Winning Big with ABM: In-Depth Discussion with Kristina Jaramillo

pharosIQ: Welcome, welcome to this week's episode of pharosIQ’s podcast, the podcast that is anything but boring for B2B marketers. Each week we dive in, talk a little marketing, talk a little what's trending, what's happening, and then finish it off with my favorite part of all the podcasts talking about an unboring B2B campaign that our guest has run over their career.

The whole, the goal here is to hopefully, just talk a little marketing, give you something to listen to, but also inspire ideas or creativity for you and your marketing programs. From that perspective this week, we are pumped to have Kristina Jaramillo. She is the president of personal ABM and host of her very own podcast, ABM done, right?

Kristina. Welcome.

Kristina: Thank you for having me, pharosIQ. I appreciate it.

pharosIQ: I am pumped to dive in today. First and foremost, tell us a little bit about a personal ABM. All

Kristina: right. So as the name implies, we are focusing on the personal aspect of account based approaches, strategies, ABX, whatever buzzword you guys are using at your organization.

So we focus on the one to one interactions with the high value deals, the ones that get stuck in the pipeline, the ones that are go cold for after engaging in sales and marketing, efforts, campaigns. And we help them close or go over the finish line.

pharosIQ: Awesome. AB, ABM is in a transitionary phase right now.

It seems to have been evolving over the years when, it seems like going to an event, every session was about ABM, now we're now is ABM becoming go to market. Is it all the same? It's we're in this kind of weird hybrid zone right now. What are your thoughts?

Kristina: I think it's we're revolving.

I think people are getting on board and seeing that because it's account based. It's not marketing per se. It's not sales per se. It is go to market. So I think account based go to market is like the next evolution of it. I'm hoping that's where we're going because it can't be siloed anymore. Yeah.

pharosIQ: And

Kristina: it's,

pharosIQ: it is getting the, spending it even at small companies, getting the pieces to work together in a seamless flow can be really challenging too.

So you notice you're pretty active on LinkedIn, check Kristina out on LinkedIn. If you haven't, by the way, she's a great follow and totally active. So you talk about. A few reports coming out of the CMO council that show ABM programs overall, right at best get a C level accounts, from contract to closure faster, right?

Tell us a little bit about what you think is happening on that side of it.

Kristina: So I think there's a bunch of reasons, but I saw something from Liam Moroney. I'm hoping I'm pronouncing that right on LinkedIn. He said, people are basically cherry picking ABM. And I think. That's why there's this issue with have not getting the results, the revenue results.

People aren't taking the time to do the work or do the steps that they need to get done before they go into a list selection. In many cases, they haven't really looked across the customer journey or the buyer's journey. To see where there's red in the business, where are they winning?

Where are they losing? How do we need to change those account experiences and the interactions that we're delivering as a team, not just in sales, not just in marketing. They haven't really segmented their existing customers. And if they did segment them, maybe they're segmenting just by revenue now or industry.

They haven't seen where or taken the time to look where customers are the longest, where they're providing that greatest long term revenue growth from their solution. And if they are doing ABM with existing customers, you really want to see why they are such a valuable customer. What do they look like?

What are their strategic priorities? How are they using your solution or your offer really offer different so that you can go after similar accounts. And I think because people aren't taking the time and just jumping right into it, they're doing account based targeting. So they're using ABM as an account tiering or maybe a prioritization strategy.

And they're creating their ICP, aligning with the account list and just doing activities, but pushing out same content, same messaging, same experiences across the board, again, just more targeted. So they haven't really changed that account experiences. We're doing the same thing. And I think targeting prioritization is a really big key element of ABM.

It's really only a part of it. ABM has to be new way of how you're going to do business, new way of how you're going to talk to customers, how you're going to gauge prospects. Express your value prop and a new way of thinking how your sales, customer success, marketing rev ups, how we're going to work together and unison and move as a team, like a well oiled machine to revenue and just thinking about it in a whole new way and not just saying, we're doing, we're targeting accounts and that's what we're doing.

And I, I think this was really cool that pharosIQ Gillespie said. LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago. So many programs are really masquerading as ABM and they function suspiciously like whatever they were, companies were doing before. So it's almost there's that evolution or revolution of ABM, but it's half finished, we're not all the way there.

pharosIQ: Some executive went down and said my buddies are doing ABM and they're seeing results. We need to do ABM. And, and then there's an entire industry full of software vendors who tried to, lead the world to believe that ABM is a software or a platform or a, so it's been tough.

