Tech startup Phononic has semiconductor products that could well revolutionize the refrigeration and cooling industries. As Director of Integrated Marketing for the company, it’s Daniel Englebretson’s job to make sure the world takes notice.He’s found the best way to target ideal prospects – the right companies and the right decision-makers at those companies – is with an account-based marketing approach. But if you think you know account-based marketing, it’s changed quite a lot in just the last few years, says Daniel.We talk about…
- What account-based marketing meant three years ago… and how it’s changed radically today
- The integral part your sales team plays in these efforts
- How to avoid being “creepy” in personalized marketing
- Key ways account-based marketing is different for startups and established companies
- And more
Listen now...
Mentioned in This Episode: www.phononic.com
Episode Transcript:
Steffen Horst: Welcome to the Performance Delivered, Insider Secrets for Digital Marketing Success Podcast, where we talk with marketing and agency executives, learn how they build successful businesses and their personal brand. I'm your host Steffen Horst.Today, we're going to talk about account based marketing. Here to speak with me about the topic is Daniel Englebretson, who is the director of integrated marketing at Phononic. Before joining Phononic, Daniel was director of integrated marketing at Acuity Brands and held multiple Demand Generation positions. Daniel, great to have you on the show.Daniel Englebretson: Hey, thanks for having me, I'm glad to be here.Steffen Horst: Daniel, how did you get started in marketing and what led you to the point in your career where you are at the moment?Daniel Englebretson: That's a great question. For many people, marketing means many different things and for me, I've been particularly drawn to the marketing technology side of things. And also, I really enjoy solving problems and I like talking to people, so when you marry technology and talking to people and solving problems together, you end up with something that looks a lot like what I do today. So it's kind of a natural fit for things that I just like to do. And I've written a wave of my career basically moving from role to role alongside the transformation of mar-tech, and technology and marketing. That's a lot of how I am where I am today.Steffen Horst: Tell our listeners about your role at Phononic, and what Phononic does.Daniel Englebretson: Sure. Phononic is a startup that started back in 2009 I believe, so we've been at it for 10 years, maybe we're not a startup anymore. We spent a few years developing the technology required to do solid state heating and cooling, and in the last few years, we've been commercializing that and products. And so what that means is we can make things hot or cold without moving part. And a lot of legs and a lot of applications, but the one that you most commonly see us playing in today are refrigeration, freezing, optoelectronics, which is you're cooling the lasers that you dated down the optic cable.But basically anything that needs to be heated or cooled, we can do with semiconductor technology that couldn't be done before using thermal electronics. So lots of applications, means I get to play in lots of different verticals, talking to lots of different types of companies, and in my role here at Phononic as the director of integrated marketing, a big part of my job is to know what's possible in the world of demand generation and marketing, and inform my business partners internally of the best way to achieve whatever objective they have for whatever campaign they're trying to run.So I consult with my partners on, if you are trying to create demand or generate awareness, or if you are trying to hit this cost per lead, or that cost per lead, what are the right tactics to use to do that? And really over the last couple of years, I've also been a big proponent for account based marketing and account based strategy. So I've also been doing quite a bit of, I guess you would say consulting internally or working with internally our sales teams as well as our marketing teams on that account based approach and the technology and tactics related.Steffen Horst: Great. So Daniel, what is account based marketing? I mean there are so many different tactics and ways to do B2B marketing. What is special about account based marketing?Daniel Englebretson: Yeah. Yeah, that's a great question. I think it also can be answered a number of ways and I think, I'll answer it the way I would have answered it two years ago when I was first getting, or maybe three years ago, when I was first getting started. And I'll answer it the way I understand today. Three years ago, to me, account based marketing translated really into creating leads at accounts that mattered to the business and firing off certain kinds of tactics with certain types of technology that allowed me to generate leads at those accounts. And that's an okay definition,.But over the years, what it has really become to mean to me is this an entire strategy around how you even go about connecting the dots across all of your integrated marketing efforts, whether it's PR or media or events or demand gen or SEO or editorial or whatever it is, how you connect the paths across all of that in a unified storytelling way, and how do you bring your sales organization into the fold in the planning and execution of that so that everything that you're doing is impactful and meaningful in the context of the accounts that your business wants to do business with. And so it's more than just a set of tactics or a set of processes. It's kind of an all end approach to how you might go about building and executing your