Podcast: How Boomi Runs Programmatic ABM in APAC

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Episode’s topic: How Boomi Runs Programmatic (One:Many) ABM in APAC

In this episode, host Shahin Hoda chats with Stephanie Dechamps, Head of APJ Marketing at Boomi, about how marketers can run programmatic a.k.a one-to-many ABM campaigns successfully in the APAC region.

During this exciting conversation, Stephanie discusses the common challenges marketers encounter while following this approach and shares practical ways to overcome them. She also talks about the three key ingredients of a successful one-to-many ABM strategy, the importance of personalisation at scale and the role of third-party data providers.

Stephanie concludes the podcast with tech-stack recommendations & warning marketers of the mistakes they might make while implementing one-to-many ABM campaigns.

This episode’s guest: 

Conversation segments on this episode:

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• About Boomi
• About xGrowth
• Refine Labs podcast by Chris Walker 
• Matt Heinz podcast

About the Growth Colony Podcast

On this podcast, you'll be hearing from B2B founders, CMOs, marketing & sales leaders about their successes, failures, what is working for them today in the B2B marketing world and everything in between.

Growth Colony is produced by Alexander Hipwell and Allysa Maywald from xGrowth

It was edited by Dave Somido with additional editing by Allysa Maywald and music arrangement by Alexander and Allysa.

Special thanks to Teena Wabe, we couldn’t make the show without you. 

Growth Colony is hosted by Shahin Hoda, Director of Growth at xGrowth. 

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Get in touch!

We would love to get your questions, ideas and feedback about Growth Colony, email podcast@xgrowth.com.au

Episode Full Transcript

[01:00] Allysa Maywald  On today’s episode, we welcome Stephanie Dechamps, Director of Marketing, APJ at Boomi - a category-leading, high-growth global SaaS company with the largest customer base in their space. With our host Shahin Hoda, Stephanie is going to share with us some insights and best practices around account-based marketing.

[01:24] Shahin Hoda  Super excited to chat to Stephanie. Thanks for joining us.

[02:16] Stephanie Dechamps  Okay, first of all, maybe it's just, I'm surprised it's the least developed. Because when you say ABM usually in APAC, you will find one-too-many. And then if you speak to European marketer, it will feed one-to-one, which is more like a key account approach and very personalised. And ABM one-to-many will be really, really cheap to large quantity and try to reach out to new business. So when you go into new spinelessness ABM, one-to-many is the right approach.

[02:46] Stephanie Dechamps  So in both cases, anyway, the approach to, the idea is to identify a list of account that will become your selected company and did you go after, and you will concentrate your efforts and kind of cut through the entire whitespace of the old business available in APAC and so these accounts becomes your universe you want to reach out to you want to open those engaged, you want to convince them you want to grow your footprint into and we've focusing those resources on that smaller group of accounts, even though we're talking about one-to-many, you increases your likelihood of surrounding those accounts, and being seen and being heard by those accounts.

[03:28] Stephanie Dechamps  So that's, I will say that the first ingredient is that focus. Like utilise focus, even though it's one-to-many, you still get through that massive amount of that whole entire whitespace. And then I would also say then, secondly, that account-based marketing could actually be called account-based targeting. And the reason why I say that is that it shouldn't be just marketing's job, it should be the entire DemandGendemandgen group that should focus in and gather around account-based targeting. Because you increase the likelihood of having more touchpoints, more accounts, engagement, several speaking to several persona, if you channel, if you BDR, if you marketing, are all reach out and working on the same set of accounts.

[04:56] Stephanie Dechamps  So you can personalise your approach and so forth. To make it programmatic, you could, for instance, we group that. So you will regroup the account. For instance, by industry. You could also simply use that list of account as a segment and plug that list under establish go-to-market approach that you have. And if you look at the contact level, you could regroup those contact by type of persona or splitting business decision makers and end users. So the third element will be that personalisation at scale, which is the key difference with the ABM one-to-one.

[05:34] Shahin Hoda  I mean, I love that. I love that you talked about some very realistic numbers. And I mean, what I mentioned that it's probably the least mature type of ABM. You know, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. And I completely agree with you that when you turn to marketers in Europe, they talk about one to one. And when you talk to the the marketers in North America, they majority talk about one-to-many.

