Sangram Vajre, Founder of #FlipMyFunnel, was a recent guest on the TechnologyAdvice Expert Interview Series. The series, which is hosted by TechnologyAdvice’s Josh Bland, explores a variety of business and technology landscapes through conversations with industry leaders.
In this episode, we discuss everything from the ascendence of ABM, it’s biggest challenges, and what to expect at the #FlipMyFunnel Roadshow.
Below are Sangram’s five biggest insights from the conversation.
What does #FlipMyFunnel mean?
It really means we need to challenge the status quo. This funnel has been around for a decade and as we all know, there’s an app for everything. There’s something for everything and it’s surprising nobody has challenged the funnel. As we both know, in B2B there are more people in the decision-making process. You know exactly which companies you’re targeting.
What are the different stages for ABM?
For example, if you’re targeting financial services companies, and you’re targeting only Fortune 500 companies, guess what, they’re probably 80-100 companies that fit that criteria. It’s readily available as to which those companies are. Why would you ever spend any of your money or resource on anything but focusing on those 70-100 companies. That’s where the original started, flipping it and starting with the right companies, that’s the identify stage.
The second stage is once you know the companies to go after, obviously you should know who you’re targeting. Let’s say you’re targeting an IT project. let’s say your message is only targeting IT people, anything else or anybody else is just not going to do any good to you. Why waste that? That’s the second stage which is expand.
The third stage, which is normally the first stage in a regular funnel, is engage. Now you create content that is related to these companies and these personas you’re going after. Now you do your webinars, events, everything you can possibly think of doing from a marketing standpoint. Now you do it with a goal in mind, an audience in mind with just a blanket. Obviously the last stage is turning them into advocate. It’s really identify, expand, engage, and advocate. At the end of the day I feel like the message is very clear, there’s a clear challenge and problem we’re helping to solve.
How is this conference different than #FlipMyFunnel Atlanta?
The one we did in Atlanta was a full day event. We might do that once a year or something like that or one or two days, which is a much bigger conference and focus of sales and marketing. This is 100% focused on ABM. Every speaker is talking about getting deeper in the conversation. Not just talking about the high level. This is more of “here are the real best practices of ABM.”
Influitive is coming to talk about how they’re doing ABM at their company with real examples and things like that, John is talking about measuring ABM across the different stages of the buyer journey, Megan Heuer who leads the practice at SiriusDecisions is talking about the trends she’s seeing in ABM and having an independent view as opposed to vendor-centric. Very independent view of her hundreds of customers she advises on a daily basis for large, mid-size and small companies. It’s a very focused ABM roadshow trying to help companies in these regions and everywhere understand how to do ABM at a much deeper level than at a just thought leadership conference.
Listen to the full interview below:
This content was created and published by TechnologyAdvice, an Inc. 5000 company looking to help buyers find out more about ABM, lead generation, and more. Interview conducted by Josh Bland.
Learn more about ABM and the T.E.A.M. account based marketing framework:
- Target – Create a target account list for ABM
- Engage – Account based advertising
- Activate – Account based sales enablement tools
- Measure – Account based analytics
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