a 20,000 plus community and hundreds of thousands of other people that are not even at this event but are online, they have to go build all that moat around them in order to even start to begin to compete with them at that level. So there is so much power in community and so do and Salesforce and Drift. And so I don't think we did anything new. I just felt like we definitely stumbled on this idea and thankfully and gratefully have been able to nurture it. Kathleen: Yeah, and it might not be something new, but I am amazed at how much we as marketers talk about the importance of community but so few brands and companies actually bother to truly invest in doing it. Kudos to you for following through. Sangram: I appreciate that. What Is Account-Based Marketing? Kathleen: So #FlipMyFunnel, I've always liked that name, too, because to me it so perfectly defines in marketing speak at least what ABM is in a way that anyone can understand. But to to rewind a little bit, let's go back to account based marketing. That's really what I wanted to talk to you about. How do you define account based marketing? Because I've heard it defined many different ways. Sangram: Yeah. So I'm not gonna give any analysty kind of definition. I think everybody can find a million different answers for that. I think quite simply to me it is focused marketing and sales activity, and that's all it is, really. So if you were in B2C where you are selling Nike shoes to any and everybody in the world, it makes sense to go after any and everybody in the world. But if you're selling to, let's say Fortune 500 financial services company for your supply chain product, guess what? There are only maybe 50 of them. So why in the world do we want to create content and qualification and all the processes that we all have created that has a roadblock to it? Why not start with the best fit accounts to begin with and then expand within the reach within them and then engage them and then turn into advocates. Why not focus on the 50 as opposed to 5,000 to find the 50? B2C has that problem. B2B thankfully does not have that problem. So that's why I think ABM is so cool. Kathleen: Yeah, it definitely makes sense that that larger transaction value that small audience, or the small audience within the bigger marketing strategy. So Terminus as a platform enables companies to more effectively do account based marketing. For the person listening who is either familiar with ABM or maybe not familiar but interested in learning more, tell me a little bit about what kinds of successes you've seen companies have with it. And honestly like how does it work? So if somebody says, I want to do focused marketing, what does that really mean at a practical level? Sangram: Well. So let's walk through an example of your document before we started to record, which is a company called Masergy is great customer of ours. They are in cloud communications and computing so I think most people can relate to that as a technology company and Malachi who runs their marketing is a phenomenal guy. We had him speak at a lot of the conferences and podcasts and all that stuff. So let me walk through almost status quo ABM 1.0 if you will and ABM 2.0. And I think as audience is listening to this and maybe they can figure out where they belong in this journey that you may be or may not be right now and trying to figure out to be on. So Malachi was in one of these incredible inbound marketers where he generated 25,000 leads, got 25,000 leads and he heard all the time from the sales team is like, well, they're not qualified. They're not relevant. They're not the right people and as you might know, Forrester came out with the research in 2016 I think that less than 1% of the leads are turning into customers. Kathleen: I was going to say, I'm pretty sure every single marketer that is listening has heard exactly that complaint from their sales team before. Sangram: And that's purely because we are going after again first trying to get any and everybody and then try to qualify it as opposed to going after the right people. So the problem is something that I think we have to own that we have created to begin with. So in a status quo world, I feel if you are marketing it and that's how the challenges you feel like at think of it as the status quo, that is pretty much what's happening in 90% of the company and it's unfortunate. I think we all need to wake up and look at it and think like, hey, it's not really sales problem. It's actually a marketing problem that we need to fix. So that's kind of where I feel he found himself as well a couple of years ago. Then he moved into this, what I would call AB 1.0 where I think more and more companies are finding themselves now who are jumping on the bandwagon of ABM which is saying, okay, well that's not working. Sending these 25,000 leads is not working. What do I do? Let me find the right people. Let me just go and select top 100 accounts that my sales and marketing team can focus on. That might be on a vertical, that might be based on sales stage that you are having difficulty converting, or it might be a sector or whatever it might be. So I think most people are now finding a top 100 accounts that I want to focus on. And to your point like, well how do you do it? What you really do and most companies are doing, they're running one to one campaign