The Terminus Rock Stars behind it all
Launches Quick Start ABM Program in 1Q witH
Terminus
Bazaarvoice
Jen Leaver
Sr. Marketing Manager, Demand Gen & Global ABM
Hot Take on Marketing
Get to know me
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Kate Hahn
Director, Global Demand Gen & Retention
Setting the Stage
Sales cooperation and measurement are crucial ingredients for a successful ABM program.
To bridge the Sales/Marketing gap, Bazaarvoice launched an 8 week pilot program to a select group of sales and customer success members. With their input and insight, Jen was able to create an exhaustive playbook for the wider teams to leverage.
ABM can tear down the silos but it will only work if your sales team is involved from the start.
Enterprise segment wins:
6x
increase in pipeline
4x
increase in opportunities created
33%
increase in average deal size
increase in enterprise revenue
SMB segment wins:
2x
58%
3x
increase in SMB revenue
173%
Bringing the Band Back Together
Change can be challenging for organizations of any size, especially when that change involves the relationship (or lack thereof) between the sales and marketing teams. When these teams are not aligned around the same shared goals, there lies a huge missed opportunity on how they go to market, how business outcomes are impacted, and how and where to prioritize resources and campaigns when it comes to their target accounts.
Industry
Software
ICP
Brand, e-commerce and social media marketers in North America, EMEA and APAC
Verticals
Retail, CPG, Health & Beauty, Food & Beverage, Consumer Electronics, Apparel, Home Improvement
Company Size
1000+
Jen knew an “all-in” holistic ABM strategy that aligned sales and marketing was the necessary step for Bazaarvoice. Since joining the team, she has built a scalable ABM program from the ground up, enabled a global sales team, and helped bridge the gap between their sales and marketing teams.
The scenario above is oftentimes a story we see across many organizations we work with, and one Bazaarvoice faced until Jen Leaver, Sr. Marketing Manager of Global ABM, joined the company in January of 2020. Prior to her arrival, the previous ABM strategies were ad hoc – launching one-off campaigns without a long-term strategic plan or cadence. All of which required manual reporting and sales enablement processes, yet failed to deliver the ROI Bazaarvoice knew was possible.
Enter account-based marketing.
In October 2020, Jen was named the Terminus “ABM Innovator of the Year'' as the strategy and execution she led delivered a 6x increase in pipeline and a 33% increase in deal size for Bazaarvoice.
Company Info
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The Strategic
Bazaarvoice’s extensive global retail network, product-passionate community, and enterprise-level technology provide the tools that brands and retailers need to create smarter shopper experiences across the entire customer journey. Since the COVID-19 forced so many companies to pivot on a dime while online sales skyrocketed, these solutions became table stakes for any brand looking to succeed in eCommerce. This also meant Bazaarvoice needed to pivot their own demand gen strategy in terms of how sales and marketing targeted and engaged with key accounts.
Kate knew the Demand Gen team needed a dedicated person to own the ABM strategy in order for this to all work and Jen fit the bill. “Oftentimes, ABM is an additional responsibility for a marketing manager, something someone comes back to every few days or every other week. I needed to be 100% focused on all the different aspects of our ABM strategy, from campaign planning and creative and execution to reporting, measurement, and internal enablement and evangelism”, recalled Jen.
Working with Kate Hahn, Director of Demand Gen and Retention, Jen knew that in order for ABM to be successful she needed to reset and redefine what it meant, not only from a strategy standpoint but from a sales perspective as well. Lastly, and most importantly, they needed to make ABM actionable for their sales teams and show results.
"When I first joined, there was a lack of confidence in ABM and confusion about what ABM really meant as an ongoing strategy. Not to mention what a strong partnership between marketing and sales should look like in order for an ABM strategy to succeed,” said Jen.
Pivot
Cooperation Between Sales and Marketing
One of the biggest challenges was proving the value of ABM for the sales and leadership teams. When first implementing and onboarding Terminus, Jen spent the first few months changing the mindset internally around this revenue strategy. “I knew it was going to be tough to prove out to the leadership team because ABM is more of an influenced-based attribution model. Our current marketing-sourced model only showed the tip of the iceberg in terms of the full-funnel impact of ABM. My goal was to show how it influences accounts throughout the entire sales funnel, so reporting true impact was going to be challenging,” remembered Jen.
“In addition to carefully piloting Terminus so that we could prove it out with some key individuals, we set up weekly office hours for ongoing Q&A and collaboration and set up a dedicated Slack channel so that the team could share best practices and early wins. That really contributed to changing the message around ABM,” said Jen.
However, with some careful thought, Jen built out a new reporting framework to show increases in account engagement, website lift, lift in pipeline, opportunities created, win rates, and deal velocity across targeted accounts.
