Podcast: How to Sell ABM to the Sales Team

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Episode’s topic: How to Sell ABM to Sales Teams with Eric Wittlake 

In this episode, host Shahin Hoda chats with Eric Wittlake from TOPO about what marketers can do to get buy-in from sales teams regarding account-based strategy. 

Tune in to learn how both sales and marketing need to work together to deliver outsised business outcomes and create a consistent end-to-end experience for their target accounts. In this podcast, Eric also shares some ways in which marketing can add value to the sales process, thereby selling ABM to sales teams.

This episode’s guest:

How to Sell ABM to Sales Teams with Eric Wittlake

Eric Wittlake, Senior Marketing Analyst at TOPO

Eric Wittlake leads TOPO's account-based strategy research. He works directly with revenue and marketing leaders to drive growth through repeatable best practices that increase customer value, improve customer acquisition, and drive expansion. 

At TOPO, Eric has worked with many leading global organisations and growth companies, including Oracle, SAP, IBM, Amazon, Adobe, RingCentral, ServiceNow, and Sisense to improve their marketing and account-based strategies. 

Connect with Eric on LinkedIn

Conversation segments on this episode:

• [01:07] Eric’s background and experience
• [03:34] Why is a Sales buy-in essential for ABM?
• [06:42] Marketing and Sales Development need to, together prioritise accounts in a consistent way for better outcomes
• [08:28] Mistakes Marketing teams make while interacting with Sales
• [12:28] Marketers should try to understand the goals that Sales teams want to achieve
• [14:22] Instances of Marketing and Sales alignment
• [17:46] SDRs reporting into the Marketing function is good to have but not necessary for success 
• [21:53] Having the Marketing teams' variable compensation structure tied to organisational performance works well
• [24:54] Importance of timing while targeting an account
• [31:13] Marketing needs to report metrics about accounts

Resources mentioned on this episode:

• About TOPOS
• xGrowth's Account-Based Marketing guide
• Erik's LinkedIn profile
• Erik's Twitter handle
• TOPO blog on Sales and Marketing alignment best practices
• LinkedIn blog on Sales and Marketing alignment

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.

Hosted by Shahin Hoda & Alexander Hipwell, from xGrowth

Get in touch!

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

Episode Full Transcript:

[00:19] Shahin Hoda  Eric, thanks for joining us. 

[00:33] Eric Wittlake  Thanks for having me on, looking forward to this. 

[00:35] Shahin Hoda  I'm very excited, Eric. I mean, I'm very excited talking about this topic. It's a, sometimes the challenge for marketers to really get that alignment and make that work and having you on the episode, on the podcast, talking about this, considering, you know, both your experience and TOPO's expertise in, you know, the fast-growing B2B organisation, analysing the strategies that are working there, and the ones that are not working, gets me super excited. So let's dive into it. First, Eric, I'd love to know a little bit about yourself and a little background for those who might not know you. Just give us a quick intro. 

[01:13] Eric Wittlake  Let's start today and maybe work our way backwards. So I've been at TOPO for about four years. I joined TOPO with the opportunity to really focus on an account-based strategy is the go-to-market. Prior to joining TOPO, I'd spent about 10 years in a B2B-focused environment as a B2B agency. And a couple of years into that experience, I had my first exposure to what we call target account programs at the time. And so that kind of evolved into my point of view around what was going on from an account-based perspective.  

[01:46] Eric Wittlake  It became this thing that started as 5% of my job and maybe got up to 25%, or something towards the end of that decade run. And it was a piece that, to me was kind of this magic combination of how can I get the right data? How can I create the right experience? How can I create an outsized outcome? One of the first programs I was involved in, it was, you know, a few dozen accounts handpicked to be the ones that sale said, I got nothing here. And I need something. So it was like, here are the absolute hardest ones. One response, one meeting was going to be seen as a success, because they had been trying and trying and trying and getting nowhere. These were the ones they really wanted and couldn't get anywhere with.  

