The Terminus Rock Star behind it all
Getting The Band Back Together:
Terminology:
Modern Marketing is Multi-Channel
how an ABM Company does abm
Ottavio Dattolo
Account-Based Marketing Manager
I played semi-professional baseball My middle name is Ronald I have a Mini GoldenDoodle named Ellie
fun facts
Marketing Hot Take
“I strongly dislike when people use leads as the only source of truth for their marketing measurement strategy. While it’s a good metric, it’s not the end all be all. Leads are old news. The modern way to measure marketing is to combine a variety of different metrics to formulate the impact you are having on your target accounts. A lead could be someone that likes the way your graphic design looks, so they download your ebook. That is not showing true engagement. By measuring things such as website visits, campaign responses, and intent, you can see which accounts are primed for a full court press from marketing and sales through a united effort.”
How'd I Get Here?
My experience in demand generation, direct sales, and customer management – a unique mix for the typical marketer – brought me to where I am today. I started my career managing customer accounts, where I learned a lot about customer needs and how to meet them. I then parlayed that knowledge into my next role as a sales representative and found a ton of success. Through my experience in sales I found that working with marketing was my favorite part of my job. I literally hit my quota so I could do fun marketing projects in the back half of the month.
From that experience, I learned I had a sweet spot for demand generation, so I took a job as a Field Marketing Associate with Terminus to get my foot in the door. At the time, Terminus had a solid full-funnel ABM platform, but we weren’t fully utilizing it to target prospects. We didn’t even have a dedicated ABM manager at one point. So, I raised my hand to fix that while I ran other marketing programs. Shortly thereafter, Terminus started its own ABM Center of Excellence, which blossomed into a four-person team and grew from targeting two segments to 25 in a span of six months.
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back
Hop on the bus! It’s time to take a journey through how we developed and executed one of our most successful ABM plays - Tour De Terminus.
We’d recently acquired companies to expand our portfolio, which means we needed to increase awareness, educate, and engage target accounts about our expanded solutions. Hence, the theme Tour de Terminus, where we inform prospects about our extensive, multi-channel ABM platform that can be purchased as individual pieces or in its entirety.
Tour Overview
Instead of tracking solely lead generation, our goals were centered around the account-based journey, which includes engagement, generated opportunities, pipeline, average deal size, and revenue. This provided our team a holistic view into the impact of the campaign, instead of centering around one vanity metric.
Campaign Goals:
Engage A&B Accounts:
Generate Opportunities:
Drive Pipeline:
Increase Average Deal Size:
Increase Revenue:
Our objective was to provide marketing air cover through a multi-channel campaign.
2,680 Accounts engaged
222 Opps
$8.8M
$36K
$1.8M
An Orchestrated Multi-Channel Campaign Approach That Delivered Results
For WebPT’s marketing team, knowing whether they even had the right people was key to their success, too. With little visibility into a prioritized account list based on intent, they were relying on sales to guesstimate on their account nominations — which is akin to throwing darts at a dartboard without a bullseye. Once he had that capability, his team could begin building a cycle using email experiences. But because sales viewed this as tedious administrative work, marketing didn’t quite have the buy-in needed to set up a successful account-based marketing (ABM) program. “ABM should be sales-led, but relying on sales to have all the knowledge on all the accounts is not sustainable,” he said. “Having something with intent and also first-party data really helps our BDRs go out and say ‘hey we know this account is spending a lot of time reading about this specific product.’”
“It’s just about getting the right things in front of the right people,” Doug said.
go back
We’re an ABM company. So, it was time to use our platform to deliver what it was built to do paired with some best of breed demand gen solutions.
Target
5,900 Accounts tagged by Sales as “A” (AE prospecting) and “B” (Outbound ADR prospecting) in Salesforce, selected from a curated list with certain Ideal Customer Profile scores, recent intent data, and have matched up with Growflare sales and marketing intelligence data.
Provide marketing air cover through a multi-channel campaign to help generate opportunities, pipeline, and closed won deals in Q1 and Q2 2021
Tour De Terminus - Travel around the platform
“Terminus is the only account-based engagement platform built to deliver more pipeline and revenue through multi-channel ABM.”
