We’re celebrating our second birthday all week long and to follow up our first #FlipMyFunnel Funnel Flipper post with Anadelia Fadeev, we’re honored to highlight Daniel Day! Daniel is the Senior Marketing Manager for Account-Based Marketing (ABM) at Snowflake. Be sure to follow him on Twitter at @danielgday.
Catch his highlights below!
How did you get started with account-based marketing?
My passion for ABM really comes from my experience in working in marketing, marketing automation, and marketing programs. Some startups in Silicon Valley, when you’re down in the data and looking at it, you can see the traditional way of doing marketing and focusing on MQLs and conversion really don’t matter to our counterparts in business development and sales. So I thought that there had to be a better way of doing tings than that traditional model. At the time I didn’t know it was called ABM, I just knew it was right for our organization and that’s how I’ve come into this ABM role.
How did you learn about #FlipMyFunnel?
During my time with Apttus, there was an event that was co-sponsored and a dinner where I got to meet some of the team. I had the chance to sit down and talk with Nikki Nixon about what this #FlipMyFunnel thing was. I had the chance to go to a #FlipMyFunnel event and had a chance to meet likeminded marketers, sales and business development teams and became interested in being involved.
How has adopting account-based marketing in your organization changed your career?
It’s been huge for my career to take that transition from being in operation/data and seeing how leads flow and worked in a traditional environment. I took that experience and understand it’s really an account-based team that we’re looking to drive more meetings, more demos, more real pipeline and revenue for our company by focusing together. Being with likeminded marketers and hearing their stories and things they’ve worked through, helps me understand that we’re doing the right thing, we’re not alone here on an island. To have that #FlipMyFunnel community lets us know that the things that we’re seeing and hearing and experiencing, it’s not just a single instance – it’s broad based and it’s seen in different companies, organizations and different industries. Having that community to share best practices, hear objections and things others are seeing in their own organizations, is great for us.
What are your thoughts on the #FlipMyFunnel Slack community?
It’s really the go-to spot. If you have any questions or you have something you want to comment about or you want to hear people’s quick opinion or you want answers, the members are so active and it’s the best place to go for that.
How has adopting the account-based model helped your relationship with the sales team?
In my experience, I’ve had the experience of where marketing and sales were leading this account-based charge. More recently, it’s been dictated by sales and sales executives that we would be an account-based organization in our field and our business development team would be account-based. It’s interesting, field teams have always been account-based, they’ve always had territories assigned to them. It’s been the more broad-based demand generation that’s fallen by the wayside and caused the friction between the teams. It’s really been the marketers that need to be assured that account-based was the right thing.
How did sales respond to the support of marketing?
It’s been an eyeopening experience because we’re talking about the same thing, and we care about the same things and looking for ways to drive engagement and success within those accounts. The relationship built from that is a lot less adversarial or confrontational, it’s really beneficial to aligning teams within the organization especially on the business side.
How do you see the customer relationship grow with ABM?
From a customer success perspective, I have seen organizations that have been successful in integrating a single tool that gives a full view of accounts from the time that they’re prospected accounts to signing the contracts and keeping that relationship going after the contract is signed. I know those tools are out that (I’ve seen organizations do it effectively) and I know it’s the next step in that account-based organizational overview.
Want to give #FlipMyFunnel a birthday shoutout?
We’re both Leos! Happy birthday #FlipMyFunnel, two years is great. With the way the community is growing and the kind of impact you’re having, there will be many more birthdays to come.