[02:32] Eric Wittlake  And we're able to deliver meetings within a course of a couple of months, at 40% of those companies. Just blew the doors off in terms of expectation. So that was that starting point for me, and the chance to then be able to do that as one of my primary areas of focus with TOPO. Just a lot of fun. And I've had a lot of fun these last four years being able to dive into that. I come out of digital marketing, digital advertising consumer, from time in AD tech prior to that. So kind of data technology analytics has always been one of those things that are kind of behind me that I build on. But B2B kind of became this funny, different, experience-oriented, small, high-value audiences space. Those just, you know, it's kind of become my thing. I enjoy it. 

[03:20] Shahin Hoda  I love it. Thank you very much for that. Now, you know, you mentioned that sales is like, hey, we can't get any meetings in these accounts, like can what can we do to get into these accounts? First of all, tell me why is having sales on board with ABM is important at all? You know, because I know a lot of organisations go about and say, alright, account-based marketing. It's a marketing thing, right? So, the marketing department do ABM. So why is it important to have sales onboard? 

[03:52] Eric Wittlake  I mean, we say in our definition of what's an account-based strategy, and I'll come back to why I don't call it account-based marketing in just a moment, is how do we get all of the customer-facing pieces of the organisation, working together, to engage, progress, retain whatever our goal is, a set of accounts we've all named and agreed on? How can we do it together? How can we create an end-to-end experience? How can we ensure that we're prioritising in the same way? Imagine for a moment, Marketing prioritises accounts ABC, Sales prioritises accounts CDF. Well, we've just created a, you know, in sub-optimal experience, as well as a set of business outcomes for all six of those accounts.  

[04:40] Eric Wittlake  We really want a different outcome from a set of accounts that are more important to our business, maybe more important for a short period of time, maybe more important with a multi-decade view, I don't know. But these are the ones that right now we're saying we need to prioritise. We can't prioritise that in just marketing and know that that treatment's going to carry through. We can't prioritise that in just sales and be as successful as it could be because in sales is going well. Marketing's not supporting me. They're giving me a bunch of stuff I'm supposed to be doing. Leads, I'm supposed to follow up with. Opportunities that are a quarter of the value of what these could be or less. And there's, now complaining that I'm not chasing that. Well, come on, haven't we all agreed that this is where tap for us? Let's all prioritise this together because if we don't, we actually don't end up prioritising it at all. 

[05:30] Shahin Hoda  I feel like marketing needs to prepare, you know, and I'm guilty of that, right? Where marketing needs to prepare, needs to like put the data together, need to look at the list, and see if it's right, or sales is like, just give me the phone and give me the phone number. That's all I need. I mean, in its simplest term, right?  

[05:51] Eric Wittlake  But what do we do? We have to create an ad, get the photography, the imagery, the messaging, oh, it has to go someplace. Now we got to build a landing page. Gotta get that done. Oops, that's got to go to an ops team. Sales is like, I'll send an email. And my call-to-action is a reply to me. I didn't need to build more. Like, it's a lighter process in many ways. It does make it easier. We have more infrastructure to do, anything that we're trying to do typically as a marketer, and does make that harder. 

[06:26] Shahin Hoda  Yeah, yeah. I feel like sometimes it's less effective. 

[06:30] Eric Wittlake  Very true. I mean, why is it that we said when we got started, in our account-based research and best practice, we're like, orchestration, everybody working together. But guess what? The fast path to success is marketing and sales development working together. Even bring sales and customer success and everyone else in later, when everyone's getting started, most of them were focused on new logo acquisition, or just like, get marketing and sales development to do a better job of getting qualified meetings at the accounts, everyone agreed they cared about, even if we don't have everyone knowing what to do about that together yet.  

[07:06] Eric Wittlake  You can just start with those two and go a long way. One of the reasons is, I used to do direct mail way back in the day, right? Advertising, marketing email, all this kind of stuff. Response rates of an email, less than a percent from the marketing side, and direct mail, maybe a couple percent if you're doing pretty good particularly if it's not like a super small list. Advertising, you got to have a lot of significant digits and that decimal did not just round to zero, right? And yet, what do we get when the SDRs are doing the outreach? Dramatically higher response rates.  