marketing.Steffen Horst: What I'm hearing is basically a strategy that a company wholly needs to adapt, so basically functions in the marketing realm, but also from the sales perspective, kind of subscribe to this approach because what you're basically doing is, you are focusing, I assume, on existing clients, and see how you can expand your business with them. But also you're looking for specific companies. So you're not going out and kind of just shooting your message out to a lot of businesses that might be a good target, but you're picking out that of that whole group specific companies that you target or that you talk to. Is that kind of correct?Daniel Englebretson: Yeah, that's sounds about right. I mean, generally speaking. One of the good things about and maybe double edged sword about working at a startup with a new sort of world product is, you don't always know who you want to target. So you might not always have, might not always jump out with a specific set of accounts, but you will come up with a specific set of criteria that an account needs to meet as you build a list and then learn from there.Historically, if I think back to what I was doing five or seven years ago, when I'm setting up an email campaign, I'm going to fire off to 10,000 email addresses at the same time. Or when I'm setting up ad campaign, I'm going to do it on paper click with Google and I'm going to hit anybody who puts this word into Google. Whereas now, I would never do either of those things. I would only serve my ads to the accounts that meet my criteria before I even serve the Ad, I would only send messages they were personalized for that account, or at least for that sub segment of the market. Because you have so much more understanding of who you want to talk to and what you want to say to them.And a lot of ways, it's not really fair to frown on the past, because a lot of this wasn't possible on the past. Now, with some of the technology that's available, you can even get that laser focus, and then you get that laser efficiency as well, which is really one of the main things that ABM brings, is a ton of efficiency to your process.Steffen Horst: So that obviously, ton of efficiency is, I would assume, one reason why companies should think about account based marketing. What other reasons are there for company to sit down and look into account based marketing and consider it for their business, if applicable?Daniel Englebretson: Yeah. So I think it depends a little bit about where you are as a business. And so, I can do a couple of scenarios. Let's say that you were like me and you're working at a startup and you don't yet know exactly who the best segment is for you to target. Well, account based strategy or account based marketing gives you a framework and a set of tools to very quickly, dice your market and test your messaging and understand who it's resonating with, and not only do it quickly, but also do it substantially less expensively than some of your alternative approaches when it comes to the variable cost of doing that.And so, if you're trying to gear up to slice up markets and segments and understand where this is going to resonate, an account based approach gives you a ton of insight into those segments and those types of accounts and who's going to care and allows you to iterate quite quickly to do it. Whereas if you're at a company that's been around for a hundred years and let's say you're a $5 billion manufacturer, you have established relationships, you know your markets, your sales team has been around for a long time. And if you're a marketer like me trying to tap into your sales team and the knowledge that they have and trying to really drive value in the context of what sales finds valuable has been a big challenge for marketers for a long time.A long time marketers are running campaigns, they're generating leads, they're taking them to sales and they're trying to get better and better at generating that lead and picking it to sales. But you're still traditionally, you're still limited on how much sales really wants to play with you and how well you can, I guess, fit into what sales is already doing. Whereas an account based approach, you're bringing in sales to the table right out the gate, and they're helping you understand who you're talking to and what you're saying before you even start.And you can cut out a lot of the inefficiency of driving leads that sales never wanted to talk to in the first place, which sounds crazy, but it definitely happens. We cut that efficiency out or that inefficiency out, and then the leads you're generating are already at accounts that you know sales already wants to talk to.So, the account based approach, it really, in my mind, cleans up a lot of the noise that you might would have run into without that approach, and it locks in the collaboration before you start your campaigning. And then in some ways, at least how I'm doing it, it also keeps you from spending money on tactics, or collateral, or activity that that doesn't have a predetermined desired output. And so you get a lot more efficiency out of that cognitive overhead, so to speak.Steffen Horst: Okay. What type of company or who should adopt ABM? Who is a good fit for such an approach?Daniel Englebretson: That's kind of like asking maybe five or seven years ago, who should adopt marketing automation? I mean realistically, well in a B2B marketing context, anybody could adopt marketing automation and many, many people have, and anybody could adopt an account based approach and many people are. And the reason why I compare the two is because, account based marketing and the efficiencies that it brings and the tools that come along with it, whichever you pick, are