It's been tough. What, like just really getting. To that, the hype that not through all the hype and sitting down and being like, Hey this is just a strategy, right? There are many ways to attack that strategy. Some might be software based, some might not, some might be, and I think that's where there's a huge gap.

And I'm sure where you're helping a lot of your customers on that side the, are we getting to the point where it's almost becoming. Like contact based marketing yet, cause even you, you were talking about building the list, and, there's firmographics industry and, but some, sometimes I think where we miss.

Is we're charging the right account, but we're just not at the right person in it. And I hear a lot of that challenge from the customers that I speak to. Are we there yet or are we not close?

Kristina: I think people are just relying on that intent or relying on those signals as, we're going to go, we're going to show content based on that instead of thinking, okay, it's a springboard for where we're going to go with our solution.

Why are they looking? Is there something going on internally that maybe we have to dig deeper? Why are they In quote unquote in market, and I think he's something that you mentioned on your podcast with Eric about how intent was I know you said it better than the, I'm going to say it, but people are using intent.

Too quickly. It's very reactionary. And not thinking about, what's going on. Is there a trigger event? Are there problem profiles that we can fit into, and I think it's just adding, making it a strategy or not a strategy, excuse me, making it a a tactic as opposed to going back to that route, which is a strategy.

pharosIQ: Yeah, I think there's, right now I think you have intent, you have triggers, and you have signals, right? That's how I see the world, right? And intent is, now I think personally, 14 years old, 10, 12 years old, right? And I just don't know if it's come, I don't know if it's come to fruition, right?

Like website traffic based. Intent, if you will, right? I read article about HR software does not necessarily mean I, as company and looking to buy software. Now you have this emergence of triggers, right? Where there's a lot of AI and clay based and all of these trigger, they call them signals, but I call them triggers, right?

Where it's this company is hiring. A bunch of salespeople. So that's a trigger that they're probably going to need sales software, right? Or this company is onboarding a ton of X, which means they probably need performance management software and HR, no real indication, but a trigger. And then you have signals, which I believe are, the most telling, and that's.

Someone engaging with something that actually connects to somewhere in the buyer journey, right? And that could be anywhere ranging from, like a buyer's guide engagement, right? Where, someone's Hey, I'm thinking of buying something all the way down to a review site engagement where someone's Hey, I'm comparing vendors on a site based on my peer reviews, right?

All and I think those signals hardest to find, but once you can harness them, right? It's really a quality over quantity play. And I think most intent is missed over the years because they've tried to solve for quality and quantity at the same time. And they're just two counterintuitive philosophies.

Kristina: Absolutely. Yeah. And I think now I'm remembering what you said, cause I listened to your podcast before. Like recently it was intent to learn and doesn't mean intent to buy you're not going to drop half a million dollars on a solution because you downloaded an article, just not happening.

pharosIQ: Yeah, it doesn't have, or at least not right away, there's a couple different steps from that progression, but I think so like, how does a personal ABM approach, like what you talk about in your podcasts and your webinars drive stage progression.

Kristina: All right, so that's where we put our focus when it comes to account based. We call it as I mentioned earlier, we're evolving it or trying to evolve it into account based go to market. So it's going to incorporate account based legion 1 to 1 or 1 to few account based demand gen and then 1 to 1 ABM and, to us all teams.

So it's not just sales, not just market. We all have to get together in the line around that account based approach. Because it's going to be our strategy going forward as a group. So we want to make sure we're targeting the right accounts within the TAM. We get more ICP accounts into the pipeline. Now then we can put our focus on those accounts in the buyer's journey that may be We know have the potential to be bigger, so bigger deals.

So we're going to increase our relevance with them. When account shows interest, then we can cluster similar accounts, similar characteristics, and drive that buying vision as a team. We want to make sure that we're qualifying and disqualifying though, because you can't, treat all accounts the same.

And once they maybe reach a certain threshold of engagement, or we know that they have a strategic priority in place as an organization, then we can dial into their relevant story. And that's where they go to the one to one where we take that personal account. Account based approach. And it's really what I mean that it's more than we're talking to them about industry and persona pain points.

We're really focusing on, what's happening in their organization. What's going on operationally with their customers and how are we going to speak to them as a party of one versus the one to few, you speak to accounts and we're moving a past general assumptions and pain points.