for each one of these hundred accounts. That means they'll have an ad that talks to that exact company and all the people in that company. So you're running advertising through platforms like Terminus and Google or whatnot. Then you are taking them to a landing page that doesn't ask for their mother's maiden name. It actually gives them the whole information about how you can actually help their industry and them and others in their industry be successful. So there's no gating of information. It's actually now your customers are going to spend more time on that page because you're literally taking to a page that is custom made for them and then you can add direct mail or stuff like that, too, to kind of engage them. Now you can do all of these things because you're only focused on top hundred. You're not focused on everybody. So you can do a digital advertising, you can do a Linkedin campaign, you can do a direct mail campaign, you can have a landing page that is focused on them, a stream of content videos for them. It's all possible when sales and marketing is working together at 1.0 level. And the results of that one, just in case of Malachi and Masergy they have over 250% penetration rate within the accounts they want to go after compared to any other account that they're targeting. Right? I think they knocked off a month in the sales process. So now they're closing deals much faster. Now you can imagine what kind of revenue impact you have in your organization when you're actually taking one month off your sales process. So how many more opportunities can your sales team work on? So their results are fantastic, but that's just because they're able to focus on the top hundred accounts. Right? Kathleen: So if I understand correctly, I'm a company and let's say I want to land Coca Cola as an account. I might set up ads via either Google or Linkedin or what have you that are targeted just at people who work for Coca Cola and then those ads are going to direct them back to a landing page that's either about the beverage industry or I guess it could specifically be about Coca Cola. Sangram: It actually should be. It could literally say your company plus Coke equals whatever because we do x,y,z. Kathleen: Yeah, and then potentially as you said, other items like direct mail, et cetera and the goal of all this is to get in front of and raise brand awareness amongst as many people within Coca Cola or at least within the right parts of Coca Cola as possible. Is that accurate? Sangram: Exactly and the reason you want to do that at that level is because we all know in B2B the decision making is by committee where there are five, seven, nine, 10 people are the decision making process. If all 10 people have heard about you and have seen your message and they may never fill up a form but they all have some sort of input in the buying process. Well if the CFO, the CEO, the head of sales, the head of procurement, and all of them have seen your brand chances as are you going to have somewhat of an in in that company because of the brand awareness you've created, but you can't create that level of brand awareness unless you are focused on them. Kathleen: Now, how do you do this without having the intended target feel like it's creepy. Sangram: It's creepy beyond creepy. But I think we all have sold our rights to privacy in many ways when we sign up for Facebook, when we signed up for websites that have over digital kind of body language to it. So in many ways, I'm one. So we do Terminus, one of the things beyond analytics and all this stuff that we do for canvas marketing as a platform, but one of the things we do is we do is digital advertising and I'm not someone who typically clicks on a lot of ads or digital advertising. I actually hate it. And I've told the founder of this company, but I loves ad when it actually does and serve a purpose for me. So for example, if I am looking for something and if I get the right message at the right time, it is an awesome thing. Otherwise it's annoying to me. Kathleen: I was just saying this, I was taking the train home on Saturday from a week away for work and I had, this is such a side story, but it's relevant. For Christmas, I wanted this one pair of slippers. Sangram: Yeah. Kathleen: And I didn't get it. And all of a sudden on the train, on the way home, this ad pops up and the slippers are on sale and darned if I didn't buy them within like five minutes of getting the ad. And it's exactly what you're talking about. I mean, this is it more of a B2C example. But yeah, I mean they knew I was interested. It was the right time and it was immediate, it was an easy yes. Sangram: Yeah. Kathleen: And I don't like ads either for what it's worth. Sangram: Exactly, none of us do, but we all value whatever is timely and convenient for us or the needs that we have. So I may not like a cupcake ad that pops up randomly for me, but I would love an ad for the right book or the right thing that I want. And B2B software is no different. If you're looking for it and you find the right connection, then you will spend time. So a company like Masergy is finding true success because these people are not converting on their website like the status quo thing. They're actually spending more time looking at oh this is good, this is great for our financial. They seem to have a great