doing for B2B, what marketing automation did for B2B 10 years ago. And, a lot of that marrying of technology to get smarter, faster, better, is kind of where, I mean a lot of innovation is happening in the context of ABM, because of the efficiencies that it brings in the ... Really all of it boils down to efficiency.So I would say, if you run a B2B organization and you're targeting other businesses, you should be exploring what account based marketing could mean for your organization because so much of the value that account based brings, you can mine out really no matter what you're doing or who you're selling to, and there's different facets to that. But, I mean, there's a lot of different places it could go, you know what I mean?Just to take a step back, I was recently reading the Forrester Wave Report, the one that just came out about account based marketing platforms and there's like 15 of them that they pick, like here's the front runner and here's all the others, and all those criteria. And it's super interesting to read through that as somebody who knows about this stuff because the different players they have in this report, this Forrester, they don't do the same thing.And I think that's where some of the confusion comes from in the world of ABM, like account based marketing, there's several different models and there's several different facets to it. And depending on your business, you might be trying to accelerate your pipeline, you might be trying to build loyalty with your customers, you might be trying to orchestrate better actions and more efficiency with your sales team, you might be trying to improve the efficiency of your ad spends. I mean, there's so many different pieces that matter in one place and don't matter another place, that's where you get this crop of 14 or whatever vendors of ABM technology and they all do slightly different things.And it really comes down to what are the problems you're trying to solve as a business, and how can this marriage of technology and data and efficiency, that is ABM, how can that help you solve those problems. So, I mean, it's a super long winded to answer to your question, but really anybody, anybody who's doing B2B marketing should be informing themselves on what account based marketing is and how it might solve some of the problems they have.Steffen Horst: I think, especially the last part was very interesting what you just said, because to be honest, I think over the last two years when the word account based marketing popped up, more and more in the area where we work here, we first started in connection with DSPs. People were talking about, well we can do account-based marketing, we can work with Dun and Bradstreet and we can get data sets and then we can target specific people at specific companies and then the data costs are high, et cetera.But obviously as the conversation continues and grew, there are other channels where this marketing approach can be applied to. From your perspective, can you give some examples of account based marketing in regards to channels, how they can be used to apply account based marketing for example, or specific tactics?Daniel Englebretson: Yeah, yeah. So, my personal favorite is, is Terminus ABM, and I got into the terminus ABM platform mainly because of access to audience. I always say the three things you need as a B2B marketer to be successful in generating demand are access to audience, a value prop that sells, and knowing what's possible. And, a value prop that sells is kind of not your problem as the demand generation person, you can't control the value prop of your business is developing. Knowing what's possible is entirely your job and access to the audience, that's kind of where technology comes in. And Terminus, or just in general in the context of ABM display, programmatic ABM display, you now have technology that says, I can serve this ad to this role at this company and no one else.And in the past, if you wanted to, let's say you're selling a refrigerator to a hospital, to store drugs in it, like vaccines I'd say, in the past, if I wanted to run an ad that was after somebody who might be buying a vaccine refrigerator, I would be buying a word essentially in Google that says, anybody who types it in vaccine refrigerator show this. Or I would be doing this very broad brush as narrow as I could, but broad brush around vaccine refrigerator or whatever it is. Well today with account based display, I can say, well I want every person with the word pharmacy and their job title, that works at these 10 hospitals systems, and only those people to see these ads. Or you could even go, and then I do this in other context, you could say, anybody who works at this hospital with these words in their title, I want them to see this ad.And so I can put, I've done this actually, where I put a picture of that hospital in the ad, and I put the name of that hospital in the ad, and you click through on the landing page and then it's written for that hospital and it's for that audience. And then you can do it for the pharmacist with one page, and you can do from the maintenance guy on another page, and you can do it for the nurse on the other page, and they can all say different things, and at the same time.And so, the manifestation of ABM from a technology and technical perspective on the ABM display is huge, and I liken it to what cold email blasting was in the past, where you were just trying to hit everybody and see who would click. Now you can hit everybody and see who clicks, except for you're doing it passively, you're not doing it in their inbox, you're doing it passively, and you already know where they work and what they're interested in before you send it to them. So, it is