We’re celebrating our second birthday all week long and to continue with our #FlipMyFunnel Funnel Flipper Series, we’re proud to highlight Joe Quinn. Joe Quinn is an account-based marketing veteran and was recently promoted from his position as the Americas Section Manager for ABM at National Instruments to a global ABM manager. Be sure to follow him on Twitter at @NIJoeABM and catch his story below!
Tell us about your current role.
Up until last year, I was the Americas Sections Manager for our Account-Based Marketing program. That’s where our account-based marketing program started, in the Americas, now I have the responsibility of rolling it out globally. In the last eight months, because of the work I’ve been doing with account-based marketing, the rest of the Americas outbound functions now report to me. So I went from seven folks to an organization of about 60. And now I have the responsibilities of all marketing strategies in the Americas when it comes to outbound – account-based marketing, integrated marketing, and digital marketing.
How did you get your start in B2B marketing?
It’s funny because Sangram, Nikki and I were talking at Revenue Summit back in March and discovered that we all have a background in computer science. That’s what I studied at the University of Texas. I was hired by IBM to set up their tech demonstrations at their largest tradeshows and from that, from going to the tradeshows, they asked me to start coordinating the tradeshows and got into event marketing. From that, I came to National Instruments and started running their seminar program. So my background came from technology to events to event marketing to seminars and that’s when I ended up at National Instruments, almost 15 years ago.
How did your first position at National Instruments get you to the ABM role you have today?
When we were doing the seminar program, a lot of the events were to support the field sellers to get a direct Salesforce with geo-based seminars. Some of those seminars started taking place at their house, so we were doing event tactics at certain accounts. Then the field sellers were asking for more support – they were asking for customized content, email communications. So we started doing these account tactics probably as early as 2004/2005. We were able to continue to work on those. We started realizing, out of all the field measuring we were doing, it was hard to measure mass marketing at the time but we could handle and see what our influence with the accounts were doing. We were able to see a higher return on investment because we were able to measure it easier at the accounts. So that’s how it went from seminars to account tactics back then.
You seemed to be doing ABM before you even realized you were doing ABM.
It’s funny because about the same time that our organization was looking for an evolution in the marketing organization, I went to my director and said, “Hey, we’re doing a bunch of account tactics and they seem to be working well and I’m starting to hear about this account-based marketing thing.” He was like ok, let’s talk about it so I went ahead and put together a proposal about what it was and at the time it was really in its infancy stages. When I started our program and got our pilot of the ground I thought I was going to do just a whole bunch of tactics at accounts and I thought that was just what it was. And it wasn’t until a couple years later that the industry started defining it and #FlipMyFunnel played a huge role in that, that we started to go wait a second – we connect to a lot of what that is but there’s a lot more that we don’t do. Having so much knowledge working with sales, working with account tactics was the best foundation to then start getting more strategic about the account work and actually running an account-based program.
Tell us about the sales and marketing alignment at National Instruments.
We have a really great internal relationship with National Instruments. We don’t have a traditional sales and marketing teams – we’re all in it for the customer. We’re all in it to grow our company so we can grow our careers. We’re at a really good base level alignment already with sales and it’s really easy to execute account-based marketing because we have that.
Do you want to give a Happy Birthday shoutout to #FlipMyFunnel?
I think it’s amazing. Two years wow…all of the conferences and sessions and community and conversations I’ve had on Slack and meeting with Nikki and Sangram. I can’t believe it’s only been two years, it’s amazing how much has happened. One, it’s your birthday, the community’s birthday, but really, y’all have been giving gifts this whole time. All I want to say is keep going, keep inviting me to the party. I can’t wait until three, four, five – I can’t wait to get older with you. Congratulations on everything and thanks for all of the gifts you’ve given to us.