case study with a similar customer in our industry so they get our problem. They know what the messaging is exactly what you would create because you know enough about Coke so the messaging is going to be about it so they care. Like those are the feelings that you invoke in your future customer that standard marketing doesn't really do. So that's 1.0. And 2.0 sorry, go ahead. ABM 2.0 Kathleen: Yeah, no, that's what's going to be my next question is, all right, so what's 2.0? Sangram: If that's exciting enough for be people. If you're dipping your toes that already may feel overwhelming, but the reality is that if you truly care and if the deal size is big enough and if you can truly forward the velocity, it's really worth it. Now, if you're a transactional business where you're spending like 10 bucks a month subscription, it probably is not worth doing all the effort on it. Now ABM 2.0 is really interesting because now you go from this silo approach off like everybody and anybody and I need to go in and figure out who I need to go after and see less than 1% of the customers to the top hundred accounts and now it's super targeted, super engaged and connected and all that stuff. But now I'm getting proactive around my outreach and all that stuff is to this idea of running my entire business like that. Right? Imagine all of the target accounts that you want to go after now, not just hundreds, but maybe let's say your total addressable market is 3,000 accounts, right? And you know that your product or service is suited for those 3,000 accounts. Imagine having the ability to have a fit and intent score where you will say, okay, these 3,000 accounts have fit. These are great accounts. I just want to know whenever there is intent to buy any of these accounts somewhere online, if they're researching on G2 Crowd for a similar software. I want to know if somebody in that company is reading articles that have the keywords that I care about, I want to know. Right? So the fit and intent if you can combine that beyond the hundred accounts and say of these 3,000 accounts, any account that is the right fit and intent, I need to be alerted so that my sales can be prioritizing the experience for them. And then the same play that we talked about at 1.0, I can replicate it in a prioritized way for the accounts that are in market right now. And I think that's when you're running your business on a very hyper targeted, hyper personalized at scale. Kathleen: Now how do you, you talked about intent and some of the examples you gave were things that would happen off of your own web assets. So not on your website. It might be like you said, G2 crowd, for example. How are companies able to access this kind of intent data? Sangram: Oh, there's tons of providers right now in the market place. Like G2 crowd themselves would provide the intent.  Terminus connects with like you know Bombora. Bombora is another good one. DiscoverOrg would give you that information. Linkedin will give you that information now. Even G2 crowd as a set. And so there are tons of companies who are starting to pull all this information together and we as a platform, we are trying to hook up into all of them and say, okay, well we can run this for 100, but the beauty would be then you can run this for 3,000 and not leave anybody out there who's the right fit and has the intent right now because that's when you're going to win faster at a much higher level when you know the company that's in market. So all of these companies, they're more and more companies actually coming up with this data. Kathleen: That's interesting what you said about that you're really trying to hook up with all these different platforms. Because the first question that was going to come into my head was, I'm hearing a lot of companies talk about using CDPs, customer data platforms, in order to tie together the data they have in all different places. But it sounds like the direction you're moving, that wouldn't be necessary. You essentially would be the CDP. Sangram: Sure. I mean that's exactly right. Like we, I remember the really early days. Initially our thought was, hey, we're going to look at all the people in everybody's CRM and start helping them do advertising to them. What we quickly realized, everybody's data is shit. Like it's crap. And there's nothing in there. Like a lot of them are not updating data and there's all kinds of, there's the same companies alert seven different ways in CRM, like we all have the same issues. I'm like, okay, that's not gonna work. So we only get the names of the companies from our customers and the type of persona they want to target. Then we use our own intelligence by partnering with Linkedin and D&B and NetProspex and so many different data providers so that we have a clean set off information and then we are proactively targeting them and giving intelligence back to our customers. They're like, whoa, that's great. So I think you're absolutely right. I think we are relying a lot on good data from third party sources because most CRMs and most marketing automations, the data is not clean. Kathleen: Amen to that. It's terrible. It really is. It's my biggest pet peeve is just the garbage that's in these databases. Sangram: Yeah. Kathleen: So interesting. Okay, so it sounds like the key shift there from ABM 1.0 to 2.0 is in 1.0 you're