Sprint #1: Terminus’ Full Platform - 3/8 - 3/26
Sprint #2: Terminus’ Email Experiences - 4/12 - 4/30
Sprint #3: Terminus’ Chat Experiences - 5/17 - 6/4
Sprint #4: Terminus’ Advertising Experiences - 6/21 - 7/8
Objective
theme
key messages
campaign schedule
Over the course of 4 weeks, we launched new sprints, adding new creative and engagement channels as the campaign progressed.
Tech Stack and Teams Involved
Terminus Tools
Display Ads
LinkedIn Sponsored Content Ads
Email Signature Ads
Custom Chatbot
Complementary Tools
Sendoso Direct Mail package
Pardot Emails
Interactive Ceros Landing Page
Custom Outreach Sequences
On24 Webinars
tech stack
teams involved
Creative
Designing and building creative
Marketing Ops
Creating and sending emails
ABM and Demand Gen
Campaign orchestration, planning, developing advertising copy, and hosting webinars
Sales
Account sequencing and outreach
Website Personalization
How We Started Our Journey
Get ready. It’s time for the Tour de Terminus!
Step 1: Target Account Identification
We started with Accounts tagged by Sales as “A” (Account Executive prospecting) and “B” (Outbound Account Development Rep prospecting) in Salesforce, selected from a curated list with a certain Ideal Customer Profile score, recent intent data, and have matched up with Growflare sales and marketing intelligence data. Account Executives and Account Development Reps then audited and prioritized the accounts based on their previous knowledge. It's important to have human interaction with these lists, because often Sales knows more than we do. Data is great, but you can't rely on it 100% when building a list of accounts. That’s one reason it’s critical to have sales involved. Another reason is that it helps secure Sales buy in and ensure there is Sales and Marketing alignment.
back to the map
Step 2: Account Segmentation
We then broke the target list into three levels. We have a strategic level and enterprise level and a growth level. Then, they were separated by A and B accounts. So, there were six total segments that were hitting at any given time.
Step 3: Develop the Messaging, Creative, and Campaign Calendar
In addition to developing an overall Tour de Terminus campaign strategy, we identified assets, created messaging, and produced creative for each of the four sequences. Every time we introduced a new sequence, we swapped out the creative in all the engagement channels to deliver a multi-touch campaign. We started with Full Platform creative, then moved to Email Experiences, and then Chat Experiences, finally Advertising Experiences. We constantly flipped out creative because we know that ad creative goes stale after six weeks, so we changed it right after that fifth week. We also hosted product specific ON24 webinars for each of the sequences to drive further awareness for the respective product we were promoting. Remember, we wanted people to think of us as a multi-product provider as opposed to just an ad platform. To further reinforce the point, we launched an incentive program. For every webinar a person attended, they received a progressively better prize.
Step 4: Enabling and Collaborating with Sales
Collaboration with Sales went beyond just Account identification. We wanted to guarantee that Sales was enabled and supported the campaign. We participated in Sales’ weekly revenue meetings to ensure they felt like they were part of the process from the beginning and provide clear and concise resources for them to be successful – sequence overviews, personas they were targeting, power statements, content assets, coaching, etc. We also had weekly standing calls with the Sales Directors to update them on campaign as well as relay what the reps were doing well and what they could be doing better. It was critical for Sales leaders to convey that info to their team, as it demonstrated top-down support for the campaign. It also held Sales accountable.
Sprint #1: Full Platform Promotion
Personas to Target
Channels Launched
To convey to our audience that we are a platform ABM service that can bring all of the most important channels of engagement together in one unified platform.
Growth Marketing, Demand Generation, Marketing Ops, Marketing Managers, Senior Level Marketers, ABM Managers, Director of Marketing, and CMO’s.
Display Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Web Personalization, Custom Ceros Landing Page, Chat Bot, Direct Mail
Sprint #2: Email Experiences Promotion
To expose our prospects to the idea that there is a massive untapped ad channel that lives in a channel that is sitting right under their nose that they already own.
