Kallie Bonnell is the Digital Marketing Lead for Global Field Marketing at Beckman Coulter Life Sciences, which accelerates answers in scientific research, patient care, and precision manufacturing.
She is also a Terminus Rock Star customer.
Terminus Products Used:
Beckman uses Account Based Marketing (ABM) as effective, efficient marketing the whole revenue team can rally around.
Four reasons Beckman Coulter turned to ABM
There were four reasons they chose to get started with ABM.
- For Beckman Coulter, Field Marketing sits in the Sales organization, and many of our pre-pandemic activities were in the field, which were impacted by the pandemic. We needed to replicate user group meetings and instrument demos in a virtual environment as well as drive awareness of the new formats.
- We wanted to improve funnel velocity – reduced days to close, increased win rate, etc. – for prospect and customer opportunities.
- We wanted a tool that could impact in-funnel opportunities.
- We wanted the right marketing mix for our global key accounts.
We started with Email Experiences and expanded from there
Beckman has been a Terminus client for about three years. We started as an Email Experiences customer with Sigstr, which Terminus later acquired. From there, we extended our relationship by adding Ad Experiences and Data Studio to our ABM program. We had partners at Sigstr who knew our business, our goals, and our ABM program … and they’ve helped us configure a more extensive program with the additional solutions the merger with Terminus brought to the table. Further, regardless of the team, from Data Studio to Ad Experiences to Email Experiences to Support, Terminus’ responsiveness has been fantastic.
Establishing and expanding our ABM program was no easy feat. Beckman is a sizable organization. We have approximately 500 sellers. Just think of how many emails 500 sellers send on any given day. Now, think of how much unused real estate those emails represent to promote webinars, product launches, etc. So, email is a good channel to distribute our messaging. It’s also one more touch point with our customers.
Within Email Experiences, there are a couple of ways to trigger email signature content. We primarily use the sender as the trigger since they are typically aligned with our different product lines. If a Sales representative sells a particular catalog of products, then their signature is based on that. There are also options where the sender can choose a different segment to override the standard configuration. That’s helpful for our sellers who sell multiple product lines or want to tailor the message based on the recipient.
Email Experiences has been great for web traffic. It’s generally our third ranking referral source after organic and direct. In addition, prior to Email Experiences, employees were taking creative liberties with their email signatures, so Email Experiences helped maintain centralized control of look and feel of our brand.
What’s especially exciting about Email Experiences is that because email is such a normal day-to-day business communication, marketing is happening in the background without the recipient knowing they’re being actively targeted. It’s not ‘in your face’ like display ads. It’s far more organic. It’s noticing something during an email engagement with someone you know and trust.
As for our next steps, we’re looking forward to leveraging first- and third-party data to enrich our Email Experiences. We’re also considering more refined account-based tactics, where if the recipient’s email ends in a specific company domain, then Email Experiences overrides the standard signature with something specific to that account.
Email Experiences helped fill the void of live events
Email Experiences has been a fantastic addition to our channel strategy, especially with the impact we saw on Field Marketing due to the pandemic.
We target in-funnel opportunities, because for someone who’s in the consideration phase, coming to a user group meeting or getting a demonstration is a powerful way to accelerate purchase of our products.
Due to the pandemic, we lost the ability to go onsite with our customers, host user group meetings, conduct live demonstrations, and leverage other hands-on tactics. So, we needed to strengthen our digital muscle and adopt on-premises events for a more digital environment. Then, once we created a digital demonstration or a digital user group meeting, we needed a way to inform prospects and customers.
Email Experiences saved the day.
Data Studio added data-based decision making to the mix
In terms of the data and measurement standpoint, Terminus has helped us in several ways.
With hundreds of products across multiple different product lines and geographies, from low-cost consumables to $300,000 instruments, our Sales teams have a lot to track. Terminus takes intent data, combines it with user behavior and pushes it back concisely into our Salesforce environment; so, sellers can see what their accounts are doing. From a marketing perspective, Terminus also enables us to have a singleline of sight into multiple marketing channels. It’s exciting to tie in email and ad data, especially as we – and every other marketer on the planet – prepare for the decrease in third-party cookies and the increase in first party data in our marketing efforts. The consolidated data enriches our understanding of our customer’s journey, who is interacting with what content in the funnel, and the impact we can have on Pipeline metrics like average deal size, velocity, and win rate. It shows us what moves the needle, so we can do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.
The future of ABM at Beckman
This year we are doing what we would internally call a “trystorm” or a pilot where we trial a variety of things to learn and secure baseline metrics as a jumping off point.
We’re thinking about it in terms of account-based experiences because we have long relationships with our clients and growing our share is very important to our revenue model. Another way that we’re thinking about using ABM is with our global key account management team, which manages our 20 largest accounts. Once we sell an instrument to these customers, we want to know how to target them to purchase a service package or whatever the next logical product might be. We want to provide a white glove personalized experience to our highest value accounts. So, we are starting to think about our approach more as like ABX, or account-based experiences, to further penetrate those accounts. And we’re looking forward to partnering with Terminus in this area.
Marketing Hot Takes
First, regardless of whether you’re in B2B or B2C, I think that we would all benefit from thinking about it as B2H, or business to human. The people on the other side of buying decisions are human first. So, how do we humanize our brands better? How do we tell more human stories? How do we make those purchasers see themselves within the content we’re producing? How do they see themselves in our brand and our stories?
Second, there are three campaigns for which everyone should be using Ad and Email Experiences. They are effortless ways to say ‘hey, check this out’ and get eyeballs on content and messages.
- Driving registration to and engagement with webinars and events
- Announcing new products or enhancements
- Promoting useful tools such as a cost calculator
I’m Kallie Bonnell, and I’m a Terminus Rock Star. You can follow Kallie on LinkedIn for more learnings and tips from a real ABM rock star HERE!
