Ever wonder how software companies actually use their own products? Here at Terminus, we drink our own champagne by using the Terminus platform internally to run several different account-based marketing campaigns — because it works! Our sales and marketing teams both understand the value of having an account-based marketing strategy, and we’ve aligned the two teams to develop and execute several different types of campaigns.
Our Director of Marketing Operations, Stephanie Kelly, will be doing a deep-dive presentation at our first-ever Untapped Terminus Customer Conference on December 7th on how we actually execute and measure the results of these campaigns. In the meantime, here’s a brief overview of three campaigns we’re currently running.
Air Cover for Sales Development Reps
Having a fully aligned sales and marketing team, or smarketing team, is the key to having a truly successful account-based marketing strategy. The “air cover” campaign we’ve created in the Terminus platform supports this goal. As our sales development reps work on our target accounts, our marketing team uses Terminus to surround contacts and key decision-makers within those accounts with relevant digital ads. Doing this prior to or in conjunction with SDR outreach and other marketing efforts builds awareness and increases engagement in those accounts, turning cold calls into much warmer ones.
This campaign provides coverage for inbound as well. When we receive an inbound request to schedule a demo or download a piece of content, we first check to see if the company fits our ideal customer profile (ICP). If they do, our inbound specialist begins a cadence of calls and emails to that contact. In addition to those efforts, our marketing team adds the contact to the Terminus campaign so they will start to see our ads across social, mobile, video, and display. This joint effort of digital ads, emails, and calls keeps us top of mind for inbounds and gives us the opportunity to engage with them on their terms.
For our first SDR air cover campaign that we started in September, 22% of the accounts progressed to having an opportunity created.
Event Marketing
Event marketing is a big piece of our marketing strategy here at Terminus, so we’ve created ABM campaigns specifically for events. We’ve built an event playbook that includes a schedule of marketing and sales activities that happen before, during, and after the event. When we run Terminus ads for these events, marketing works with sales to come up with a list of target accounts. This list can include:
- Pre-registration lists
- Target accounts that are geographically located near the event
- Past event attendees
Here’s an example of an ad we ran before the #FlipMyFunnel Boston event in August:
Once the show is over, we kick it into follow-up mode for both marketing and sales. That follow-up includes Terminus ads targeted at event attendees, emails and social posts from marketing, and SDR calls and emails. Marketing’s goal at any event we attend is to generate opportunities for the sales team, so we use Terminus ads to help support that goal.
With our targeted ABM campaign, we had 11% of companies on the target list register for the event. What was even more impressive was that 19% of our total opportunities from the event and 27% of our total pipeline came from our target list.
Pipeline Acceleration
This campaign is all about closing deals — talk about sales + marketing love! Our sales and marketing teams work closely together to identify relevant ads and messaging for each opportunity stage to help move those opportunities through the pipeline. We run three campaigns targeting early-, mid-, and late-stage opportunities. The goal of this campaign is to accelerate pipeline velocity and use marketing activities to support the sales team and help them close more deals.
We started the late-stage opportunity campaign last month, so it’s a bit too soon to report metrics right now. We are already seeing great return for our spend, and we’ve seen many of those late stage opportunities engage with our ads and become customers. As the campaign progresses, we’ll be keeping an eye on how many of those opportunities close and if this campaign helped shorten the sales cycle.
How We Measure the Success of Our Account-Based Marketing Campaigns
Every campaign has different goals and metrics that we track, but here are some of the metrics we look at across all campaigns:
- How many of our target companies are we engaging with?
- Are we improving close rates?
- Are we decreasing time to close?
- Are we increasing deal size?
- Are we increasing cross-sell/upsell opportunities?
- Are the campaigns we’re running influencing more opportunities?
Shifting the focus to these types of metrics helps marketing and sales rally around the same goals and helps marketing focus on activities that directly impact revenue.
If you’re not a Terminus customer, we’d love to schedule a demo to show you how easy it is to set up account-based marketing campaigns for your organization.