[07:44] Eric Wittlake  So that's why one of our coachings early on was, how do we as marketers shift our perspective? Why am I sending a direct mail piece? So someone's more likely to reply or pick up the phone or call back in SDR in the next couple days when they get that outreach. That was actually where three X of the impact of the direct mail came from? It came from the SDR metrics going up, not from the direct metric of the direct mail piece. 

[08:11] Shahin Hoda  Yeah, yeah. And then sales is like, I feel like you made a really good point where they're like, oh, they've given me these emails that I have to send out and these comms that I have to have, and what do they know about sales, right? Have you had that before? 

[08:28] Eric Wittlake  Oh, man, how often does marketing go in, and frankly, do nothing as a marketer to make it better, and instead, tell everybody else what they need to do differently? You know, this is like marketing going in, I see this way too often. Marketing going in and telling an SDR leader, how they should run their cadence, how many touches they should have, what channels they should have, and then doing nothing on the marketing side, at first to say, how are we going to actually make this better?  

[09:00] Eric Wittlake  No, come to the meeting, know how you're going to make it better for from a marketing perspective. If you want to bring some best practice to another team. That's okay. But just, you know, show that you're working to make it better in your domain, instead of coming in and kind of giving the impression that you feel like your stuff is perfect, and all the problems or someplace else. No one's perfect. Come on, let's fess up to that. We have things we could do better. So don't go in and try to make everyone else better and not look in the mirror. Go in and say what can we do as a marketer to make this better.  

[09:34] Eric Wittlake  And on that SDR example, for instance, there's something I ran into a lot over the course for the last few years. What we started doing is saying like in a workshop, start by going in and putting up on the board, what a high performing SDR cadence looks like. And now let's wrap that with marketing to make it more effective. Instead of marketing starting with what your cadence needs to be. Do we need to as TOPO provide some perspective on that in some instances? Sure we can.  

[10:02] Eric Wittlake  We have a practice around it, we have lots of best practices, we can provide research but it's not just about marketing going in and trying to get other teams to do it's like how do how does the marketer say, I'm here to make everything you're doing work better. I'm here to get a better outcome for all of us but what I do to support you. And too often, marketing is going in on that SDR cadence in particular, and kind of going, well, this is a big problem area. Maybe it is. But go in and just, you know, from a how you engage people to start by going in and bring in solutions, and doing better in your camp too. It goes so far and just having a better next conversation and the next reply that you get from somebody. 

[10:47] Shahin Hoda  That's, I mean, that's a great point. And then it kind of leads to my next question, right? Where you know, what do marketers do wrong from sales and marketing alignment perspective, right? What are some of the mistakes they make? And I really, like how you explained said that you know, marketers should go in and, and bring value, right? So don't go and try to change anything, just go and try to understand the process. And then say, alright, here's where we can add extra value. Is that correct? Is that um, or what would be your approach, right? So if marketing wants to, because I'll tell you why I'm asking this question. Sometimes in organisations, sales is doing account work, right?  

[11:35] Shahin Hoda  So sales is focused on accounts, but they might not call it an account-based strategy or account-based marketing, or account-based everything, whatever you want to call it, right? They're not calling it that. And these buzzwords come out of marketing. And marketing is like all we need to do account-based marketing. And they go to sales and sales is like, what is this? Is this the next, you know, the new shiny thing, the colour of the month? Is this marketing again, getting excited about something now? It's all right, yeah, we'll sit down for a workshop, and I'll be on my phone checking emails. And after that, we'll go back to what we're doing. Right. So I've experienced that quite a lot. And my question is, how should the approach to marketing be different in order to grab sales attention and be able to sound a lot more valuable to sales? 

[12:29] Eric Wittlake  So what sales' priority? What do they need to accomplish? And let's take that one step further. What are the risks to them actually, being able to hit those objectives? It might be that the risks, for instance, the risks are actually customer retention and expansion. That's the big nut if you're a larger company, of where revenue is going to come from. And yet marketing maybe came in and said, we're gonna do this thing around the acquisition. And sales is like, you know, the piece I'm worried about right now is that customer expansion needs to represent 30% of my number. And that's where I'm going to miss. And I can never win enough in the new logo to make up for that.  