[06:04] Shahin Hoda  My experience has been that sometimes the targeting capability of the advertising platforms are not as mature in the in the APJ space. And therefore, you know, some of those strategies that are coming from the US don't necessarily, whether it's maybe IP targeting or whatever it is, it's really hard to do that in Indonesia, or it's very challenging to do that in Malaysia, sometimes. That's what I was referring to, is that something you see as well, or you don't see that data challenge when you're looking looking at the market?

[06:39] Stephanie Dechamps  I absolutely do said I see that data challenge. No, say what data is the goal, but it's also the pain, right? It's just trying to find that data, that's often the first, just the first issue we have. So if you think of like SRE, so how do you get to that data? At the end of the day, what you want is a list of accounts. So you, you start with, you have your total addressable market that as defined by analyst, and then you have a sense of the business potential. So we're talking here about numbers of revenue.

[07:09] Stephanie Dechamps  So then you add a layer of which geography are working on, which kind of you are the kind of you're limited to the product where and then you can add kind of your market share, you end up by your, what they call the sum, the service obtainable market. But you still have, you still have an estimated revenue. You still do not have that list of account that you can act upon. So then, if you, with that SOM in mind, the first tangibility to is to list, a look at the list, and you go to third party vendor and you give them some firmographic.

[07:42] Stephanie Dechamps  So they will be I mean, it's nothing new here, you talk about company size, revenue industry, and then maybe for your contacts, you're going to select job title and department, once you can go into having acquiring the contact. Most of the company will also have a go-to-market segment. And then potentially, or more likely your global team has set up an ICP so which is based on firmographics. And then, and in B2B Tech, where I'm working at, we have a layer of technographics. Actually, a lot of companies could use this technographics.

[07:13] Stephanie Dechamps  So which ERP that company is using, or depending on where you try to hit them, which kind of technology you're trying to sell them. So that gives you, you can go to a third-party data vendor and saying, okay, design my large criteria, which kind of list of account. They will be, they will be relevant. Those American database provider will be relevant for very large enterprise and for public-listed company. And you will find the information because it's public information.

[08:46] Stephanie Dechamps  Indeed, when you go into well, I want to go into Indonesia, or Japan, and you go into another language and even another type of character because it's just impossible to find. But even simply Australia, you can't imagine how difficult it is to find a proper database to cover Australia, non public listed company, government type of entities, it's very difficult. So you need to have then kind of almost one by one, finding your database provider, your local database provider that can help you to design that list of accounts and enrich the data as well.

[08:46] Stephanie Dechamps  Indeed, when you go into well, I want to go into Indonesia, or Japan, and you go into another language and even another type of character because it's just impossible to find. But even simply Australia, you can't imagine how difficult it is to find a proper database to cover Australia, non public listed company, government type of entities, it's very difficult. So you need to have then kind of almost one by one, finding your database provider, your local database provider that can help you to design that list of accounts and enrich the data as well.

[09:25] Stephanie Dechamps  So yeah, it's not easy. The other thing I would I would look at and this is like, then you have fixed your list of account, right? But it's still really broad. The other thing is I would and there's still like you, you don't have much information based on that. The other thing I will look at is that also look at your convertible audience, the audience that has convert with you. So that comes from your first-party data, because that will tell you the characteristic of who is converting. Like what are the the touch point that you need to have, the journey to conversion? What content do they consume? But you also very dependent on your own data.

[10:06] Stephanie Dechamps  Garbage in, garbage out. The more your CRM is accurate, and the more use information yourself or your customer success to have put into the CRM, the better you understand. If they just said, if your contacts in your CRM is someone from procurements that doesn't really tell you who they had engaged with, and who was the person to reach out to. So that's actually also really helpful once you have that list of addressable audience to go into. Okay, what should I work on for lookalike type of audience that will be more likely to convert and then you go into that list of addressable audience, and then, and you kind of search for similarities. And you also design that path of user journey.

