Signing on new accounts is at the heart of business growth. As Mark Cuban says, “sales cures all.” However, companies can struggle with bridging the language gap between sales departments and marketing teams.
In today’s episode of the Flip My Funnel podcast Hermi Ruiz Account-Based Marketing Manager at Snowflake takes the stage during an exclusive session of the 2019 B2B Sales & Marketing Exchange. Her speech encapsulates how ABM campaigns help Snowflake to sign the accounts they need and how it has allowed them to grow their business to several thousand global employees.
Here’s what Hermi will be sharing today:
- Her personal journey from sales to marketing
- The responsibilities of the ABM team at Snowflake
- The tech stack that Snowflake uses
- Her team’s workflow
- And how these processes have led to results for Snowflake.
This post is based on a podcast with Hermi Ruiz. You can listen to the full episode here or below.
“Build your brand, Hermie.”
At Snowflake, Hermi had the opportunity to sit down with the Sales Development Reps and actually engage in a conversation that increased communication between sales and marketing.
Unlike her past jobs, where marketers were siloed off into a separate department with little to no communication with the sales team, Hermi explains how integral that connectivity is to the success of the company, and her effectiveness in her role.
By combining sales and marketing in the ABM team’s outlook and approach, it makes them twice as effective.
Teamwork makes the dream work.
In order to practice the concept of teamwork and make sure that everyone is operating in harmony, Hermie explains that it’s essential to clearly communicate roles and responsibilities between team members. For instance, every new hire is briefed on what is expected of them and what they will receive.
Tech Stack
Hermie also shares some behind the scenes third-party apps that help to power the Data Warehouse behind Snowflake.
For ads Snowflake uses Terminus, Bombora and EverString to target their accounts. For measurement they use Engagio and Terminus. As a cloud-based Data Warehouse, they have as much data as you’d expect flowing in. Snowflake measures all of this by visualizing their metrics using Looker to make it easy for their employees to see.
“They can see what, when, and how content is being consumed. So they know which pieces of content are really resonating with their prospects, and they can leverage that as well with their messaging. And this truly gives them a 360 degree view of the account journey. We don’t want to just break into the account. We really want to strengthen the relationship and accelerate that deal. So this is one of the newer things that we’ve rolled out to our team.”>-Hermi Ruiz
Account intelligence and finding fit.
Hermi’s favorite part of account-based marketing is account intelligence. She’s coined the term “self-service” account intelligence, because it helps to really scale out ABM in its infancy, to a lot of people without having to do a lot of handholding. For Hermi, having all of their metrics from Bombora, from Terminus, EverString, tying back into our Salesforce allows Snowflake to keep a good grasp of their accounts. One helpful metric is called the marketing account fit score, or MAFS for short.
The MAFS score allows sales team members to really focus in on where the account is at. For instance, it can show which accounts need attention immediately, and which accounts should be followed up with.
Salesforce self-service account intelligence is engagement minutes and Terminus impressions. This lets sales staff know how many times one of their accounts has seen an ad on Terminus, as well as how much engagement that’s kind of come from it
The process for getting to 1000+ ABM Campaigns
Hermi shared the process for how they are able to have so much success across so many different areas, with sales team members around the world.
Since Snowflake has over 300 global sales directors, they’ve built out a collaborative process that allows them to identify their top accounts. This makes communication across channels much easier.
- Each sales director comes in and gets to choose their 10 accounts.
- Have to provide key contacts and key personas so that they know who they are targeting on the account
- The account holder is solely responsible for executing the account.
- The account holder becomes an advisor to explain the value add to the client.
People first, systems second generates results.
“At the end of the day, people are still buying from people. And if you’re just going to sell them a tool or sell them a platform, they’ll buy it and they might use it. But if they feel like you truly care about their entire process and their entire journey, and really trying to push them to their limits of what can really happen, people start consuming.”
Hermi shared that ABM has tripled deal sizes, doubled engagement and led to deals being closed twice as fast as accounts that don’t have ABM.