manually creating your target list and in 2.0 you have a system in place that feeds your targets to you that is essentially automated. Is that accurate? Sangram: Exactly. Right, and now you're going back to okay, you want to automated, but now you want to automate it or you want to create this personalized experience, but now you are creating that personalized experience for anyone that is in market that has the right fit as opposed to this arbitrary hundred companies that I have decided because they sound great or my sales team said that this is important. Now I'm actually running my business on the smart content. What Will ABM Look Like In the Future? Kathleen: Well now I'm really curious to hear what your predictions will be for what ABM 3.0 will look like. Cause I have some ideas that I've gotten as I've listened to you talk and I'm curious to know if they're going to be similar to what you come up with. Sangram: I don't know. I just came up with 2.0. I don't know what we get going. Kathleen: I mean the first thing I thought of was if the second step is the system basically feeds you, these are the companies you should go after. In my head, I'm thinking, well the third step is then you have a system, an artificial intelligence system, that just spins up the landing pages. Sangram: Oh yeah. Kathleen: From your relational database. It says, oh they're financial services. Well we have that template. Pop their name in and then it's really truly the robots are doing our jobs for us. Sangram: Oh you, you are spot on when it comes to personalization of this whole experience. I mean right now people are throwing bodies at it. Kathleen: Yeah. Sangram: Hey, you know what? Go create 50 landing pages. We have a customer Snowflake for example. They're running 500 one to one campaigns. 500. They have 15 people now I think six and by end of Q one, so by end of Q one they're supposed to have 15 people with the title of account based marketing. So you can think about how they are because they're like, well, does every one of them have regions and then helping to personalized experiences for it. So we are actually in some ways putting bodies in place because we don't know if there is a way to automate all of this experience because it's so rich and so valuable and so unique in many ways right now. Kathleen: I'm sure we're not far off from it. Sangram: Oh, no. Kathleen: So talk me through the one thing we haven't really touched much upon. We've talked about ABM from the marketer's standpoint. Walk me through at what point in this process in an ideal world, should sales enter into the equation and what does that hand off look like? Are they involved the whole way? The Marketing To Sales Handoff In ABM Sangram: There is no handoff. I think that's where we got it wrong. I feel like some of the blame is on me as well as part of that, that old group of people. I feel like there is no hand off. Sales and marketing hundred percent has to agree on the way this is going to work. Otherwise you can't create a personalized experience. If the sales person's not going to call as soon as the direct mail is hit to the right person, then you know it's not gonna work. If the sales person is not going to follow up when they see an increased activity of the right accounts on your website because you have get rid of all the forms and now you have five kind of right people on their website if they don't do that work that's needed to follow up on, then in the B2B world, it's still not going to work. People are not going to just come and swipe credit cards if you're selling a $100,000 product. So sales are super important. What's bigger difference I think if you want to go the predictions route is I think marketing is going to own the process of figuring out who to go after because they're going to have fit and intent data. So imagine as a marketer and you could say, hey, we want to open an office in, we want to expand our business, great. Based on the information that I have from all of these different technologies that I'm able to cobble up together, I can see that in Boston there is the highest concentration or best fit future customers. There is a lot of intense action going on over there, too. So we should open a sales office in Boston and put two people in there because based on the quota that we are hitting, it makes sense that two sales people. So imagine that a marketer can set up sales quota and not only that, a marketer can figure out the forecasting of which deals are going to close. Because a lot of times the sales would say, oh, I think 30% of them are going to close. And a lot of times, quite honestly they have no clue. Nobody has any clue why somebody went dark or what happened there. Right? But now marketer can say, hey look. And we have seen this happen at Terminus and a lot of customers say, look of these 10 deals that you planned that they're going to close this month, let me tell you, 7 of them have not even spent a minute on our website in the last month and a half. So let's get rid of the bullshit. There are only 3 that we can have a full opportunity to close. Why not just focus on these three? We know there's interest in there. Let's do more campaign. Maybe do a in house dinner over there and try to close the deals with these three because the seven, the chances are they're not going to close this month