[10:45] Stephanie Dechamps  And then the third thing I would look at is going back to that third party type of data, when you have it, but again, it's very linked to English speaking market is adding to a mix is the intent data. So you will look at what are those company doing outside of your own premises and what are they searching for? And you look at the topics that are relevant for your solution that you're selling. And try to get that information on each other, the company that raising which are all based on a contract, so it's all based on IP addresses.

[11:26] Stephanie Dechamps  But the intent data, the intense topic will be most of the time in English. So you won't have Japan, you won't have Korea, you won't have China, that's not going to work. But at least from an English speaking market, you have a certain sense of, if adding an additional layer of prioritisation. It's really super helpful. It's also usually low hanging fruit, because the people in that company accurately searching right now. So there is a research happening. And the provider that you will need to go for is the provider that's probably has the broader network.

[11:54] Stephanie Dechamps  I'm not going to name here, but some provider going to give you intent data  based on their own network, okay, fair enough. But it's probably too small. You probably need to have a provider or several provided and to compensate for that have a really notch network, then they can say, well, we've seen won't tell you where. People have had those intense signals or where they have consumed the content. But the broader it is, the better it is in this case.

[12:20] Shahin Hoda  I have a feeling I know who you're talking about with regards to having their own content. But let's not get into that. No, I love that. It's you've summarised it so well, in terms of layer of tasks that need to be done. And again, you know, adding additional information, the data components coming from multiple different parties. Have you seen, I mean, I'm sure you talk quite a lot with your counterparts in the US, have you seen a difference or do you have a different approach when it comes to programmatic ABM compared to a your counterpart in the US for APJ?

[13:01] Stephanie Dechamps  I'm not going to name here, but some provider going to give you intent data  based on their own network, okay, fair enough. But it's probably too small. You probably need to have a provider or several provided and to compensate for that have a really notch network, then they can say, well, we've seen won't tell you where. People have had those intense signals or where they have consumed the content. But the broader it is, the better it is in this case.

[13:44] Stephanie Dechamps  So we really don't talk about the same type of- EMEA will be similar to APJ, though. I mean, if you look at the entire universe, depending on what you're selling, right, but if you look at the entire universe of Australia, if you have four tiers and account, you probably kind of really talking about the entire universe of enterprise that you can reach out to, companies that you can target in Australia that have a certain size to sell your products, or to actually sell our technology. And it's probably in half of that in reality. So yeah, we talking about thing it comfortably 2000 account. 3000 account is really like a good base for APJ. But depends on what you're selling. I mean, B2B tech, so that has an influence.

[14:28] Shahin Hoda  Got it. Got it. One of the other things that you see people talk about quite a lot and I don't know if we can touch on this is a lot of conversation, a lot of data in terms of median and average number of spans when it comes to one-to-one campaigns, when it comes to one-to-few campaigns. Are there any numbers that that you could share around that for the programmatic in terms of like, in terms of going about doing budgeting for these? What are your thoughts on that front?

[14:58] Stephanie Dechamps  You may know how much will I'll spend in programmatic ABM?

[15:02] Shahin Hoda  Yeah, there any kind of information that you can share on that front?

[15:08] Stephanie Dechamps  Well, I can certainly talk about percentage, but I will do 100% ABM. I will be a one-to-many to everything I do. Because being in it being in APJ, usually your dollars are scarce. It's not that we can like overspend, I mean, we have to be really mindful of what how much we spending our dollars are usually limited in terms of numbers of activity we do. But I will use ABM really more as like one-to-many as kind of almost as a segment in everything we do.

[15:39] Stephanie Dechamps  And we use that same list of account for digital activities, for field events activities, for maybe not so much for partners, because in partners, you partner marketing, you want to open a bit more to what they can bring to the table. So be probably less restrictive on partner marketing, but with you, and that's the idea of what I was saying earlier, you want to surround those accounts, right. So you want to be everywhere you could be. You want to target the same accounts and make sure that you become visible.

[16:10] Stephanie Dechamps  So you'll be on social, you will be on digital channel, you will be on videos, you will be- and as for digital. You will then you will go into sponsoring events, you will be into more local event, local association event, still using that same list of account that you define. What I will do is revising that list of accounts, probably on a quarterly basis. But I will put this how I'm telling you to just like go 100% ABM and if your vendor doesn't have that coverage of your list of account, then open it to to more based on what they could offer.

