The Terminus Rock Stars behind it all
Turntide Revolutionizes The Way Humanity Uses Energy… and How They Go to Market
About
Turntide Technologies revolutionizes the way humanity uses energy. It develops breakthrough sustainability technologies that drive down energy consumption and operating costs in three energy-intensive industries – Buildings, Agriculture, and Transportation – boosting bottom lines and smoothing a global path to 100% clean energy. Its goal is to help businesses radically reduce energy demand by applying intelligence to their operations and electrifying their fleets.
Turntide’s agriculture solution powers intelligent barn systems to optimize animal well-being and drive profitability and operational efficiency for dairy farms around the world. Their solution brings together a solid foundation of industry experience and understanding of the challenges faced by dairy farmers with next-generation technology, scientifically designed to improve the health, happiness, and productivity of cows … and, yes, happy cows really do produce more milk.
Fun fact:
Jack Knoesel
Business Development Representative at Elevated Third
I graduated from Missouri State and spent time in various sales roles. Having studied marketing in college, the combination of a marketing focused organization and a sales role was the perfect fit.
How’d I get here:
I traded in the hardwoods of Missouri for the convergence of plains and mountains of Denver. I worked at a golf course for almost eight years and had a long amatuer career spanning junior golf, high school, and collegiate competition. I’m also an outdoorsman who enjoys backpacking, chasing bugles in September, or trying to miss the next oncoming tree in January.
Fun Facts
“True wins with an ABM come from the hard stuff, like relentlessly sticking to your ICP and ensuring your Salesforce data is 100% clean.”
Marketing Hot Take
Marianne Schroer
Director, Growth Marketing
She is from the Midwest (Kansas). She is a sports nut, has worked at the ACC, and currently serves as the President of WISE of Greater Raleigh.
Nothing in B2B marketing is dead. Unless you are talking about fax marketing, nothing is ever truly dead. You might just have to reevaluate how you are doing it.
fun facts
Marketing Hot Take:
How'd you get here?
She was an Economics major in college, but didn’t know what she wanted to do with that degree. She spent several years in sports marketing with the ACC and enjoyed interacting with fans and promoting the various sporting events. She touched a wide swath of marketing aspects from ticket sales to crisis marketing and built a toolkit of Marketing capabilities, fundamentals that all marketers should know. Wanting something different that has a true impact on the business, she transferred to the B2B tech space, specifically growth marketing. And growth marketing at Turntide is experimental. You can try anything … and you can tell if you’re effective or not.
Setting the Stage
Turntide was evolving from the launch to growth stage in its lifecycle and needed to evolve its go to market approach for an incredibly unique, targeted solution.
Turntide knew ABM was the answer and used a well-thought-out approach to bring it to life.
About Turntide
Turntide had just closed a massive round of funding and wanted to go to market and scale quickly. However, Turntide’s marketing at that time was more about building brand awareness and generating investor interest. There wasn’t a concerted focus on lead generation.
Further, Turntide’s solutions only work for certain clients in specific markets. The value prop means nothing to those outside of the specific markets.
Given the challenges, Turntide knew they had to revolutionize their go to market approach. And account-based marketing was the key.
Turntide’s sales cycle could also be long and encompass a large buying committee.
For example, one of their target audiences is a certain type of OEM in the electronic transport space.
The Solution
Marianne focused on the essentials of ads, data, and chat. Here is their current tech stack:
Terminus Chat Experiences
Terminus Ad Experiences
Terminus Data Studio
Pardot
Salesforce
Unbounce (for landing page design)
Creatopy (Ad Design)
ZoomInfo
Turntide wanted to hit the ground running at launch, but they lacked internal bandwidth.
How We Use Our Tools
Targeting the right people =
With ABM, you want to target the right people at the right time with the right message … and that’s how we put our tools to work.
Using our contact tools (Zoom, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Salesforce) and intent data (Terminus Data Studio) to identify all stakeholder personas at our ICP target accounts.
At the right time =
Using our ad channels (Google Ads, Terminus Ads) to reach stakeholder personas and chat (Chatbot and Live Chat) to connect with prospects when and where they are engaging with our content.
With the right message =
Using behavior (Google Analytics) to better understand our prospects and intent data (Terminus Data Studio) to personalize the message.
Tech Stack
They didn’t have a Marketing Ops person who could launch and optimize tactics. They didn’t have a digital marketer who could scale the landing pages. They didn’t have in-house creative. They didn’t have BDRs.
So, they teamed up with Khronos, an agency that provides ABM services, to help them get going faster.
It helped that Khronos and Terminus were already partners in the ABM space… so Turntide knew they had a power duo to achieve their ABM goals.
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Steps to Solve
Marianne collaborated with Sales and Product to define and document Turntide’s positioning, segments, personas, and Ideal Customer Profile.