kind of that first, passive impression on your audience with a targeted message.When you get past that, like you said, ESPs and email for sure, you can be doing with email, and in my context, we've got all these different thinking around, well, how many emails do you send to the same account and how do you personalize them? You can personalize with that account name, or their website, or the person's name or their title or whatever, and we certainly do all those different things, but you can personalize the emails that you're sending out, and personalize the messaging that you're putting into those emails and send it to that audience with an account based message so to speak.And for us, in a lot of ways today, in a lot of what I'm doing, like the most basic framework is starting with ads and then layering emailing, and then layering calling, all with account specific messaging. But, you can get past that and you can get into some targeted social media, on LinkedIn for example. Or you can get into some, I actually do a fair amount of geo-fencing, where you can geo-fence a specific place and serve up certain messaging. So there's a number of ways that you can do it.But, the other half of it though is, why are you picking those accounts in the first place? And that's where a lot of that sales collaboration and activation comes in, and a lot of the technology in this space is about sales activation as well. So after I fire that email, or shoot over that ad, or geo-fence that event, or whatever, how am I surfacing the insights from that account that it just engaged? How am I surfacing that and actioning the sales team on it?So a lot of the technology is about surfacing activity that's happening at a target account and informing the sales team, well number one that it happened, and number two, here's what you should go do now. And so there's a lot of actioning around these insights in a smart way, so that you get better efficiency with your sales team. So, we bubble that up now to our sales teams and help them see that activity faster so that they can move faster. But there's, I mean I could probably elaborate further on other facets of it, but the framework, and I see this in a number of ways, but the framework that I typically use is this team framework that you see around on the internet, target, engage, activate, measure.So you're either trying to improve how you do your targeting, you're trying to improve how you engage who you're targeting, you're trying to improve how you activate your sales team, and then you're trying to improve how you measure those results and iterate on top of it. And the different technologies typically fit into one or more of those areas.Steffen Horst: I mean, from what you just said, obviously it is required to have a clear understanding of attribution, because you are kind of talking about buying media, in your example display media, and then obviously you provide your sales team of the information that this information or this email was sent out. Now, give them a call, we target them with relevant information. How do you go about to make sure that the information from the offline world, from the sales team, ends up in systems so that the actual success of the media buying can be properly measured?Daniel Englebretson: Yeah, so that's a great question, and I'm going to answer that from the marketer’s point of view first. It goes back to what I was saying earlier about traditional demand Gen, you generate a hundred leads and you send them to your sales team and 30% of them get a call back because of the other 70%, they just aren't type of account that they really wanted to talk to or they don't have time for that or whatever, whatever the excuse. And from the marketer's perspective, it's totally just an 'excuse.' But from the sales guy's perspective, he doesn't have time to waste on something that's not relevant to him or her.And so that's the age old problem that we've been dealing with in demand Gen, whereas with an account based approach, if the sales guy or girl tells you up front, I want business as these 100 accounts. If I generate a lead at one of those accounts, they're going to care a whole more about it because they pick that account first place. And so that fundamentally kind of underpins everything else I'm about to say. There's already a base set of engagement between sales and marketing that's already locking in a certain amount of interest in playing along before you even start. Because the marketer has been trying to solve the problem of how do I prove that my activity is worth something to the company, so I can get more budget or more headcount or keep my job or whatever.The marketer has been all about that forever, and the sales guys been getting hassled by the marketer forever, and this approach, that is account based marketing is locking in that playing along earlier on. And a lot of people will say, well, I've been doing this all along, there's nothing new, account based marketing is just good marketing, and I agree. The difference is the technology that's available and the data that's available today, you couldn't do two, three, four, five years ago. And so, even if you've been doing this good marketing all along, collaborating with your sales partners, the kinds of data that's available to go action on in the kinds of tactics like account based display, they didn't exist before. So there's even tighter collaboration required, and even tighter collaboration possible between the two departments.So, that gets followed up on with, doing ... In my case, when we're planning campaigns, we have stage gates in the planning process that say, well, once the brief is done, sales has to sign off. Once a buyer going is done, sales has