Full Transcript

Kelsey Krapf 0:00
Welcome to the official podcast of the next cmo hosted by planner, makers of the first AI driven marketing leadership platform for quickly and easily creating winning marketing plans, maximizing budget impact and improving ROI. The next cmo is a thought leadership podcast for those that are CMOS or want to become one. My name is Kelsey craft and I’m the senior marketing manager.

Peter Mahoney 0:24
And I’m Peter Mahoney. I’m the founder and CEO of planner and welcome to the next cmo podcast.

Kelsey Krapf 0:44
For this week, we have Ron live na and hottie marks around is the founder and president of market capture and honey is the marketing strategy leader at blend. Both Iran and honey are experts in the ABM space. Thanks for coming on the show Ron and honey.

Peter Mahoney 1:00
Yeah, thanks. Welcome, guys.

Unknown Speaker 1:03
Nice to be here.

Peter Mahoney 1:04
Yeah, we’re excited to have you. And this by the way this conversation came up. It’s been we were joking earlier that it was a long time to schedule. We’ve been talking about it for a while Iran and I have been part of the same cmo networking group here in the Boston area for for a long time. And I recently had a great conversation with Iran about his philosophy and approach to ABM and said, Oh my God, we have to tell more people about this. Because I think ABM is one of those things that’s largely misunderstood. And he had the great suggestion to talk about the specific practical application of some of his theories with one of his clients. And that’s where we got to meet honey. So why don’t we start to be fair, ladies first and have Honey, why don’t you just introduce yourself quickly and tell us a little bit about blend?

Honni Marks 1:59
Hi, nice to join you guys. We’re actually I’m honey and I started at blend earlier this year blend is a digital lending platform. So we are working with different sizes, sized financial institutions. A lot of banks that you may know, but I might not mention their name on this podcast.

Peter Mahoney 2:19
Great. Excellent. And obviously the perfect example of someone if you’ve if you’re working in the financial services industry and selling to banks, you probably have a pretty well defined market. ABM probably is a front and center kind of strategy for your approach in Iran. Why don’t you just give us a little bit of your background in that background on your business?

Eran Livneh 2:42
Sure, sure. I’ve been in b2b marketing for probably longer than I would like to admit. I was VP marketing at a few software startups, maybe most known here in the Boston area is click software, which is now part of Salesforce. But over the past 16 years, I’ve mostly operated as a fractional cmo for b2b software startups and scale ups, as well as an advisor focusing on helping companies such as Blend, implement ABM programs and having a lot of fun at it.

Peter Mahoney 3:17
Yeah, that’s that that’s great in and the one of the things as I mentioned, that I was excited about in our discussion is is your approach to you put, you know, a nice process and around around ABM, so maybe you can set the table for us in in just define what you think ABM means around.

Eran Livneh 3:41
Yeah, so it’s funny because, you know, I think for those of us that have been working in b2b marketing for some time now, ABM is not really something very new. You know, over 15 years ago, actually, I wrote an article, I call the band know your customer by name. And that’s something that I’ve preached and implemented in many companies, before we ever call it ABM. And that’s another fun fact is if you look at trends on Google search, over the past 15 years, you will see that searches for account based marketing have really been taking off just at the same time. And pretty much at the same rate, that searches for one to one marketing has been declining. So in many ways, in my mind, we are just reframing and refining something that many of us have been doing for quite some time. And I think that the reason we’re doing it is is really not rocket science. Right. I mean, you know, I’ve seen ABM delivering superior results that pretty much every company that I’ve worked with, and if you think about it, it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Because, you know, every marketing knows that the more targeted you are, the more successful you’re going to be. So in my mind, when we talk about ABM, again, it’s not a very new thing. But the challenges in my mind is in the execution. And really, the way I look at it is ABN requires discipline. And at least the type of companies that I work with, many of them don’t have this kind of discipline. You know, especially when you look at young companies and entrepreneurs. You know, many of them just want things done quickly, they, you know, they tend to sometimes cut corners and look for things very quickly. So, you know, so I think that’s one of the challenges, but I would say also that, you know, I’ve been at it for quite a while. So I see that, actually, today, there is greater support for ABM strategies. In these organizations, there is more understanding of the need, compared to what I’ve seen maybe five or 10 years ago. And I think this is really what has brought us to the point where ABM is such a popular trend in so many companies today.