Display Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Webinar, Web Personalization, Email Marketing, Custom Ceros Landing Page, Chat Bot, Direct Mail
Persona’s Unique to Email Experiences
Field Marketing, Content Marketing, Event Marketing, and Marketing Communications.
Sprint #3: Chat Experiences Promotion
To educate the market that we have a competitive chat solution that is quickly meeting industry standards. Also, make it known how it is a part of the Terminus solution and you’re able to intertwine all of your engagement channels. Live view is also a huge win in the market.
Sprint #4: Advertising Experiences Promotion
To educate the market on the competitive advantages that will have by advertising with Terminus. From security and compliance, having ways around a cookieless feature by leveraging 1st party data from email and chat, and having access to over 400,000 different safe websites.
Digital Marketers, Growth Marketing, Demand Generation, Marketing Ops, Marketing Managers, Senior Level Marketers, ABM Managers, Director of Marketing, and CMO’s.
Display Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Webinar, Web Personalization, Email Marketing, Custom Ceros Landing Page, Chat Bot, Direct Mail.
Campaign Gallery
Results
As mentioned, our goals were centered around the account-based journey, which includes engagement, generated opportunities, pipeline, average deal size, and revenue.
Bottom Line: We spent $40,000 on the four sprints and generated $2.9M in revenue.
Below are results of the two-quarter campaign.
Engage A&B Accounts
Goal: 2,680 Accounts engaged
Previously, we sold a lot of singular deals; but, because of this campaign, people were purchasing a suite of engagement channels as opposed to just individual channels.
We even influenced one Opportunity worth $300K and only spent $178.
Not to toot our own horn, but let this be proof that ABM works.
Results: 4,000 Accounts engaged
149% to goal
Generate Opps
Goal: 222 Opps
180% to goal
Results: 401 Opps
Drive Pipeline
Goal: $8.8M
165% to goal
Results: $14.5M
Increase Average Deal Size
Goal: $36K
183% to goal
Results: $66K
Increase Revenue
Goal: $1.8M
161% to goal
Results: $2.9M
The #1 lesson learned from this campaign.
Because Terminus has such extensive ABM expertise, we incorporated our entire platform as well as several external best of breed demand gen solutions into this campaign. It was an incredibly complex undertaking. Unless you are far along in your ABM journey and are well staffed, I would suggest a more streamlined approach to start. Don’t over complicate things. If you do, you may find the campaign overwhelming to execute, and Sales may have a hard time buying into and supporting the initiative.
Don’t over complicate things.
Consider a ‘Crawl, Walk, Run’ approach, where you progressively add engagement channels:
crawl
walk
run
Click each stage to learn more!
Crawl
Create a campaign Landing Page. Every campaign should have one, even if it is a very standard format. You can evolve to an interactive one later!
Start with Display Advertising to capture people browsing the web.
Layer in LinkedIn Sponsored Content Ads. All B2B buyers live on LinkedIn. You can even leverage some of Terminus’ advanced targeting capabilities.
Add in email signature advertising. Your employees communicate externally, so have them promote the same message or content that you have in your other channels, using their emails.
Develop custom outreach sequences. This is where you work with Sales to execute a cadence of persona-based emails, phone calls, and voicemails to reinforce the campaign message.
Add chat for target prospects who come to your website. And, if you want to really dial up the experience, you can use Terminus’ Chat from Anywhere feature to incorporate chat anywhere – in display ads, in your social media, even in a sales presentation.
Leverage direct mail for a physical connection. Providers like Sendoso can help, especially when it comes to strategies for securing addresses for remote workers.
Add relevant webinars to help drive hand raisers.
Create CRM email templates for Sales to use with prospects. In our case, we used Pardot.
Deploy an interactive, segment-specific website experience with embedded personalization. Properly greet each one and make them feel like a real VIP!
In the end, what you’re striving for is a surround sound approach with multiple impressions of the same message. People have become tone deaf to the hundreds of different messages they see each day. Also, people consume things differently. Some people are more visual. Some prefer reading. Some like to visit websites directly. So, having a little bit of something for everybody – in their preferred channels – delivers the experience critical to the success of any campaign.
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