to sign off. Before the content gets created, sales has to sign off. Once the accounts are picked and locked in, sales signs off on the accounts, and many times it comes from them and then it goes through some iteration. And then there's some kind of recurring meeting, I do weekly roll ups and monthly meetings where you're continuously locking in with sales on, "Hey, are these the right kinds of leads? Are these still the right accounts? Should we be adding accounts or removing accounts," et cetera.And then obviously you have to have the technology to capture it, so we use Salesforce CRM for example. So when I'm turning over accounts and opportunities to sales, getting them to put the information back in the CRM, it's a slightly bigger issue than just what I'm talking about. But, if you can provide, like I was looking at this opportunity that we generated the other day, a fairly sizable one, a fairly exciting one. It was a 12 month history of 176 touchpoints from marketing across, I don't remember how many, like 15 or 17 campaigns. For me to be able to point at that and go to the sales guy or girl and say, "Hey, these campaigns are influencing these opportunities and these are the people who are interacting," when they see stuff like that, they're like, "Oh, now I know why I need to put my information in the system."So, I think transparency and communication with the dash boarding and providing the information back to them, helps them understand why they would want to put information in the system in the first place. A great example of this that I always run into is trade shows, like whatever sales guy or girl has a trade show they want to go to and they're having trouble getting the funding for it, well with the attribution that you can be doing now, you can go back and look well this trade show touched these accounts, and in this business at this point in time or whatever the case.So they started to get their head around why putting the data in, how that powers what kinds of attribution, and then they're more motivated to put it in. But as I kind of started this comment with, since all of the campaigning is around the accounts they already care about, that's what's getting them to the table to look at it in the first place, and then pass that, your multi touch attribution or whatever you're doing is keeping them engaged and why.But ultimately at the end of the day, it's the result, both anecdotally and objectively, to have a sales guy come back from a conference and say, "Wow a lot of my customers said they saw our ads before the event," well that wasn't an accident. Or for a sales guy to say, "Hey, it used to take me three weeks to get in the door of an account and now it takes me a week to get in the door." That's not an accident. That's because you've been priming that account with specific messaging. And then you get the objective, which is the actual dollars, closing the deals. And nothing breathes collaboration like success, and bringing an account based approach only amplifies that.Steffen Horst: I think that was some really great information you just shared about how to align sales into marketing side. Because if that's not done properly, obviously this all will fall apart. I think having sales sign off on communication, on collateral, et Cetera, make sure that everyone is in the same boat and that later on sales for example, cannot come and say, well, we didn't want the sale, or that's not correct what you communicated.Daniel Englebretson: And if I could expand on that in two ways, number one, realistically, if sales isn't going to go close the business marketing doesn't have a job. And so if sales wants to say something that's slightly different than how marketing wants to say it, you should think very critically about that as a marketer, of how much you really want to fight that. Because sales brings a lot of value to that thinking, and I think a lot of times marketers get frustrated with, or it's not as exciting to them when sales wants to say one thing, which isn't as creative or as fun or whatever, as whatever marketing wanted to do. But, there's a lot to be gained from looking at it from both perspectives.And the other thing that I would really point out on that is the importance of simplicity. I think I have seen a number of marketers personally, I've seen this, where they get jacked up about ABM and they're just so excited about ABM or whatever it is that they're trying to do, and they jump in full tilt and they break out all these massive templates that they're going to start using and all these inputs that are required from sales. You've got to get me this, this, this, this. And the rest of the organization hasn't caught up. They don't know why or even what you're talking about.And I think if you can do anything that you can to simplify as much as possible, the initial asks for the initial foray into this, slim it down as far as you possibly can just to start building that understanding and that learning, and then scale up from there. If you try to do the best ideal customer profile, or the best target account list that you can possibly get before you even start, you're just, it's almost an oxymoron, you almost can't get the best before you start, because you don't know how that's going to work.And the main thing is your sales partners, no matter how good they are, no matter how advanced they are, no matter what background they have, they are not going to be familiar with the marketing technology like you are as a marketer. So you have to bring them along slowly. You can't just dump it all on them, and I think that's super important when you're building that collaboration.Steffen Horst: Daniel, a second ago you talked about personalization. How