How did Turntide do it? Well, one thing they didn’t do was wait until everything was perfect or over engineer their launch. If there is one lesson Marianne would like to leave with those initiating ABM programs, it’s this: just start somewhere with a reasonable scope. Launch and use the data and learnings to evolve and expand. Start with a 1:many approach and then narrow the focus as you evolve.
Identifying the target audience
Aligning with Sales
Just start
Scale intelligently
So, where did Marianne’s start?
Marianne sought to understand Sales’ needs, identify problems they were trying to solve, and what actions would help them hit their revenue numbers.
Just start.
Marianne’s started by sunsetting the old messaging campaign and running new messaging for one key segment, buildings in the US. Then, she focused on how to orchestrate that one campaign across channels.
Marianne knew the value of data and the associated insights that lead to learning. So, from that first segment, she adjusted the campaign for the international building segment. She is now tweaking it to become a 1:1 approach for top accounts and leveraging learnings for the Agriculture segment.
Here’s an example: One of the biggest challenges for Sales had been noise on the inbound front. Turntide was attracting a lot of attention. In a specific example, after firms backed by Bill Gates’ and Robert Downey Jr. announced investments in the company, Turntide experienced an exponential increase in inbound volume. Unfortunately, they didn’t have a good qualification process in place, and Sales was dealing with a lot of unproductive, inbound noise. So, Marianne deployed chat on their website to engage, qualify, and convert leads to reduce wasted bandwidth.
She then shared the vision for ABM. Most sales teams think of Marketing as driving leads, but once she enlightened them on what was possible with ABM, they wanted to know how soon they could get started.
Best Practice Suggestion: One thing that was incredibly helpful is finding that one salesperson who really gets it, who is really bought into ABM. They are showing up for meetings, they are providing feedback on emails, chats, and playbooks. They are all over the data. When salespeople see someone being successful, they will follow. And marketers, in turn, elevate them in the eyes of their teammates and CRO.
Best Practice Suggestion: Share data and findings with Sales. Turntide has six different messaging themes that they were testing in one of their campaigns, and they relayed insights back to Sales regarding what messaging resonated best for a given persona.
Best Practice Suggestion: Do not assume the same approach with different messaging will work for all segments. Each segment should have it’s own strategy.
Marianne then evolved her ABM program to meet the different needs of each target industry (view ads to the right).
Best Practice Recommendation: Revisit your ABM approach as your portfolio expands. With new solutions comes new target markets and messaging.
Turntide had recently acquired the company that expanded its agriculture solution. Since the two organizations weren’t fully integrated yet – they weren’t in the same instance of Salesforce, for example – she knew there were limitations on how she could progress leads. So, for the time being, she rallied around generating awareness of the newly combined organization and solution using display ads.
Agriculture
For this industry, she had new messaging and wanted to launch it to all segments. She started with a broader message and general imagery that would resonate for every segment and ran it until she saw which segments were responding and which messages resonated most. From there, she initiated a segmented approach. Tactics used were display ads and chat.
North America Buildings
Here, she took the North American Building approach and tailored the messaging for UK audiences. She knew she could not run the same direct response and BDR plays as with the North America Building market, and instead focused on chat playbooks that drive engagement during live hours and are more engaging than a form. She also had the requisite double opt in on their web pages. Tactics used: display ads and especially chat.
International Buildings
Marianne is just beginning the discovery process and building out the foundational documentation, leveraging learnings from her other ABM initiatives. She plans to launch later in the quarter using a blend of 1:1, 1:few, and 1:many, depending on their different segments.
Electrification
What’s next for Turntide?
Optimize and refine their Agriculture and North America Buildings tactics and segmentation Roll out 1:1 tactics in their International Building segment and expand to additional countries Launch ABM in the Electrification space Leverage Terminus data to continue to increase personalization for 1:few campaigns
From a segment standpoint, they plan to:
Evaluate Terminus’ Website and Email Experiences Test a premium ad campaign on a global level (Connected TV) Deploy a Linkedin conversation ads strategy
From a tactical standpoint, they plan to:
The Encore: Big Stats, Big Wins
By leveraging Chat, Turntide improved response time from multiple days to contact to instant/same-day contact.
As the program matured Turntide refined their ICP, resulting in a 257% lift in qualified leads.
In the first month, Turntide saw a 92% increase in target accounts visiting the site, and are now seeing a 405% increase today.
In the first 6 months Turntide generated 170 meetings in total with target accounts.
90 days in: Turntide moved 73% of the audience from “unaware” to engaged or in pipeline.
90 days in: Turntide saw 913% increase in chats, and 1001% increase in target accounts engaging with chat.
As the program matured Turnride saw a 120% lift in average CTR.
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