[13:13] Eric Wittlake  So you're focused on the wrong thing. You're not focused on where my need. My priority is? What would you tell somebody going into sales that they need to do? They need to understand the priorities, the critical initiatives of the person that they're trying to sell to. Why don't we do that as marketers, when we go try to take our initiative to sales,? Start with understanding what their priorities are, what their initiatives are? And then if an account-based approach is the right way to help to address that, awesome. If it's actually something else, that's great, too. 

[13:45] Eric Wittlake  But let's start with understanding what we should become shared joint priorities are. These are the things we need to go accomplish. Now, let's have that starting point. We've got to get to the same page, in order to get started. Once we get to that same page, then we can actually have a conversation about what is it we're going to do? Why does this make sense? When marketing goes and says, well, we're going to do this and it makes sense because of all these things. And those things don't tie to the priorities, the needs, the challenges that sales has doesn't matter. Not going to get us anywhere. 

[14:19] Shahin Hoda  Very good point. Very good point. And between the marketing department and the sales department, right? Who have you seen that alignment is most important for right? Is it the, you know, the marketing team, then maybe the field marketing with the AE's? Is it with the SDR? Is it with sales development? Where do you see the most important piece of alignment? Where do you see alignment being the most effective between these two departments? 

[14:50] Eric Wittlake  There's kind of two pieces when I think about alignment. There's one, we all agreed and two, there's we didn't hold hands and did it together. And in order to do it together, in some cases, let's say that we're focused that need, the priority we found is its new logo. Your smaller company growing quickly, the vast majority of new bookings are gonna come from New logos. There's not a lot of expansion opportunity in existing accounts, there's just not very many of them yet versus your revenue objective. That might be marketing and sales development on the execution piece. But sales have to care about where we're focused on that execution on.  

[15:33] Eric Wittlake  So the agreement about what we're going to prioritise, that would need to be with sales as well. But the how we're going to get more meetings, more qualified meetings, more opportunities created, a lot of that execution detail I could cover between marketing and sales development in that instance. Let's say on the flip side, I've got a bunch of eight, nine, maybe even 10 figure customers, you know, these, let's call it Fortune 50 type companies. Where's that alignment going to happen from an execution perspective? It's going to be an account team that's got multiple people in sales, maybe multiple dedicated resources in marketing research and enablement, things along those lines.  

[16:18] Eric Wittlake  Almost certainly a marketer that's got no more than say, accounts their response for. Now, I'm talking about field marketing, and the sales organisation, actually handling a lot of the actual account-level execution. So where that alignment, that tight working together on planning and execution happens, is going to change. It's going back to that, what are the priorities? What are the things we're trying to solve for? What does that look like? And what do we need to do together? And then who are those groups that are doing it together day-to-day in order to get to that outcome?  

[16:55] Shahin Hoda  Right, right. Okay. Now, on that note, one of the things that I've seen is sometimes sales development role comes under marketing. Some companies I've noticed that they incorporate the SDR row under the marketing department, not on their sales. What are your thoughts on that? Is that you know, is that mean just like you said, that might not be very effective with account expansion. But when it comes to acquisition, is that now is that a strategy that you recommend? Is it really depends or what are your thoughts on that? 

[17:32] Eric Wittlake  Well, I'm a marketer by trade. I come from that background. As a marketer, I like to think of myself as being pipeline and revenue-focused. And by the way, marketing can never create an opportunity. Sales development is our only path to creating opportunity. So if they're under the marketing organisation, that sounds good to me, If they're not, close tight alignment with sales development is absolutely critical. Now, the reality is, there are lots of teams that are not well aligned within their own team. They don't have a lot of faith in their leader, there are competing priorities, they feel like they're under-resourced or another team, another group within the same team has preferential treatment, or is really the one that is listened to more.  

[18:18] Eric Wittlake  So, what your reporting structure is, this is not an automatic solution to those kinds of alignment problems by any means. It gets you the first step. It will always get you structured that way. You'll always be to have first conversations you might not otherwise. But following through is going to be really important. And I've frankly seen completely busted relationships when they're technically in the same department. And I've seen great relationships when they're technically in different departments. So to me, how do we work together is far more important than the reporting structure.  