Peter Mahoney 6:13
Yeah, and I think the starting point that you alluded to there Iran is the the idea and it’s the same thing with one to one marketing if you’re doing personalization. Well, I just had this conversation with the other one might have been on one of our podcasts, I can’t remember they all blend together blend, look at that I used you. And I Exactly. And with personalization, as an example, the biggest challenge for most people is you need to start with actually segmentation. Because you need to figure out what are the buckets? And how do you define them, and then you start to build the messages for the buckets. And in in ABM, you need to have a very clear defined set of market segmentation definitions and targets. So you can build a list of what in the case of ABM gent ends up being is a very specific less list of named counts. So tell me, honey, when you started with was there a URI have sort of this an existing list? Did you have an account, target list that you went for? And was it segmented? Or did you need to start doing that work?

Honni Marks 7:19
Yeah, that’s a great question. I think this comes up a lot, right? When you’re talking about account based marketing. So I actually had a list that was pre determined. One thing to point out with this list, though, is we’re talking about strategic accounts, I work with the strategic sales team. So I would say about 80% of this target list our current customers, so we’re doing cross sell activities, and then the other 20% are net new prospects. So you have to think even in terms of your strategies for account based marketing, those are vastly different considering the majority of lists or customers where there’s a group of people that we have very strong relationships with. And then we have net new prospects, where we might have some relationships, but we’re really trying to create that for groundswell to get things moving. So as Iran, as Iran knows, when I started at blends, I will share that I went all in, I dove off the diving board, and said, we’re gonna do one to one personalized marketing. So I will share their audience, I think if a company is new to ABM, and just getting started, I would recommend you know, dial it back a little bit, start with a segment that, you know, as you described was, is based on pain points, or there’s some commonality, because trying to go all in at once with one to one, which is very detailed. Um, you know, we had some challenges with that. So I’d recommend, start with one too few and get your feet wet before you move into the one to one place.

Peter Mahoney 8:57
So in your case, what did that mean, what what is a one to few look like? In your case? Does that mean just getting more specific subsegment kind of messaging and offers or is it something different?

Honni Marks 9:13
Yeah, I mean, it, it obviously varies. I mean, I think for us, a lot of the commonalities that we’ve seen with our segment list is in terms of marketing to a specific persona, so we might have our set list of 20. But within those accounts, we’re divvying up these campaigns based on persona and doing highly targeted campaigns personalized content to a specific persona, we might still use the same content piece like the same ebook asset but all of our personalized ads, all of our landing pages are speaking to this specific persona. So I think it just depends on you know, what the audit what your target list is who they are, I mean, that’s a big part of ABM. Do you truly know who you’re selling to? What makes them unique? And what makes you unique? Why? Why do they want to engage with you? What what’s in it for them? This really needs to be part of your ABM strategy.

Kelsey Krapf 10:14
Definitely a Ron, can you talk to me about, I guess your current specific process for, you know, developing account based bargaining?

