FlipMyFunnel Post, Other

Good to Great – Taking ABM to the Next Level

This week’s #TakeoverTuesday episode is hosted by Steve Watt, an ABM Strategist. He interviews Meredith Fuller, Managing Director of Buying Engagement at Quarry.  Listen to the episode below. 

Sometimes it’s good to take things up a notch.

Perhaps your ABM program has some wings, or you have some ABM tech … but you want to take things deeper. This is the #FlipMyFunnel episode for you.

Quarry is a B2B agency, that was, once again, named to the top 10 US B2B marketing agencies. And to top that, they were the only one singled out as specialists in ABM.

Here’s what we’re unpacking today:

  • How intent data can go 1 layer deeper than traditional analytics
  • How behavioral data builds on predictive assessment
  • The difference between table-stakes personalization and deep personalization

You’ve done some really leading work with ideal account profiles. Tell us how you do that?

Meredith: We put in a lot of focus on technologies, triggers, and behavioral indicators, as well as where, when and how to layer all those filters together. That way, you really are focusing on those accounts that are most likely to engage and to move along the buyer journey. That could be current customers or prospects.

Tell us more about how Quarry layers on intent data?

Meredith: Intent data and analytics is all about searching and assessing and evaluating digital online behaviors of an account, vis-a-vis, some particular and relevant terms to your products, your business, your brand, etc. Whatever it is that you’re looking to put into market, the intent providers do an assessment to understand: Who’s surging on those topics? Who’s surging on the terms that seem to be most relevant to what you are delivering?  So intent data does a great job of layering on timeliness and relevance over the top of that predictive assessment to determine who would be your best customer — i.e., who would be most likely to convert.

You also layer on behavioral data. That’s essentially those who are engaging with your own web properties, right?

Meredith: Yes. And I would actually spin it beyond: It’s not just engagement with your web properties, it’s engagement with anything you put in the market. So perhaps you have an inbound play, perhaps you have a content syndication program. Perhaps you have digital ads. Perhaps they’re actually engaging on your social channels. It’s sort of anything they’re doing that demonstrates they’re engaging specifically with you.

Can you explain trigger filter to us?

Meredith: The trigger filter is sort of a new or different one, perhaps that folks aren’t as familiar with. And what we view as a trigger filter is anything that’s happening at the organizational level that might suggest there’s a propensity to initiate a surge, or do an investigation, or evaluate existing vendors or what have you, in your area. So maybe an explicit example might help:

We have a networking client and some of the triggers that we look at are: Has there been an acquisition by an account in the last 3-6 months? Has there been a new CIO or CTO appointed in the last 3-6 months? Have they actually announced an expansion or a new office opening? Any of those organizational activities are often precursors to an evaluation of that company’s networking partner or networking provider. They indicate the account may be saying, “We need more, we need better, we need other.”

One thing that sometimes gets missed is that intent activity (in particular), as well as trigger activity, behavioral activity, and even the predictive, shouldn’t just remain at the level or at the register where it’s helping you identify and prioritize accounts. Making sure you actually pull that insight all the way through and into your message delivery is really important — it gives you so much rich intelligence about what folks at that account are leaning forward on. What are their hot button items? What are their issues? What are their challenges? What are their needs? You can use that intelligence and reflect it smartly into your account-based content messages.

I hear this the term deep personalization frequently. What does that mean?

Meredith: There’s almost an expectation around what I would call table stakes personalization. That is the email you get, or the landing page where your name has been pre-populated or your organization’s name is in there. Perhaps there’s even been some image changes that are reflective of your particular vertical. That basic level of personalization is becoming more and more pervasive. Folks get that, and they understand how to do it. And again, there are so many technologies out there that actually make it fairly straightforward to accomplish.

What I refer to in terms of deep personalization is really kicking that up a notch and making sure that not only are you personalizing at that level but you’re actually really understanding your prospect and their interests based upon the queues that you get from their behaviors and from some of the technologies I was just speaking about. For example, I would point to the HCM cloud campaign we actually ran for Oracle. What we did as part of the backend for that campaign was we actually ran an intention assessment on the key accounts that they were targeting to understand. Again, what topics were those key accounts surging on? And then based upon that intention, based upon that interest that was being shown, we actually dynamically altered the messages and the landing page content for the actual experience delivered to those accounts.

The other thing that we’ve done when you speak about deep personalization is that we’ve actually been able to successfully move beyond just having personalization delivered at that email or landing page experience, and brought it all the way through, for example, to an ebook. Where once the individual clicked through their email, got to the landing page and then downloaded the ebook, even the internal pages of the ebook were personalized. We actually were able to scrape a screencap of the landing page of that target account and have it visible in the desktop computer and the image in the book.

I assume you can’t just hand off a playbook or a strategy document to a client — you probably have to get in there and help them with this technology, correct?

Meredith: It won’t help clients if they really don’t understand how to use it, or how to integrate the technologies, or where and how and what data needs to get passed from platform to platform to platform. Or even the order of operations in terms of, again, when do you employ certain technologies versus other technologies? So we find that there are a number of key points that organizations, clients, & prospects need some help with:

  1. They call for help and say, “We’ve made these purchases, and we have these platforms, but we just really don’t think we’re getting the full ROI out of them. We Aren’t quite sure how we knit them together and what those integration points are.”
  2. The other area that clients frequently need help with: Interestingly, enterprises sometimes get handcuffed because they have lengthy procurement cycles. It’s very difficult for them to bring in a technology to trial or for a pilot because of the various internal red tape and protocol and hoops they need to jump through. So something else that Quarry’s done is we actually have quite a deep and broad list of technology partners, and terrific partners and names that you would know. You know the Mintigo, Bombora, and others. We actually allow our clients to access that technology through us. So for some enterprises, it’s much easier for them to use the technology if it’s on our papers, so they don’t have to take on a contract.