[18:55] Eric Wittlake  If I was going into someplace as a marketer, and as a high growth organisation, and we want to adopt an account-based approach, I'd really like to have the SDRs in my organisation, that'd be my first choice. And high-growth orgs right now it's about a third of them, have them in marketing about two-thirds have them in sales. Can I work with it the other way? Sure, I can. Being willing to work together, having the same set of priorities, which by the way, in order to make an account-based approach we're going to need to get to anyways. Being able to build on that foundation. That's important if you're in the same group or in different groups. 

[19:38] Shahin Hoda  I want to talk about compensation, Eric. Some argue that if marketing is going to become revenue-focused and be very pipeline focused, their compensation model should also change and be based on maybe revenue or closer to the model that sales is. Especially the department that is responsible for the activation work. Then, you know, not the branding department, the brand-building component of the marketing department, but the one that is responsible for activation and acquisition, so on so forth. What are your thoughts on that? 

[21:03] Eric Wittlake  What is the variable compensation based on otherwise? If it's based on MQLs, then, you know, get out? Yeah, we need it to be based on pipe create a revenue. That said, marketers are, regardless of how far we go down this path, we are as individuals within the marketing organisation, a little bit more removed from it. I'm not as the, you know, let's say, you've got a director and two managers within the demand generation team. Well, I can't really adopt a quota structure for individuals within the marketing organisation, because it's an overall marketing contribution.  

[21:44] Eric Wittlake  So from that perspective, having the same degree of variable comp within marketing isn't something that's going to get most marketers engaged. But having our variable comp based on the organisation's performance, based on a clearly delineated marketing's overall contribution to that organisational performance. Those are good moves. And we shouldn't be copying, marketing on actually getting the website of, well, maybe we can, I don't know. But the primary variable comp that I want to see a revenue-oriented marketer get is not on successfully launching a new website, it's on contribution to revenue. 

[22:26] Shahin Hoda  Gotcha. Okay. All right. Now, this is good stuff. This is good stuff. Now, Eric, those are most of the questions that I wanted to ask, right. But is there something that you didn't think we didn't cover that it's valuable? Regarding sales and marketing alignment, anything comes to mind.

[22:45] Eric Wittlake  If you're at the point where it's like, you can't even get a good conversation about accounts, start doing that on the inbound side, like, you don't have a list, you don't know who they care about, they're not sales isn't engaged with you. I mean, let's say it's pretty, you know, this kind of relationship, that just starts to show that you have access to that data, which by the way they've never seen from you before. And you can make some good guesses with no input from them about the accounts and the titles that matter. Come on, let's face it. We know some of that stuff.  

[23:19] Eric Wittlake  A really quickly pulled together a target account list, by marketing alone, may very well be 70%. Right? With no input from anybody else. Like, you know, it's not bad. It's better than random. Why don't we treat it like it's all the same, we can make some really good guesses. I don't know that I want to go put, you know, 1000 bucks behind every one of those. Like there, I need the alignment conversation. But do I know enough to surface information that's going to be more valuable to sales? I'd better? I mean, isn't that part of my job is understanding our market? How am I actually judging myself choosing between opportunities, everything else if I don't know enough to take some pretty good guesses about what is valuable as companies, titles, individuals, reasons they engaged to my organisation? I better be able to do that. 

[24:18] Shahin Hoda  Amen, no, that's good. That's awesome. I wanted to ask you, we talked, touched on cadence a little bit during the conversation. I was itching to bring it up. But it was it's removed from the topic that we're talking about. But do you also touch on that quite a lot? Like, actually, let me ask this. What are some of the topics that you're super passionate about when it comes to account base? Because I know initially when we talked about I said, look, this is something I would love to talk about. And you're like, yep, I've got that covered. But what are some of the topics that you usually enjoy talking about and are super passionate about? 

