Tony Yang, VP of Demand at Mintigo, recently presented “How Predictive Empowers Your ABM Strategy Throughout The Flipped Funnel” at the #FlipMyFunnel Austin.
Good morning everyone. Thank you for the warm welcome. My name is Tony Yang and I head up demand gen at Mintigo…which means that I not only market our predictive solution but I am also a practitioner of ABM and get to use our own product as part of our ABM strategy.
I also have the benefit of learning from our customers, who are some of the most savvy and forward thinking marketers I’ve ever met. So today, I’ll be sharing some examples from them as well as my own experience in How Predictive Empowers Your ABM Strategy Throughout The Flipped Funnel!
It’s no surprise that there’s a ton of buzz around ABM and predictive. It’s always interesting to see the rise of these buzzwords as they increase over time, so here’s an obligatory screenshot of these two terms tracked on Google Trends.
But come on – what does Google know about marketing…and data. So, I decided to turn to a more authoritative source on these topics – and I was able to find a highly scientific study on what’s hot in B2B marketing - a poll taken on Twitter! This poll was taken during the SiriusDecisions Summit two weeks ago…and let’s face it, who’s considered more of an expert on B2B marketing than the fine people at SiriusDecisions, and who knows more about ABM than the guy who literally wrote the freaking book on it!
But on a serious note, ABM is getting a lot of traction because marketers like many of you and myself included, are starting to get on the same page as sales…and we now have the technology and the availability of data to enable us to do so.
First, let me give a brief explanation on how predictive works so that we’re all on the same page. You start with two sets of data – depending on what use case or problem you’re trying to solve, the desired outcome is used as the “positives” data set. In other words, if you’re looking for more potential buyers or your ideal customer profile, your positives list would be your list of customers…because you want to find more like them.
So let’s have a moment of honesty here – there’s no need to raise your hands or self-identify…but for those of you who have started implementing a named-account approach before, is this how you’ve create your target account list? I know I’ve experienced this before at my previous companies – I went over to my sales teams and asked them who they’d like to focus on, and they’d come back with a list of this year’s Fortune 500 companies, Inc 5000 companies or any variation of these top company lists that you see on the screen, and then they say let’s go after the top 100 or let’s focus all the companies on this list that fall under a specific industry. Sounds great but how do you really know if the companies on this list are a good fit for your company, and more importantly, how likely they are to buy your solution? A comprehensive ABM strategy not only takes time to build up but also will require a good amount of resources…if you end up focusing your efforts on accounts that will not likely buy your product then you’ll be wasting a lot of your precious time and energy. So this is where the value of predictive marketing solutions like Mintigo really come into play.