And we want to make sure we're actually speaking with those human buyers. So we're not speaking to pharosIQ rack as. the role that he has and what's important to him. We're speaking to him, different levels of personalization. So we want to make sure that we're getting relevant to rank, division, company, operational, financial, spreading ourselves across the organization, how we can impact that.

So we make sure that every touch point is personally relevant. And those are, these are what the bigger accounts is. We're not going to do this with the smaller accounts and things like that. When you think of doing one to one, a lot of organizations just say, we're going to have a personalized landing page, or we're going to do an event just for them, to us, it's a strategy just for that particular organization.

pharosIQ: Now, tactically, speaking to all of, the different. Buyers across the stage progression. What are, what tactics are you usually using? Is it an email focused? Is it direct mail, all of the above? What are you seeing success with tactically?

Kristina: So tactically we're doing LinkedIn, which I am a big fan of, as we know emails, we're doing content that's specific for the buyer or and the organization as a whole.

So when we're aligning with sales, what's going on in that they've already engaged with them. They're already in the middle of the journey. Let's say. What's going on in that sales conversation. What are they getting hung up on? What are they, are they comparing you to other competitors?

Where can we mention there's gaps in the competitors and where we fill the gaps and how we see those gaps are going to impact the business as a whole. So if we can create a personalized piece of content, white paper, case study, blog posts, whatever that is to help the sales conversation. So it's bespoke content for that deal or for that organization, but then We can also use it in the one to few and one to many campaign.

So it's scalable that way. That's what we're seeing.

pharosIQ: You commented recently on a a post by a Sangram at a go to market partners, right? His post had said that ABM isn't scalable agree or disagree and why?

Kristina: That's one of the very question I get all the time. Okay. I'm gonna go back to something I saw from Steve Armente who is at the Digital Ocean.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with him, but

pharosIQ: I do. I he was at Google before. I've known him many years as Google. Steve.

Kristina: Got Google, Steve. I like that one. Actually.

pharosIQ: Actually, my phone as Google, Steve. That's awesome.

Kristina: Okay, so he mentioned something about account based. And just removing that marketing because the marketing part ruins it.

And I think marketers are, he mentioned marketers ruin everything by oversimplifying and trying to scale and automate. And I think he's a hundred percent correct. And I think that's why we have gotten to the point where we associate ABM with tech platforms. So by oversimplifying, trying to scale and automate by letting, demand based terminus, six cents, lead the strategy.

A lot of teams are just scaling bad processes. They're scaling bad interactions, bad experiences. So they're building the pipeline, which is fantastic. With name kept accounts, target accounts, they really want to get to, but they're not converting to revenue, which is the biggest issue. This is why really teams as a whole are struggling to move those accounts from contact to deal.

So before you can scale, we need to fix that account experiences that everyone's delivering. So it's not just what marketing saying, what sales is saying, we have to do it all across the board. And you also have to think about the fact that effective ABM incorporates companies, challenges and objectives into the messaging content so that it resonates and it goes beyond just targeting.

And which cannot be scaled, but where we can scale is lessons that we learn from the one to one so that we can get better at the one to few and one to many. If you go under the microscope with the one to one, you can see what's working and then scale that. So those lessons and insights can be used to guide those programs, get more accounts into the pipeline and then you can figure out which ones really need or qualify for that one to one more personal touch.

pharosIQ: Yeah. It's, and it's really, I love the, I personally love the ABM play from at like once the, once you're in the door, cause I think that's just a significant, especially in. Large enterprise sales, right? How do you, cause a lot of it's about creating buy in across multiple stakeholders, helping that champion, giving the champion some tools to help scale across there across in some cases, a six to 12 month process, and most look at ABM from an acquisition standpoint, right?

Like, how do I get the first meeting with said person? And I think it loses a lot of steam from there, and then also post sale. Yeah. Net retention rates are dropping significantly across a lot of SAS right now. And that's really just because, it's because a lot of SAS isn't as sticky as they thought it was.

And a lot of people with big fancy Excel spreadsheets mistook sticky with subscription. And those words are not synonymous, it's not news to me. But in, in one case, like what we've been working on here, I found that the post sale process can be some of the most influential ABM that you do.

And even as something as simple as, years ago, we, whenever we were at a previous company, whenever we were small at the time, whenever we want a new customer, we sent them like a coffee mug with a, like a bag of roasted coffee that had our brand on it that just said Hey, thanks for being a customer.