Eran Livneh 10:25
Yeah, sure, I’d be happy to. So I call it the perfectly imperfect ABM. But maybe let you know, let me take a step back and talk about what I see as some of the issues that companies struggle with in the execution. And I think you can get a little bit, a little bit of faith from what Annie just mentioned. But the first thing is that, you know, and that’s not the blend case, but I see definitely companies that are really giving you just half hearted effort. So for example, they will define some personas and create a campaign or two that is targeting these personas, but they don’t really follow through with a sustained effort. And they quickly go back to what I call marketing, as usual, which is really not targeted, more opportunistic, and really, in many cases, just focused on something like, Oh, yeah, we have this great new product. So let’s do a campaign around this. Rather than look at, you know, the buyer what problems they have, and how we can help them solve it. So that’s one type of companies in one tribe that are struggling with ABM. And the second is really the the opposite side of the spectrum. So companies that are really trying to boil the ocean and get it perfect before they get started. And the challenge, there is a treaty, in many cases, by the time to actually get something done and see some results, someone above and get three tire defeat and says, You know what this abmc ingredient doesn’t work. Or, you know, it’s not worth the effort. So let’s forget about it. So what I try to come up with is something that, you know, is is really giving a more practical way to go about it that is feasible for most companies, and also start showing results very quickly. And, and it has really four, four pillars, or four parts in my mind. And the first one we talked about is yes, you have to define your target buyer, if you don’t know that, then you know, you’re, you’re you cannot start. So you want to define them, you want to make sure that bearing CRM, you want to make sure that they’re in your marketing automation system, you want to make sure that, you know, if they respond to something you know who they are, and if they just came up came to your website, through an inbound effort, you also know that they’re part of your target list. So that’s the obvious. The second is the messaging. And really, the key here is, you know, to make again, as practical because you can start with something that is, you know, more focused in on generic persona is like, you know, head of line of business or a tech persona, and then just get more granular over time. And then the third part, which is very tied to the message is the content. And again, you know, you want to start with something that you can execute relatively quickly. So you’re not getting into, you know, six months cycles of creating all the different permutations of the content that you can think of. And really, the key is to get very quickly to the fourth part, which is, you know, to start activating eighth and reaching out to people so you can test and iterate and see how you can change it. And hearing my experience, you know, you have different strategies for outreach. But the my experience really the the to the torque, best in terms of time to market is email and SDR outreach. And, you know, you can add LinkedIn, you can add targeted ads, you can add all these other things. And it can talk to some of these, but I think this is, you know, you need to find something that works relatively quickly. So you can start showing results, learn and iterate on that.

Peter Mahoney 14:30
It makes a lot of sense, or I’m in and I used to tell people in personalization. So I ran the personalization business line for a software company here in Boston for a long time. And we used to tell people to start with two segments, customers and non customers. There’s a good start, right? make it really simple and and then just start to break it down further and further. And you’re right people get sort of crushed under the compliance have their own ambitions, and they can’t get it done because they want to boil the ocean and get everything else fit. So I think that’s, that’s really great that you sort of evolved to that to that point. The other thing that I assume is part of your your model is the idea of measurement and optimization. So that’s it. That’s a key thing, obviously, in any ABM strategy is, is one sort of defining a baseline to defining what the targets are for moving the needle on those metrics. How, how would you think about that generically, and maybe honey can talk about how they’ve thought about that specifically, in her in her world?

Eran Livneh 15:45
Yeah, so I think that’s, that’s a great question. And yes, in my mind, when you look at ABM, they’re basically there are a few measurements that are key. And again, you can you can get very granular, but if you keep these in mind, I think you have a good baseline. So in my mind, it’s about coverage. So if you know what your target market is, how many of them have you been able to identify? The second one is, is reach. So how many of them? Have you been able to reach out through your effort, and then the next one is engagement, how many of them have actually engaged with you. And then the last one is, is you know, and that can vary from one company to another, but some, some sort of conversion. So and you can define what your conversion target is, whether it’s a meeting, you know, in SQL, different companies and different elements of that. But in my mind, if you just keep it to those four steps, and just make sure that you measure these as you go along, you have a good starting point.

Peter Mahoney 16:54
So honey, how would you How would you think about that it blend? Is that the approach that you’ve used? And so where are you on the journey?

Honni Marks 17:03
Yeah, I would say I mean, considering that a large part of the strategy I’m working on is with strategic accounts, it’s to increase engagement. So you know, especially from conversations, working with sales, and trying to get them in alignment with these campaigns, obviously, you know, they have long term relationships with many people have these strategic accounts, probably 10 to 15. And so, when I’m working with sales to I’m trying to communicate to them, how can we help create, you know, interest, Buzz and increase engagement with these 90 800,000 people that you know, don’t know who blend are and so when you go to do a virtual presentation, there’s some brand awareness, we’re not you know, we’re still doing very top of the funnel campaigns brand awareness campaigns. But I would say the number one priority right now for blend is increasing engagement, strategic accounts, both within the customer subset and within net new prospects.

