It was at 10:30 a.m. on a Friday morning when I got the call saying that I had been offered the internship position of my dreams! I quickly ran and told my parents, mentors, and close friends. But by 11 a.m. the same day, the excitement had turned into, “What have I gotten myself into?”
I am a senior majoring in marketing at Georgia State University, and before this internship I had a year worth of sales experience but nothing marketing related other than a few notebooks full of general marketing concepts. When I heard that I would be put in charge of leading the #FlipMyFunnel revolution, I was both ecstatic and nervous.
Lucky for me, after sending my application for the internship, I downloaded this awesome e-book from Terminus, which is aptly titled The Beginner’s Blueprint to Account-Based Marketing. After reading 28 pages I felt like an expert, even going as far as accidentally pitching ABM in one of my class assignments.
From the beginning, account-based marketing just made sense to me. Why waste your time reaching out to every possible lead just to hopefully find the ones you want when you can identify the ones you want first and then reach out to them? The conversation in which I explained account-based marketing to my dad went a little something like this:
So, imagine you’re going to start a motorcycle club for all of your friends who ride Street Glides like you. What would you do?
A. Make a list of all of your friends who ride Harley-Davidsons. Email all of them a flyer promoting your Street Glide club. Have 80% of them throw it away because they ride other Harley models. Contact the ones that you know didn’t delete your email, and maybe some of them will actually sign up.
B. Make a list of all of your friends who ride Street Glides. Email this list the same flyer promoting you club. Have 80% of them sign up because they ride Street Glides and it seems like a good idea. Go ride to Sturgis with your group of friends.
It was an obvious choice to him and he’s an engineer, so why is it so hard for marketers to understand?
That question was answered on my first day at my new internship when I saw my first ABM Stack. I immediately noticed the lack of major companies in the account-based marketing space. This was even more obvious when I began looking for articles for the #FlipMyFunnel blog, Twitter account, and Facebook Page that I would be helping to moderate. I immediately recognized a few key names that kept popping up, such as Chris Engman, Jon Miller, and Sangram Vajre. As I accessed the FlipMyFunnel Slack community, I became aware of even more influencers, but they all worked for the same collection of companies.
This led to more motivation to expand this category of marketing by reaching out to as many people as possible! I’ve taken on the role of finding marketers with complex sales cycles, both B2B and B2C, to share this new strategy with. My ultimate goal is to flip everyone’s funnel!
To learn more about just how easy it is to drive demand using the customer experience — aka #FlipMyFunnel — click here to sign up for the VIP club today and start talking ABM.