And we had more, more touch, more follow up emails and more like NPS ratings and more thumbs up just from that little touch point that just said, Hey, thanks for buying, and I think that's where a lot of companies miss in the account based experience. They win the deal and it's Oh, we're off.

Whereas like you can, like in, in most businesses, it's about the next deal and the next deal. That's where you really make all of your money. And I think that post sale ABM strategy is something that most companies aren't even thinking about right now.

Kristina: Yeah, I also to expand on what you're saying, I think from what I've seen and from what I've spoken to a lot of other people, even Mark Stouse has mentioned this, that ABM has the most effectiveness from the middle to the end of the buying journey and then beyond.

I think when we get stuck at putting it at the initial interaction, you're right, we lose steam, we lose revenue and we slow ourselves down.

pharosIQ: Yeah, I had, I was brainstorming with my team and I work in a fairly competitive space, lots of vendors, lots of competition. And we're focusing so much of our attention on how do we just stand out from the noise?

And one of our ideas was like, Hey should we just, should we send our proposals via physical mail? Like when's the last time that happened? Like we're, we will send the proposal via email. But also somebody getting that hard copy. If I got a hundred proposals, 99 of them were via email and one person.

That'd be that physical mail, right? Like I'm at least going to remember that deal, like I'm going to remember the, that buying experience from there. So we've been toying around, but even less functional, just how often are sellers sending like a personal note, a handwritten note saying, thanks for your time these days.

That's something that I did. Growing up in sales 20 years ago, that was like comet and now we're good.

Kristina: I even did it when I was working in college and retail for Nordstrom. We had to send thank you notes to our customers. So it's yeah. And I grew up that I have to send thank you notes for every gift, but that's like a personal thing.

pharosIQ: That's something I get barraged on by my mother quite frequently. Yeah. That's

Kristina: usually a mom thing.

pharosIQ: Did you say thank you? I'm, Literally 42 and I'll walk into a room and my mother will say three things. Did you say hi to this person? I still get that. Yeah, I did. I'm familiar.

I know how to say hi. I got it. And did you say thank you? Yes. Yes, mom. I did. I Check. So now that we've gotten my mother out of the way for the podcast, let's dive into the, the real hard hitting part. Let's talk about your unboring campaign. You sent me over a little info before that you did some cool stuff in an ABM program for a company called Unifor, moving, stuck accounts to revenue. So tell us about it.

Kristina: Yeah. So it seems like it might be, it might be boring to some marketers, but this is the kind of stuff that I like. Get really excited about because I have relevance to or I added, help to close a deal. And I think more marketers need to get behind that.

But to stop an account from going dark, uncovering how you increase that relevance and it increase or tell the right story. That's something that excites me. So Unifor conversational AI company that came to us because they were building a pipeline. They were using demand based. But they were having a challenge with a high value accounts in particular, going dark after engaging either with sales or with marketing.

And we noticed that this was happening because there was limited alignment. They were targeting tier one banks. So they wanted to win these particular banks and they had gotten engagement, like I said, with demand based content and messaging was speaking to the industry and personas versus named or specific accounts, those buyers in the accounts and the strategic priorities and the gaps and impacts.

The go to market team really lacked relevance. Content and messaging wasn't resonating. Didn't tell that account specific story, which is what we like to do. We weren't target or they weren't targeting, excuse me, the right people. They were getting in however they could. They weren't engaging the mobilizers, which really involved blockers that, help that company move that deal forward.

And they weren't influencing those internal conversations that are happening post sales, post interacting. Because people love to stay in status quo, especially those blockers and those buyers were in a state of indecision because they were scared to fail. They were stuck in like the lovely wasteland of intent.

An action because they were figuring out or their minds were swirling with all the things that could go wrong. They didn't, our client wasn't creating that environment for them or an experience for them that would make them uncomfortable with what they were currently doing. So uncomfortable in their current state, but also comfortable enough to make a decision instead of just status quoing it because they were taking that demand approach to ABM.

The go to market team was slipping in that zone where they were disseminating thought leadership, content, great being top of mind, wound up sending out content that was just confirmatory. And they showed prospects that they're, they're smart. They're up to date on issues and trends. They're savvy and knowledgeable, but they weren't showing how they could help the organization.