in the next two days, right? So that level of intelligence in the front portal, from fit and intent and then forecasting, is unique and new and I think the marketer is going to be in the driver's seat. Kathleen: I feel like all the sales people who are listening are going, "No way. Marketing's not going to set my quotas." Sangram: I think they want it. If they are smart to recognize the power in this thing, I think they would want it because they can actually have a higher quota at a much higher velocity and they would actually be doing what they're the best at, which is influencing the deal and closing it. But marketers can now, we are all going to be more of an intelligence provider. Here's the intelligence of who you should go after. Here's the intelligence who can close faster, so maybe focus. We are really helping sales team to do their best and I feel like the future really is going to be where sales fully embraces marketing's role in helping them win more deals. ABM and GDPR Kathleen: Interesting. One thing that came to mind as I was listening to you describe all the disparate sources of data, especially the intent data, the first question that came into my head is how does this all fit within the increasing movement towards giving users more control over their information and privacy and GDPR? Can you talk a little bit about that? Sangram: Yeah, I think it's great because you're no longer emailing people without their permission. And the advertising that you're seeing are proactive advertising and interest that you have already shown interest for, which is why you bought those slippers because you kind of wanted that. Kathleen: They had my number, I'll tell ya. Sangram: They had all information that you have willingly provided to them. So I think as long as it is helpful, I think people are going to be okay with it. I think the reason GDPR is actually good is because people are spamming, right? People send a newsletter which is all about it and people want a newsletter that's all about who is getting the email is coming too. So it's such a different thing. I think all of that is happening because we just don't know who can bite the bullet. We don't know who's going to pay the bill. We don't know who's going to buy the product or service. In this model, because you're focused on a few that actually matter, that's why you heard me never say or use the word "prospect" in the process. You're prospecting is dead because the only prospect that you don't know if they're going to be a customer or not. In this case it's all future customers because you've already done the homework to figure it out if they're best fit and can you serve them or not? Have you served other people like them or not? If it's not best fit, you shouldn't be spending any time with them at all. Who Is Account-Based Marketing Right For? Kathleen: Yeah. So there are a lot of companies that are practicing account based marketing. Tell me a little bit about who this is right for in terms of the type of company, because they're obviously, it does take a certain degree of manpower to build out these assets. There's an investment on the front end especially if they're going to buy a platform like Terminus. Sangram: Yeah, totally. So I think there are two ways of thinking about that, Kathleen. One is the organizational readiness, because no matter how many resources you have, I've seen it fail tremendously in many, many ways. And one of the one was that the organization is not ready to adopt that. So I'll talk about that in a sec. And then the other way is also to figure out like are we selling and do we know who we're selling to and as the audience really open to it? So I'll get into that as well. So organizational readiness, meaning if you have a sales driven quota or marketing, sales driven culture or marketing driven culture, then this is not going to work because it has to have a "one team" kind of mindset. This will only work when organizations fully understand the importance of doing it. And believe it or not, it starts with the CEO, not CMO or CSL. It actually starts with the CEO because it's a business transformation that we're talking about. We're talking about clarity around having aware of what your total addressable market is. I'm sure if you ask your audience right now, I would guarantee, majority of them will not know what their total addressable market looks like. How many exact number of customers they can potentially sell to this year. That was like, these questions are not something marketers jump into. Typically they are like siloed in the sales world or maybe. Like everybody, the CEO to the board, to the CFO to the CMR, everybody has to agree on the total addressable market and that's organization readiness. So if you don't have that kind of stuff, I think it's going to fail and I've seen it fail. It might succeed. but I've seen in fail more than not. And the other part is around the idea that are you selling like let's say you're selling $50,000 product which has an annual subscription which you can upserve in the next couple of months or a couple of years to $100,000 or $150,000, ABM is perfect for you. That makes perfect sense. But if you're selling for like 10 bucks, Dropbox kind of subscription fee kind of stuff, unless it has a tremendous potential then it won't make sense for you to do it because