[16:46] Shahin Hoda  Interesting, interesting. Yeah, so I can totally see how that becomes a little bit hard to put dollar figure on it. Because there's all these other activities. Not just the you're kind of ABM advertising component that is focused on that. But there's all these other aspects, from field, from demand gen from all these that are also focusing on those accounts. So I completely get that.

[17:10] Stephanie Dechamps  And that's what becomes your ABX.

[17:12] Shahin Hoda  That's right. That's right. Yeah, the experience component comes out of that. Got it. We've talked about tech, we've talked about intent data, we've talked about, you know, using data providers, is there anything else around the tech stack for running a successful programmatic ABM program that you would recommend to somebody?

[17:35] Stephanie Dechamps  Yeah, I mean, it starts with you, it's your datas, right? And so it's the integration of your data is just like getting all the data point together in a structured way that you can read it. So, it's actually using your existing tech stack, which will be your CRM that needs to be connected to your martech, that needs to be connected to your attic. They need to be connected. Some places you would have data warehouse was probably bit too structured. But think of a customer data platform, is you want to have a customer 360 view. And it's going to be difficult to have that view on sitting on your different application.

[18:15] Stephanie Dechamps  So the ideal world, if you can, you would like to have that one view of the customers centralised at one place. So that will give you the customer 360 view. But the key to that is also to organise the data and to clean that data before you put it together. Otherwise, your data will not be structured in the same way and it will not be readable in your different application when you kind of send it back if you want. So you could kind of think of a master data management or what if becomes maybe a bit more technical, but in the lighter version will be a master data hub, which is kind of an index to structure that organisation of your customer data.

[19:02] Stephanie Dechamps  So they're basically going to say well, at that line in my in marketing automation tool, this is how you identify the customer. And this is where you identify the customer in your CRM. This is how you identify your customers in your tech and your finance and etc. Tools and application and you end up by having creating that unique customer ID and kind of the few criteria and then you probably going to have like a few, think Excel, right? I mean, just it's not an Excel but like you will have additional field that will be for things that are specific for CRM and specific for finance and but the the kind of core, I don't know 50 components will be structured in a similar way.

[19:41] Stephanie Dechamps  And that will give you a view and with that unique ID of your customers internally, everyone will know who you're talking about. Similarly, when you speak to, you talking to, you go to your third party, your media and you say I want to have, I want to speak to Optus well, how do you say up to this? Why do you use a DNS number, if you have access to the respirator use the domain name, right? So you need to have a unique ID internally, when you integrate. So talking about that third party enrichment data into your CRM, again, you need that integration upfront.

[20:16] Stephanie Dechamps  So you have a lot of provider, a third party provider that already have developed those API's that are too common CRM. So they will have it to Salesforce, it's a very common CRM. Then we'll have done the same on the media buying side. Do you have a UDSP, Prophet connected to Bombora, and LinkedIn for intent data, your LinkedIn lead gen form. He's directly connected to your Marketo, Eloqua. So you when you do media buying, and you have the opt in, so those connectors are sometimes prebuild, already developed by those martech and tech stack, tech stack application.

[20:53] Stephanie Dechamps  So yeah, just a caveat to that is here, we talking about the accounts. And we need just to be mindful when you add the layer of the contact, because as we all know, we need to be careful about the personal data. So maybe send it like first to your CRM, and then your marketing automation, or your marketing database will filter when it's not, there is no updating with your work for the contractor contact level.

[21:19] Shahin Hoda  Of course, of course. And I was gonna ask about that, right, because a lot of platforms are curated for leads versus accounts. And I don't know what your thoughts are. But I think it's also very important to take that into consideration when you're building the data hub that you talked about, that you are, you have  an account lens on when you're looking at the so that you'll do all the sudden disperse the leads from one account, but they're all over the shop. 

[21:52] Stephanie Dechamps  Yeah, the Oh, that is so sharp. And if you think of the marketing, automation tools, think marketing right? Being developed probably 15 years ago with that leave those in mind, not that I can't model in mind. And companies are changing to that lead source model to that account model. But it's a big change. It's a profound change.