So bank of America was account that they got in through demand based went cold. One of their largest accounts target accounts, bank of America has a huge it team. They had already developed their own AI tool in house. So they have hundreds of patents on AI. They already know what they're doing, but Unifor was sending out awareness and generic consideration content and messaging, and it's not going to move them forward.

That's what they were trying to get them through when it came to sales and marketing and that content and that messaging. The interactions across the board didn't show Bank of America that unifor understood their current systems their current gaps and how their current system were gonna create challenges for their customers, for their contact center agents for compliance issues.

They didn't show that they understood Bank of America's strategic vision, their pro product road roadmap for their AI tool. The desire of the different banks or the different vision divisions with the banks, the impact that they're the solution, a uniform solution could have on the bank. And then 1 of the most important things they weren't talking about is why that the bank should outsource it with them versus spending time and resources to do it internally.

Go back to the drawing board. They needed really the account intelligence. To guide that content, guide that messaging, guide those interactions, and we did some deep research and we learned that Bank of America was really heavily investing in their self serve platform, but they also invested in their virtual assistant or virtual reality to train agents and customers, but there wasn't a feedback loop.

There was that siloed information and because they weren't bridging that gap, the customer experience, the agent experience, they didn't have the guidance to follow best practices in place. So there weren't the processes in place to ensure that feedback that the Bank of America received from customers was being acted on across the board.

Unifor wasn't leveraging these insights that we found in their content, in their messaging and interactions, and they weren't asking or driving the quality, the reason why change and create that buying vision for them. But by aligning with the key accounts, changing content, changing the approach and experiences, they went from that account going dark to closing a half a million dollar deal.

But it was because they did that account. Research and increase their relevance and personal relevance taught for differentiation versus making baseless claims that they were able to show the client that new way they needed to change all these things about their interactions and account experience.

And, their thoughts on what ABM was when they came to us versus the ABM, the way that we show them, they moved away from the old ABM to this next evolution of where I see account based approaches going.

pharosIQ: I think, it's so much of the ABM focus is tactical, right? Again, it's the one thing I've asked you as well.

Do I do display ads? Do I do leads? Do I do direct mail? Do I do webinars? Do I do social, like tactic, and so little is messaging. And I've said it many times over, right? Like messaging and timing, right? If you could, you could send like a pretty average email.

At the right time and score, right? You could send a wonderfully wordsmithed direct mail at the wrong time and not. So understanding the timing component, but then also like just speaking the language of the customer, like in my space, I'll have customers who.

They basically call it the same thing. Something different, right? Like it's an MQL, it's an SAL, it's an SQO, it's an MAL. It's an M, like an M rv. Like I've heard about 700 acronyms for like basically marketing generated opportunity. That sales says it's okay. That's the but.

If I'm able to uncover what they call it, right? And I send an email that says, improve your MRVs, right? And that's what they call it internally versus everybody else who calls it MQLs. Now I've connected with them. It's just a very simple nuance. I think you're accomplishing, you hit the nail on the head, right?

If you can really speak the language of the customer or about what they're talking about right now. And that's, with my team, you'd be surprised like the, if you're targeting B2B marketers, right? Go to the website and look at go to the website and look at the homepage, right?

Like whatever that tagline is on the homepage, I can assure you that dozens of people in that marketing organization spent hundreds of hours thinking about that tagline. So like even putting the tagline in the subject line of an email, right? Like you're going to get a 15, 20 percent increase in your open rate.

Just because you did just because someone's that's our tagline. I should probably open this. Somebody at least took the time to go to my site and everybody's just passionate about it. So really great points. Awesome. So Kristina, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been awesome.

We've reached our time because. All right. Frankly, people get tired of me in about 26 to 27 minutes across most of the data points that we see. So it's been awesome chatting. I'll look forward to connecting with you on social and then checking you out there. Again, where's the best place for people to find you on social and your website and all that stuff tell the crew

Kristina: definitely on LinkedIn.

Invite me to correct connect, make sure it's relevant. So show me, me, everybody knows that one. And we just talked about it with that subject, the email subject line. Personally, me, I'm great resources there. You can book a strategy session. You can talk to me about maybe getting on the podcast and see if it's fit.

pharosIQ: Awesome. Great. Thank you so much, Kristina. Have an awesome rest of your day. For those of you. Listen in, give us a give us a follow, give us a five star rating. And on whatever podcast platform that you're checking out. So when folks are looking for B2B marketing content, we jump up towards the top and increase our user base.

So thank you all for listening and we will talk soon.