important is it for account based marketing? And to what extent do you suggest to go to personalize your assets?Daniel Englebretson: Yeah, that's also an excellent question. And, I mean, there's a spectrum of personalization, and I've got it visualized in my mind because I always use the same spectrum, and I'm not going to get it entirely right. But, you get all the way down to one to one, and then you go all the way up to just mass market like super bowl commercial, and somewhere in between there, you're segmenting on, you're personalizing by at least account, or by at least sub vertical, or by at least industry. So there's different levels of that personalization.And, hard is it, to me, to me depends on how big is your total addressable market and how much time you've got to get after it, and just to elaborate on that, I've got one vertical that I fell into where the total addressable market is less than 100 accounts. I've other verticals that fell into where the total addressable market is thousands and thousands of accounts. And so, meaningful one-to-one personalization at thousands of accounts is going to be a lot more taxing than at hundreds of accounts. And also the significance of closing one account out of a hundred is more than closing one account out of a thousand or whatever.So, there's some boundaries around that, that make it more or less significant. But I would say that in the context of email, the more personalization that you can add without being cheesy, and/or creepy, the better. And I've been very focused on name, account name, little nuggets like, you know, I was reading on your website, inserting the website name. Like I did a big test on it a while ago, and when I went from three factors to four factors of personalization, I'm not going to get totally wrapped about looking at it, I saw an improvement of 30% in the click rate, 30% improvement in click rate with that one extra factor of personalization.And if I remember correctly, I think it was actually was their website that I put into it and I think it was something like, hi first name, I was recently on company's website, and I put it in the website and I was reading about Blah Blah Blah. And that personalization of adding that to all that, saw that, and I did a split test between including that or not including it.There's plenty of research out there about all the different things you could test, but just firsthand, personalization in email in my experience, there's a threshold where if you don't get over the threshold of personalization, you might as well have not done it in the first place. But you don't want to overdo it, so you want to get right at that right now. Whereas like in advertising, with the ad, we definitely personalize down to ... All the accounts are picked by sub vertical and then usually we're personalizing at a minimum down to role types within those verticals. So like purchasing my one set of things, maintenance you might see another set of things, something like that.But then there are some cases where we're running one to one, where an account, season account specific ad, and again because we have certain specific things that we want to say to that account versus another, and the significance of winning that account is extremely high, because of the marketer is only so large. So, I think the best way to answer it is, you should try personalizing and you should be setting it up in a way that you can be testing it and you should figure out what works best for your business, because it's going to be different even inside your business from segment to segment. But if you're not trying it and you're not testing it, it's a missed opportunity.And basically every ad set we put out, every email we put out, every landing page we make has something that's being tested. So, you should be always testing the factors of personalization and the degree to which you want to personalize, looking for that sweet spot, because when you do that, you do see significant improvements. Every time I've done that, I've seen significant improvements. There's just testing in general but on personalization as well.And so, I think it is kind of the holy grail, is getting 100% personalized marketing. But there's a lot of costs in terms of time that comes into that, and you can try to improve it with AI generated ads and stuff like that. But, I think you got to maintain the human side of it too. You don't want to personalize like a robot, you come off like a robot. You got to come off like a person. So there's definitely a fine line.Steffen Horst: Great. I mean that was great information. Daniel, I'm looking at the list of questions I had jotted down before our call and I realize I still have number of questions, but from a time perspective, I think we're kind of coming to the end of this podcast, which makes me think we probably should get you back on here in a few weeks to talk about all the other questions I have here. Daniel, if people want to reach out to you, find out more about you, where can they go?Daniel Englebretson: So I love LinkedIn. I'm always on LinkedIn. I share a lot on LinkedIn, you can find me on LinkedIn easily. I have a Twitter handle DEnglebretson as well, but I use from time to time. I'm not as religious about Twitter, but I'm trying to improve, but LinkedIn is my spot.Steffen Horst: Thanks everyone for listening. If you like the Performance Delivered Podcast, please subscribe to us and leave us a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast application. If you want to find out more about symphonic digital, you can visit us at symphonicdigital.com, or follow us on Twitter @SymphonicHQ. Thanks again and see you next time.
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