Then, the real work started for Bazaarvoice to optimize their strategy for scale.
To help bridge trust and collaboration, sales enablement became a top priority. She then launched an 8 week pilot program to roll out intent and engagement data, powered by Terminus, to a select group of sales and customer success members. With their input and insight, Jen was able to create an exhaustive playbook for the wider teams to leverage.
Steps to Solve
Jen’s team relies heavily on the reporting inside the Terminus platform to track performance against key metrics. Leaning into KPIs like account coverage (accounts matched + average impressions per account), and accounts with view-through visits and clicks, helped optimize their campaign strategy early on. With the help of sales operations, she was able to leverage the sales team’s single source of truth: Salesforce. There she created custom dashboards for each team to help them prioritize outreach for target accounts, in addition to serving up weekly intent reports to sales and customer success to highlight target accounts in current open opportunities and accounts with upcoming renewals.
“When it was time to report results to the leadership team, it was an entirely different conversation than in years past where there was just confusion and disappointment. We used the data in Terminus’ Trending Scorecard to showcase the full-funnel impact of our ABM program with the leadership team by looking at performance between our active campaign groups versus control groups,” said Jen.
Kick-off calls
Timeline
Click each bubble to see a more in-depth breakdown of what Bazaarvoice did
Weeks 2-8
Week 1
Week 8 & beyond
Met with Sales VPs (ENT and SMB) and SDR manager to pitch the Terminus pilot program, get buy-in, and asked them to nominate 5 members from each of their teams to participate in the program.
Joined sales all-hands meetings to give a sneak peek into Terminus intent and engagement data and showed them how these insights were going to help get them more meetings, create more opps, land bigger deals, and have full-funnel insights into account behavior for open renewals and opps.
We also used this as a final step to recruit a few more sales reps to fill out our pilot team roster.
Week One
Met with the pilot team, did a deep dive into Terminus
Educated them on intent and engagement data Reviewed the custom SFDC dashboard we created Walked through Terminus Metrics and Terminus Account Insights in SFDC so they knew how to use all of the insights
Weeks 2 - 8
Held ongoing weekly syncs with the pilot team to gather feedback, understand what’s working and what isn’t
Developed the following sales resources:
Custom weekly intent report (highlights accounts showing intent in open opps, upcoming renewals, and which accounts are using on competitor intent)
Created a Slack channel to share tips, wins, feedback, and questions
Sales workflow flowcharts and playbooks
Held bi-weekly syncs with sales VP and the SDR manager to share feedback and wins along the way
1) Shows how to navigate through the various scenarios they’ll experience with intent and engagement data (i.e. which accounts to prioritize based on if they are only showing intent, or intent + engagement, etc.)
2) Shows them how to bake using Terminus insights into their daily/weekly account prioritization and sales workflow
Week 8 and beyond
Rolled Terminus out to the wider NA sales and CS teams
Kicked off similar pilot programs in EMEA and APAC
Set up weekly office hours for each of the new pilot teams and the wider team rollouts for 4 weeks after initial launch
Created a Terminus training course for all new hires to learn the ins and outs are they are being onboarded
Checked in on a quarterly basis with sales DVPs and the SDR team to make sure their teams were leveraging the tools and to continue the open feedback loop.
Running in tandem throughout were our targeted, stage-based display and LinkedIn campaigns set up to target our strategic accounts. This helped to create awareness for our target accounts and maintain air cover while our sales team was learning the ropes.
RESULTS
The initial goals were to: build an ABM program at scale using a crawl, walk, run approach. At the same time, Jen set out to re-educate and re-excite the sales and customer success teams about ABM so the entire go-to-market team could target key accounts more strategically with Terminus. After just one-quarter with Terminus the team saw a complete turnaround in their ABM program.
“The whole team realized the impact of our efforts and the power that ABM can have if wielded correctly with the right tools,” said Jen. “We’ve had so much success. It’s now a pivotal pillar of our growth marketing strategy,” she continued.
In one quarter, Bazaarvoice realized and exceeded expectations for both of their business segments: enterprise and SMB. Comparing the targeted accounts with the control group in the enterprise segment, they saw
In the same quarter, the SMB segment experienced similar success.
Launching and scaling a successful ABM program is a tall task, but starting with a small pilot to optimize for your target audience and key accounts can get things on the right track early on. ABM can tear down the silos but it will only work if your sales team is involved from the start. Sales cooperation and measurement are crucial ingredients for a successful ABM program.
“Being able to tap into intent and engagement data has enabled us to be more strategic in our targeting and make ABM actionable for our sales teams, allowing both teams to have a shared focus on our most strategic accounts. The Terminus platform has become a critical part of our success in terms of how we report out to the business, rally the sales and customer success teams around shared goals, and show the full-funnel impact of ABM.”
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