Peter Mahoney 18:07
That That makes sense. It’s interesting because it around I think you and I might have talked about this when we connected I did something that we didn’t call ABM because back in the day, they didn’t really call it that we had when I was at nuance, then called speech works. something called a BTA program, and it was BTA stood for Bullseye targeted accounts. And in part of what we did is in and by the way, this was not my brainchild. So props to Steve chambers, and Mike Thompson are two guys who actually killed it with this program. And, but the idea was to take a very specific list of people because we worked with, you know, the hundred largest call center centers in the world as an example. And we developed a baseline score. And the baseline score was basically a relationship assessment. In that relationship assessment was on a score, we had about five attributes on a score of zero to five. And it was, you know, where they current customer, your zero, where you were a repeat customer, it’s a five, it was based on the the IVR, some of the technology platform that was involved, we had a whole bunch of different factors. So you ended up with sort of this blended score of 50, whatever the number was, and and it was really useful because what we we did then is the program plan behind this was charged with progressing that score. So So basically, you had then this this model that you could use to say we want to we want to put effort against engagement, and then it was a little bit manual in the end, but that was okay, because there were 100 or something. And what we did is we had the sales team basically do their own assessment and say Are they a one or this or are they three on this You could see the the evolution of the approach. So it might have been overkill in what we did. But in our case, because it was a fairly tight kind of universe, it was useful. And it sounds like you probably have a similar size universe, maybe it’s, it’s not thousands, it may be in in the hundred ish order of magnitude, honey, is that right?

Honni Marks 20:22
Yeah. And as you were talking, I didn’t want to point out to you did mention the word manual. So I will say with account base, and where we try to say copy sales and marketing, um, Iran really brought that up. And I think that does really help get sales alignment. Blend has some of the brightest people I’ve ever worked with. And they’ve tried really hard to work with me to try to automate some of what we’re trying to do within account based marketing. And there are some areas that you can automate and figure out a process so that it’s not such deep research and such manual work. But I truly think you just really can’t replace that there’s still elements of account based marketing that you just have to roll up your sleeves and do research. And I will say like, that was another learning lesson, I would say that we’ve had it blend is that it just takes it takes more work and effort. But obviously, the payoff is much higher.

Peter Mahoney 21:25
Do you think? Go ahead, Kelsey.

Honni Marks 21:27
Yeah, what I wanted to ask you just because as a marketer, everyone understands the sales and marketing lineman is extremely essential for the business to thrive. So from an ABM perspective, how do you make sure to align, you know, the sales side into your ABM marketing efforts? Yeah, it’s a great question. I think, you know, there’s so many variables, depending on the company, the relationship between sales and marketing, but I can share my own personal experience, I think the first starting point is talking to the sales team that you’re working with about what account based marketing is, it’s always surprising to see, maybe not surprising, but you know, people have different definitions of what it means. And I think, as you know, first line of business, are you are you in the sales team in alignment with what account based marketing is and what you’re trying to do? So I think once you can work together, collaboratively, collaboratively, to discuss what the goals are. That’s his first starting point. I also when I’m working with sales, I try to do obviously, one to one, you know, we’re working with strategic accounts. So our strategic team maybe only has a few accounts, and truly this this is, you know, their their baby. So, you know, I think having a lot of one to one conversations to gather learnings about the account is definitely key. And then also, I think of a company’s marketing is supporting their account plan. So I think you have to have a lot of discussions about what are the account milestones, what were you trying to go with the account plan, I’m here to support your efforts, and really marketing should be supporting their strategy. I think an end goal would be to work collaboratively so that you’re both kind of setting a strategy for that account. But as a starting point, this marketer really needs to understand what the long term strategy is for that account, so that you can support their efforts. With that said, you always have to be fluid, you have to be ready for anything, you have to be able to change the campaign. Even if you map something out for six months, even with strategic accounts, things can change. You know, COVID is a great example. You have to be able to be nimble and change your strategy. And I would say you know, ultimately it takes time it takes time to build trust between what you’re doing and sales and it just really depends on what how that initial relationship started at the company How well do marketing and sales work together to start one other thing to mention just about trust, too, you have to say you know what I kind of came in your your, you’re also asking a lot of questions about their account and wanting their contacts and tell me more about the conversation. Let me let you know, I’m listening to your Gong calls like that you do need to make sure that you’re continuously sharing why you’re doing that how you’re trying to help move that account along because sometimes it can be a little bit aggressive, the wrong word, but there’s a lot of curiosity about like, why she asked me all these questions about my account. So yeah, I think that makes total sense because if they you know, these account managers have one to two accounts, these are their These are their babies, as you said and, you know, one wrong email that’s, you know, not personalized or doesn’t have the right approach could technically be ruin all of those efforts that that salesperson has, you know, built up over the years. So yeah. So say it, there’s a balance, right? You know, the account executive has the ability to opt out, like we work with them very, very detailed, going back to the manual, looking through their list of contacts, who do you not want us to contact, this is more for str efforts, I do think there needs to be a balance too, because until somebody gets warmed up, they could totally, you know, void you out of doing an entire campaign, which may or may not make sense. But you know, just like they say about every good salesperson, you have to be a good listener and really listen to them, and what they think the account needs are. So I really think of it as building a long term relationship.