[24:54] Eric Wittlake  I mean, one of the things that we've seen make a big difference is how do I be smarter about what accounts win? When do I go after these accounts? And how do I be much better about timing? We've gotten pretty good at going, okay, these 200 accounts are worth more to me. Let's focus on these 200. But we haven't gotten as good historically at going, oh damn, that's 200. Here are the things I want to do. I can only do that for 40 or 50 at a time. Which one should I pick right now when we can get better at getting our timing right? Because we manufactured timing, or because there are market and company signals that guide us to better timing. 

[25:42] Eric Wittlake  Probably a balance, a mix between those two, then we can actually have significantly better results because we've started to get the timing piece of the equation down. And so that's one of the things that we've seen. Now, I think that that's starting to come into what we can do when we keep our account-based lens on execution. But we start looking at our ability to target individual accounts to activate, say, marketing and sales dev together, or account management or sales, along with marketing, whatever that case may be. How do I start to use that same ability to execute at an account level across more of what is currently labelled my demandgen or broader go-to-market?  

[26:29] Eric Wittlake  So that's not to say that I'm going oh, well, the account base team has taken over, you know, 2000 accounts, they used to have 200. Demandgen good look at your numbers, we just took all the good ones. But what I mean is, what if we watch intent? What if we watch timing signals? What if we're doing a program for a competitive takeaway have a pretty high-end solution? It's mostly companies that are in our target account list that even work with that competitor. But guess what, there's another 40 that aren't in the list that works with them. And I know, because it's a pretty expensive solution may not be quite as valuable, but they're still well above average when I want to include them in that program. There's a pretty good chance I would right? 

[27:13] Eric Wittlake  So how do I start to think about what accounts I'm going to include and when? That sometimes using intent, the program structure itself to dip outside my target account list. That sometimes saying, within my target account list, I can't be all on, all the time at full intensity for everybody. Which ones right now and how? How do I get much better about that right now focus? The way a sales development team does, the way a sales organisation does. It's like I'm sales development in particular, where am I focus this week and this month? How do I start to do a better job of reflecting that across more of what I do, and use timing signals to get it right?  

[28:02] Eric Wittlake  Things that are going on in the market, a competitor was acquired, there's fear, the products going to be sunsetted, or prices are going to go up or whatever. All right, all in, we're going after their install base right now, right? Makes perfect sense as a marketer? Well, that is by definition, a list of accounts. And unless it's somebody the size of Salesforce that got bought, and you're worried about what's going to happen to the product, it's not like you're going out there and saying, okay, I'm going after every single company that's out there. And I can have that be part of my broad messaging. Thinking of like when Eloqua was bought by Oracle. Marketo was actually able to just go broad market blast, you know, they're no longer an option for you, right?  

[28:44] Eric Wittlake  That's not typically the case. A lot of that execution oftentimes really needs to be account-based. Account or I'm not going to use the account base term here, because it means more to some people. But it needs to be too specific accounts. And my ability to execute against the list of accounts is something that I've learned and refined through the execution of an account-based strategy. How do I make use of this new skill set across more of what I do in my entire go-to-market? That's one of those things that, you know, to me, represents one of the next big opportunities.  

[29:18] Eric Wittlake  For today's account-based platform solutions, to be able to say we're going to power the selection and the execution of more of what you do in demandGen, for instance, because we bring a level of account intelligence and ability to execute an account level. And I could scale that from what you started with as 500 accounts. I can scale that to 10,000 accounts while running it side-by-side with your broader demandGen. And that would be a good thing for you. Because what I'm doing is I'm prioritising from within that broad pool, a small subset of accounts that are most likely to convert to value for you right now. And then you're continuing to do what you did before, and you're continuing to have the triple down extended focus on the ones at the very top of the list. That's just smarter go to market. 

[30:05] Shahin Hoda  Your right and a lot of situations, it's like this is the accounts, let's go after them. Versus, yeah, I mean, sometimes you could buy some Bombora and put some put that information on top of it. But, you know, I mean, that's really the extent of it. I really like that. That's really cool. 