the cost of acquisition will go off the roof. So this is really for accounts that that do matter and have a higher revenues. Mid market, if you're selling to mid market and enterprises, even if you're a small shop, so this is, I want to really clarify, I've seen companies that are really small, like 10 people shop be wildly successful because they sell $100,000 $200,000 worth of services or product. And I've seen companies that are big companies, even public companies that are selling to SMB, they are not successful at all because if your target audience is smaller and it just won't work, you'll have to scale so much. What Kinds of Results Can You Expect With ABM? Kathleen: Right. And what about results? Like do you have some examples of what companies have seen as a result of doing these types of campaigns? Sangram: Well, I mean, some of it, what we talked about Masergy where their engagement rate and I think penetration within the right kind of targeted council is up by 250%. They knocked off a sales month from their entire sales process because they were able to do that. To me, that that sounds like millions of dollars. Even beyond that, 85% of their revenue came from one product and they have three more products to sell. So they have to figure out a way to upsell the other two products and they just were trying to create awareness. So now you're going apply ABM to customer marketing. So you already know the customers that have this one product, let's say cloud computing. You say, okay, now I want to run the same ad to other business units or other personas in that company making your customer like somebody in their company look like hero and show how you're helping that business owner. So if you're selling to GE and you have one business unit and you want to sell it or the business unit, it's awesome. Like that's a hundred percent ABM. So what they found out that they are creating more sticker products line and business line for them, but most importantly, and this was this was the best, that they found that their NPS score, which is the net promoter score for the customers who bought more than two products after they launched the ABM because they knew so much about them already as the best fit, went up from 70% to 90%. So think about that for a second. You're not only serving your customers and upselling your own process services, because you're serving the right people and because your focus again is on the right people, you're able to serve them, you really are able to solve their problems so you're not trying to close more deals, you're trying to close the right deals. So they're going to be more delighted than ever before because they're not going after everybody. Kathleen: That is really interesting. I have never actually heard anybody talk about using ABM for upsells and cross sells. Sangram: Actually that is the best use case than demand generation. I think because we're in marketing, we think we need more acquisition. It's actually parsed into three - acquisition, pipeline velocity and customer marketing. If you were to start ABM, if you have never jumped into ABM at all, I would say jumping into pipeline velocity or customer marketing first. Pipeline velocity, which means if there is a deal in play and you know when it's going to close, let's say 30 days or 60 days, perfect. Your sales is going to be cooperative, the finance team is going to be looking at those deal, your CFO, CRO, everybody's in it. So if you can show movement there, you get by in there, so that's the best place to start 100% because that's where you're going to see you already have a good customer, why not get more of the from the good customer? But pipeline velocity, Kathleen I think is a very understated area of focus and if you're piloting with the top accounts, it's not actually acquisition, that's the last place you want to go because you have no idea when they're going to be ready to truly buy. Pipeline velocity, customer marketing, I think that's where gold is. Kathleen: Yeah, the customer marketing stuff is so interesting to me, because we always even, I mean we're not a huge, huge company. We're probably 65 people. But we always have this challenge as an agency when we offer a new service for the first time of how do we, you know, yes, can we send an email to every client we have? Absolutely. But what's an effective way to keep reminding them that we do this now? Like for example, in the last year we added a full fledged video production and training department and some of our clients are really aware of it and others aren't. And it's just interesting to think about even just running an ad to clients saying, "did you know we do this" and directing them back to a landing page for customers only. Lots of ideas spinning now. Sangram: I think that's beauty. ABM is not a tactic. It's a strategy. It's not a tool. If somebody says that, "Hey, we use Terminus and we're doing ABM" I would say you're not, because we're not doing direct mail, we are not doing call cadences. We are not doing a lot of the other things, the landing pages. So that's not it. We're not ABM. We play a wider role in helping you enable an ABM program, but ABM is a strategy that you and your organization need to really care about and focus in the area of that you need the most help. And your use case of saying just, I mean that's the