[22:15] Stephanie Dechamps  But it's also allowing us to work together with the other department and not just saying, oh, this is my lead and and where is my lead? And then they people are going to change the lead source if they can or but no, it's an account, we all working together towards their accounts going back to coordinated efforts, focus, everyone is around the same account. And you can do it in a programmatic way in the one-to-many, and you will do it in a very personalised way in the one-to-one.

[22:43] Shahin Hoda  Got it. Stephanie, I want to ask you one question before we're going to rapid fire questions. And that is dealing with and talking to a lot of B2B marketers, what are some of the mistakes you've seen marketers make when trying to implement a one-to-many ABM program?

[23:01] Stephanie Dechamps  There's a few that I made myself so I can talk about those and happy to share it.

[23:07] Shahin Hoda  Let's do that. Let's do that.

[23:08] Stephanie Dechamps  The first one. And typical one you will hear is that you do that beautiful list of account. And then you say hey BDR, hey, sales, this is the list of account we're going to focus on everyone is going to put the effort together, here and go and try to dig into this account and find something. I'm doing my job and marketing side and you can pick up the same. And then the first question they will ask you Is that yeah, great, fantastic. And, but rarely contacts, how do I reach out to into this account? Well, that's the concept of moving from and we were just talking about it right from the leads. So it's a contact to an account, you need to go into you, well, this account has and this is where marketing could probably help it.

[23:50] Stephanie Dechamps  It help to provide all those insights. But it's going into that account model and thinking, well, this is the account, I need to map and try to find several contacts, several persona and try to reach out to them. I'm thinking here BDR, right? Where they will not, yeah, they will need to still do a bit of desktop research. The second is still it's related to this is that they want, don't expect them to jump on it and say thank you so much. But as the marketer because you're already probably leading that program for marketing perspective, you can you will take that if you take again, that example of industry approach to do it in a better programmatic way.

[24:30] Stephanie Dechamps  You create your ABM program, you create content that's related to that industry. And then you will create a script for the BDR, call days, call to action that are related to that list of account to target. And once those lead will, so this is what you can share with the BDR if for them to do it by themselves, but once those leads will start flowing from your campaign, the conversion rate will be will be better because they will be already educated on those accounts, educated on and knowing what what to do with those accounts, and how to approach like, it's really a question of how do I start? Where do I start poking into those accounts?

[25:08] Stephanie Dechamps  But if you tell them, well, based on insight I've seen it's it's in that industry, so we have content around the industry. Here you go, you can use that content. We have those case study. Here you go, you can use those case study and unwanted leads coming from your ABM campaign this oh, yeah, that account I know, and an upstate up they go. So your conversion will be better. A third one, do not overcomplicate things. Believe me, that often less is more.

[25:34] Stephanie Dechamps  Once I ran a campaign, and I was like, okay, so I want to map all those persona, I need to have the content. And also I need to map to the, for buying stages. And then so under by having like for each persona and the topic and everything together, like 26 topics of interest for 14 persona, which is what's magnets to put together. And then even to build to kind of go into Okay, which intent topics should I look at for this particular topic of interest? And how do I, it was just too much. Yeah, so simplify it, regroup, that's the word programmatic, right?

[26:09] Stephanie Dechamps  To build at scale and, and I kept to those in those two kinds of six. So six persona, six type of journey. So simplify it a little bit, think what is doable with the resources that you have tried to realise what's already there. And then maybe, to the good thing, like, maybe how to do it well, that I learned. Use the results and show the results. Like for one year, I was kind of using that list of account and running with the exact same program. So as a separate segment, as the list of account that the sales gave me.

[26:26] Stephanie Dechamps  And at the end of the year, I pulled and report by account, engagement by account, and what's the results in terms of pipe and opportunity, etc. And the results were obvious. It was tremendously better with that list of account that was put together based on some insights that we had. This is the guesswork of an offensive sales just to guess work of luck. What should I put? Where are my relationships? So yeah, show the results. Use you'll be able to show the results like user account based least work coordinate together, and, and the results will be much better than whatever else you have done.

[27:22] Shahin Hoda  I love it. I love it. Show the results. That's such a good point. And I love that last mistake as well. I've made that mistake. And I've seen a lot of people make that make the mistake of going too far down the rabbit hole of personalisation. When it comes to when it comes to ABM programs. No, I love that. Okay.