[30:23] Eric Wittlake  Well, one of the things that I was thinking earlier when you mentioned, you know, how do we sell this? And it's a challenge in many traditional organisations. This has become much less of a challenge with saas companies I work with, just because they're a little further down this journey. And as an industry, people move in when they've seen the successes. How many sales leaders in traditional organisations, think of marketing and go, oh well, we're trying to get into account X, or we have this relationship challenge and account Y? And go marketing can certainly help me with that. What does marketing do? We report, media spend, impressions, clicks. How many people attended our webinar, how many webinars we hosted? We never talked about accounts. 

[31:13] Eric Wittlake   Accounts are the language of an enterprise sales organisation. What do you talk about in a pipeline review meeting? You talk about individual deals and individual accounts. What you talk about in that pipeline review meeting as a marketer, unfortunately, frequently? The campaign that you have coming up, how many leads it created, how many were passed over to sales development? We talk in aggregates. And can we as marketers. in those places where that's actually created the perception that we can't move accounts? We don't think in terms of accounts. Can we start surfacing the progress we're making against accounts that sales care about?  

[31:53] Eric Wittlake  We don't have to have adopted an account-based strategy yet. You may not even know what accounts they actually care about. You probably have some good sense for it. Drop account names. No, we didn't have 123 people on our webinar last week. We had that and we had three people from IBM. Like drop company names that sales will care about. Have information about what's going on, from an engagement perspective, at individual accounts. Start to actually the way you present what you do, and what you know from a marketing perspective. Start to talk about it in terms of accounts.  

[32:29] Eric Wittlake  Because in many organisations, sales have never been exposed to program-oriented marketers, outside of a few people in field marketing, who can even have a conversation about what we would do with a single account. What sort of results we've had? How we've engaged them? Marketing talks in big, broad aggregates all too often. And that's given us the perception that that's all we know how to do. So in some companies, simply starting to talk about individual accounts. Simply starting to surface information about how accounts are engaged, based on sometimes the limited information we have access to initially, just can help change the tone of that conversation. 

[33:15] Shahin Hoda  Yeah, so that's that that goes from the very basic level, right? So that these companies visited our website, or these companies, just like you said, attended the webinar, or even interacted with our ads. So it's starting from there. Is that is that what you mean? And then giving more and more heavier intent related information?  

[33:37] Eric Wittlake  Yeah, I might even put it as instead. We talked about the campaigns we ran and the outcomes we had by campaign can we give some highlights for the accounts that we engaged. And less about, like these from this, and but just, you know, our language starts from the campaign, from the initiative for a broad audience and the aggregate results. Can we have some colour that we add about accounts individually? And you know, as well as anyone oh, hey, we got 1000 leads last month.  

[34:09] Eric Wittlake  And there's somebody on the other end hearing that who's like, not again? How can we actually help people go, there's real value in this. This is actually something you're gonna care about. No, I know, you don't actually care about all 1000. Too bad I won't say that out loud in most instances, right? But I know you don't. Let me actually surface for you some that I think you do. Some that are from interesting companies, great titles have engaged multiple times. Let's surface something that is more interesting in the language of account versus gross aggregate campaign result. 

[34:46] Shahin Hoda  Yeah, that's very true. That's very true. And you're right we don't do that as often as we should. We don't do that and yeah, and sales never got excited about marketing to, they never went and said, oh boy marketing is gonna run another webinar. That's amazing. That never happened. Okay. Well, Eric, I really appreciate it. This has been a great conversation. Thank you so much. Now, Eric, if anyone wants to know more, wants to get in touch with you, what's the best way to do that? 

[35:18] Eric Wittlake  Well, I'll give you two things. One is getting in touch with TOPO. Topohq.com. We're always doing those marketing webinars and things along those lines. But we roll out our new content that way. So you get access to some of our latest best practices, research and data is. And come find me personally, the best way to find me is probably on LinkedIn, where I do tend to respond slowly, but respond and engage. I also tend to listen, lurk, and occasionally snark on Twitter. So that's also a good place to find me. I'm just @Wittlake on Twitter. 

[35:53] Shahin Hoda  Fantastic. Thank you so much, Eric.  

[36:35] Eric Wittlake  Thank you.