cheapest, the amount of, if you were looking at a dollar return, that's the best place to kind of put in. But we end up putting more money in acquisition than actually getting more from our own existing customers. Kathleen: Absolutely. And if you have a tiny targeted audience, it's worth spending more per click or whatever the metric is because they're warm, so interesting. So you mentioned a couple of companies. Was it Masergy? I want to make sure that everyone knows how that's spelled so they can see it. Sangram: Yeah. Masergy and Snowflake is another company. Phenomic is another company. We actually do something called internally called customer in the office. So every month we try to bring in a customer and have them share with you. That's why these stores are so fresh for me because every month I'm hearing from them literally how it's transforming their team, their sales and marketing relationship and their organization. Kathleen: I love that customer in the office thing, that's great. Keeps me really close to not only the successes but some of the challenges people are facing. So definitely if you're listening go check out those companies to see some examples. It might not be obvious on their site, I'm guessing, because a lot of this is sort of happening behind the scenes under the curtain specifically directed towards their target customers. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: Changing gears for a minute, I have a couple of questions that I always ask everyone who comes on this podcast. Curious to get your take on this. The first one is company or individual? Who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now? Sangram: Well, I mean the company probably comes to mind is Drift. I'm sure others have mentioned that as drip, like what David Cancel and David Gerhardt are doing. I feel like they're building a great category and it reminds us a lot of what we have done in the past, but I feel like they're doing it better then what we have done to be very honest. So it really, really feels good to see what they're doing. Kathleen: Yeah, their names definitely come up a lot. And I did get to interview Dave Gerhardt. I was like, "I keep hearing your name, you have to come on the show." Sangram: He's great and the team is awesome over there. Kathleen: Second question, with the world of digital marketing changing so quickly, we kinda touched on this earlier with ABM even changing so quickly, how do you personally stay up to date and on top of all these new technological advancements and trends in marketing? Sangram: I mean, just like you, I feel like I have, I think the podcast is a great way to learn. So I listen a lot of podcasts. I listen to Inbound. I listen to Donald Miller's podcast. And I almost sometimes go back to we need older books but instead of newer ones, because I think what hasn't changed is that we are all humans, thankfully, and what hasn't changed is the emotions and the feeling. And I feel like the more I go back to that, the better it gets. So like podcasts is like the radio. It's back to radio. You're recording this thing and it's going to go live. That is crazy that it is the new thing right now. So I feel like podcasting is like the new white paper of the world. Videos are like the new blogs of the way. In many ways you're just going back to some of the older ways of communicating just one to one in a very authentic way. So wherever that authenticity line goes, I try to follow that. Kathleen: Right. And thank you for mentioning the specific podcasts that you like cause I'm always on the hunt for new ones. Sangram: Yeah. Connect With Sangram Kathleen: So I'll definitely check those out. Well, if somebody has a question, wants to learn more about Terminus, or has a question about ABM, generally, what's the best way for them to find you online? Sangram: Well, so I post on a very regular basis on Linkedin, so just find me, Sangram Vajre on Linkedin. Terminus is terminus.com. You sort of join the community, #FlipMyFunnel. Kathleen: Great. And I'll post the links to all of those things in the show notes. If you're listening and you found value here, you know what to do, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or the platform of your choice. And if you know somebody who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at workmommywork because I would love to interview them. Thank you, Sangram. It was great talking to you. Sangram: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Apresentador: Afonso Andrade Continuamos nosso bate papo com a Carol Cunha e o Nikki Nixon, agora falando sobre o terror nos quadrinhos, cinema, TV e jogos.  Para saber mais sobre os convidados: Nikki Nixon:http://www.deusesemonstros.com/https://www.facebook.com/deusesemonstroshttps://www.instagram.com/deusesemonstros/ Carol Cunha:https://www.instagram.com/katchiannya/http://www.tanlup.com/marcarubrahttp://www.casadosquadrinhos.com.br/

Apresentador: Afonso Andrade Um bate papo com Carol Cunha e Nikki Nixon sobre as origens e as mais destacadas obras da literatura de terror. Para saber mais sobre os convidados: Nikki Nixon: http://www.deusesemonstros.com/ https://www.facebook.com/deusesemonstros https://www.instagram.com/deusesemonstros/ Carol Cunha: https://www.instagram.com/katchiannya/ http://www.tanlup.com/marcarubra http://www.casadosquadrinhos.com.br/