If someone fills out your web form, are they a qualified lead?
Jon Miller isn’t so sure.
In this video, Jon explains why leads are too narrow when targeting prospects… why ABM is too wide…
And he shares a different way to identify your best prospects.
For Jon’s perspective, check out this B2B Forum clip or read the transcript below.
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We’ve talked a lot about what I call, “buyer indifference.”
Buyers have gotten overwhelmed with the same tactics.
eBooks. Emails. Calls from SDRs. And just the volume of stuff coming at them!
They’ve gotten pretty good at tuning it out.
So too many companies respond to the declining response rates by turning the volume up.
“Let’s send more emails! Let’s create more content!”
And it just perpetuates the problem.
We all know, what’s the definition of insanity?
Doing the same thing, expecting something different.
It’s even worse to do even more of the same thing and expect something different.
So buyer indifference is a real problem.
As a result, our buyers have gotten really good at staying anonymous.
They know that if they come to our site and fill out a form, unfortunately they’re probably going to start getting calls and emails that they don’t want.
Way too many companies are treating a form-fill as an MQL.
And I mean, it makes sense why an SDR might do that, because they’ve got numbers to hit. They want to kind of go after everything they can. They don’t want to be late to a deal.
But it’s causing this backlash for buyers.
They’re not coming to our site and filling out forms.
They’re not downloading our content.
And they’re researching elsewhere—in dark communities—and that’s making traditional things like lead scoring and lead nurturing, frankly, just not work as well anymore.
But perhaps the biggest problem with the traditional way we’ve been thinking about B2B marketing and the playbook is that… the model I helped create at Marketo is so focused on creating highly-measurable pipeline creation that it’s led to, I think, a dramatic underinvestment in less measurable brand creation.
I’m going to butcher this name…
The Eren Bass Institute, I believe is what it’s called, did a study.
And they found that only 5% of your target market is in-market to buy products or solutions at any given moment in time.
So if all we’re doing is focusing all of our effort on demand gen to the 5% that might actually be in-market, we’re all fighting over the same fraction as our competitors.
As opposed to balancing this out a little bit more, putting more into marketing to the 95% that aren’t in-market, in order to expand the pie.
So I think this is one of the deepest problems with the traditional playbook, is that underinvestment in brand.
And then lastly, a little more tactically, is the traditional playbook is all about leads.
Not surprising that you’re in a session about ABM, I’m going to talk about this.
But we’ve learned that tracking only leads doesn’t give us very good insight into what’s going on.
You could get one person to show up on your website… download 10 pieces of content… be all over the place…
That doesn’t necessarily indicate anything’s happening at the company, right?
Maybe they’re doing research for some other reason.
And that’s why we all started doing accounts.
Because maybe that one person doesn’t show anything.
But if 10 people from the company all show up on the site… and none of them actually do enough to kind of hit an MQL threshold… but you can see, “wow, 10 people did something,” that’s way more likely to indicate there’s something going on at that company.
That’s why we all started focusing on accounts.
But the reality is, I think…
If leads are too narrow, then accounts are too broad.
Because there are two problems with accounts.
The first is, not every single person who works at a company is going to be your buyer.
So any kind of marketing strategy that only thinks about the account probably is too broad.
Second—but more subtly—is a focus only on accounts tends to be over-rotation onto new business.
And this is a little subtle.
But if you think about it, we score an account and we say that an account is in a particular stage in the buying journey.
Well, what happens when that account becomes a customer?
They bought product number one.
Great! Well, now they’re a customer!
But what about product number two and three and four and five and all these other things that you can sell?
You’ve said they’re a customer.
Now you’re sort of missing out on the ability to really understand that they might just be a prospect for product number two, and an open sales cycle for product number three, and so on.
So what we really need is to not talk about account-based marketing, but buying-group based marketing where we think about these unique buying centers within a company, and track where each buying center for different products is at its place in its own buyer’s journey.
So if leads are too narrow and accounts are too broad, buying groups are kind of just right.
And what that lets us do is, it lets us move away from the traditional playbooks over-rotation on new business to something that’s a little more balanced, thinking about new business as well as cross-sell and expansion.
Lots of reasons why the traditional playbook is broken, and therefore, ultimately my point of view is: we need a new playbook.
The stuff that I did at Marketo doesn’t work anymore, and it’s time for something else.
And that’s really what I’m going to focus the rest of this presentation on.
But before we get into that…
We’re going to take another dad joke break. (I also studied physics for my undergraduate degree, so some of my dad jokes are kind of sciencey, too…)
So two atoms were walking across the road when one of them yelled out, “oh no! I think I lost an electron.”
“Really,” the other one replied, “are you sure?”
And the first one said, “yep, I’m absolutely positive.”
Okay, so let’s talk about this new playbook for smarter ABM.
Now, what did I say at the very top of the presentation?
The four worst words a marketer can hear is, “do more with less.” Right?
So hopefully nobody takes away from this presentation that what you all gotta do is work harder.
I truly believe you are already working hard.
And so if you need to do more… with less… and you can’t do it by working harder…
What’s the only one answer? To work smarter.
And so what does it mean to work smarter?
Working smarter ultimately is about applying more data and more intelligence to everything that you do, so that way you can be more effective.
So I do want to just take a quick second to introduce the term that I call “account intelligence,” which is:
“How do we know everything about these accounts so we can be the most effective?”
Account intelligence starts with your data.
So this is the information about your accounts—and the people at those accounts—that sits inside your CRM, your marketing automation system, and—another source that’s often overlooked—your email, and your calendars… if you have a more advanced tool, your call recordings…
Things like that.
This is all the information that you can mine about the accounts that you sort of own that data.
And obviously you have to use it with appropriate permission.
But kind of a fun fact about account-based marketing is that companies don’t have a right to privacy.
People do. But companies don’t!
Any information you collect about a company is totally usable.
So you have to take this data, you got to clean it, you got to match it, you got to make sure it’s working in a way that’s sort of appropriate.
And then typically… you’re going to match it, do things like lead-to-account matching.
And then keep it up to date.
Then you’re going to complement it with third-party data, whether it’s through Demandbase or ZoomInfo or some other vendor.
This is information about the companies.
How large are they? What industry are they in? Information about the people at those companies.
Turns out, these days, mobile phone numbers are really important if you want to be able to call people and connect with them.
But also their social profiles, accurate title information, have they left one company and gone to another company…
Technographic data is interesting.
Technographic data is information about what other technologies a company already has installed.
For me, a demand base—knowing what CRM and market automation system you have—is really important.
It turns out in our predictive analytics for our technology clients, the technographics is the number one predictor of account fit or ICP.
Even more than industry or company size!
So if you’re a tech company, this is really useful data.
And then, last but not least, intent data.
There’s probably a whole session on the agenda about intent data, so I’m not going to get into all the details.
But this is information about what topics that company is researching.
And as we’ll see, it can be very useful and important to identify where an account—or a buying group—might be in its journey.
Published September 19, 2024
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