[27:44] Shahin Hoda  Stephanie, I have a couple of rapid fire questions as well that I want to ask you. And the first question that I have is what is one resource and it could be a book, a blog, a podcast, a talk, whatever it is, that has had a profound impact on you, whether professionally or personally, what what comes to mind.

[28:38] Stephanie Dechamps  It's one that a colleague of mine recommended. It's a podcast. Guy is an American called Chris Walker. And he works for his company, Refine Labs. What I like with him is that it is actually talking about things that are well, we talked about, like the attribution model, he talks about, interestingly, the last one was saying, is a, it was about the attribution model, in particular, where he was saying they were like, asking their, their prospects, where did you heard about us? And he says, the attribution model says, organic search.

[28:38] Stephanie Dechamps  And then the person when you talk to them says, oh, a reference from from a colleague of mine, or the other option was LinkedIn, LinkedIn postcard. And it keeps saying that over and over and over again, listing probably 50 Different companies. So it's kind of portfolio has good, like, it's just poking on that attribution model. And I think it's really where we need and that's also linked to the account based approach. So I think it's great. There's another guy from Heinz Marketing, Matt Heinz, which is also more talking about still along the sides of attribution model, but the demand gen and I thought, again, some of its podcasts are really good.

[29:54] Shahin Hoda  I love it. Yeah, they're both they're both really, really good thought leaders. Both watch Chris Walker and Matt Heinz. Okay, question number two. If you could only give one advice to b2b marketers, what would it be?

[30:07] Stephanie Dechamps  Probably to take an account-based approach. And work with data, use data. We have used data. We have so many data available at our fingertips in marketing. We don't look at it that much. We do look at it, but we don't look at it that much. Data will help you to help you to tell you half of the story, the rest, you need to turn in and interpret it into insights.

[30:36] Shahin Hoda  Got it. Got it. Okay. Question number three. And we've kind of touched on this. If there's anybody else, please, please mention it. But what are some of the Who are some of the influencers that you follow in the marketing space?

[30:50] Stephanie Dechamps  So yeah, the two that I mentioned.

[30:53] Shahin Hoda  Chris Walker and Matt Heinz?

[30:55] Stephanie Dechamps  Yeah, we'll be probably those that are following, then I will, I will look more at our look at my competitors and see what's happening. But it's really more for work, but from a giving, getting inspiration, starting with those two.

[31:15] Shahin Hoda  The ever evolving technology, and the fact that all jobs is getting more and more interesting everyday. Once a former colleague of mine said, it has never been a better time to be a marketer, thanks to that technology and data. He said that five years ago. I think it's still valid, it's allows the fact that the technology is allowing us to, to be more sophisticated, to be more personalised, to do something more interesting and to also we get better insights.

[31:48] Stephanie Dechamps  But we also do less of kind of the daunting and repetitive task of machine learning and AI have tremendous opportunities not always always be rainbow and unicorn, because you you still have to it's technology, right? So you have to test and some often more often than not, it's not going to work the first time. But it's amazing the technology that we have at our fingertips, he keeps evolving.

[32:10] Stephanie Dechamps  And I kind of feel I don't know what it's gonna come out. But I kind of feel now we are now at the stage where we need to have the next big phase we had. We had marketing automation probably 15 years ago, and then a kind of a con based coming like, seven, eight years ago. There's next one that's gonna come out is there going to be propensity model predictive? I think maybe that could be that one, the predictive part and I can't wait to see that coming.

[32:36] Shahin Hoda  Stephanie, this has been a very insightful and awesome conversation. And I want to say thank you so much for for coming on the podcast. I really enjoyed our chat.

[32:48] Stephanie Dechamps  Thank you. It was really lovely chat to

[32:51] Shahin Hoda  No, pleasure's absolutely mine and again, thank you so much for coming on and sharing all your insights. I'm sure a lot of our listeners are gonna take a lot away from this chat.

[32:58] Stephanie Dechamps And yeah, again, thank you so much.

[33:02] Shahin Hoda  Thank you. Thank you. Have a great day.