Peter Mahoney 25:48
So it’s interesting because the you’re you’re bringing up a real challenge with, with a BM in it’s sort of drawing the line between one to one sales support in a scalable model for for ABM in and of course, you, you want it to feel very personalized to the account, you want to be able to deliver a very specific message. So it’s so around you see this a lot because you help companies figure this out? How do you help them move that slider to the right place? So that they’re they’re, they’re striking the right blend to do it again?

Eran Livneh 26:30
Yes, I think that that’s a really good question. And I think that obviously, the more granular you are trying to get, the more challenging it is to scale. So when you do one too many, you can reach a lot of accounts. But if you want to make it more effective, you need to target different personas within these accounts, with different messages and different content that is tailored to their pain points, and opportunities. When you do one too few like honey described, or one to one, you’re essentially multiplying the number of variations in your messaging and the content. And that really becomes more of a challenge. So the way I try to help companies scale these is essentially, to think about it as an assembly line. So you have, you know, the three stages that we talked about the message, the content and the delivery, and each one of them takes an input from the previous one. And if you start kind of like building these centers of excellence, or you know, it blend, they call them pods, around these specific targets, and you make sure that they’re all in alignment, then you can start scaling it, because then you have different groups that are responsible for different items, but they’re still taking their cues and building up on what the other the previous step really define. But really the critical piece here that that even comes before the the messaging and the content and Ani spoke about the the levy is the research part. And that’s the part that is actually more difficult to scale. So again, if you you know, if you’re just looking at, you know, something on at a high level, so, you know, you know, let’s take the planet, as an example, if you’re targeting CMOS, you know, I can imagine that you can think of some high level message that would pretty much speak to every cmo, you know, they have a pain of managing their marketing plans in one place and managing their budgets and you know, good Keep going, keep going,

Unknown Speaker 28:43
keep going.

Eran Livneh 28:46
That can be that can be pretty generic. So, but you know, it not easy start breaking it down, then you know, you may you may or may not need to research like because CMOS in pharma may have a different set of issues, compared to CMOS in software, they have maybe more regulatory issues that they have to deal with and other elements that they have to account for. And then a CMO with, you know, 500 people in their marketing team have different needs, you know, compared to one that has 50 people or five people on their team, so you start breaking it down, obviously the the kind of messages and the kind of level of research that you need to put into it, you know, that that needs to scale. And obviously, when you get to the one to one, like Kanye said, Now, you really have to dive into this specific account, understanding of what’s going on with their business, you know, are there you know, who are the players there, you know, who actually pulling the strings and all these kind of things. And that’s really something that takes time and it’s actually difficult to automate. So in my mind, it’s really about segmentation. So you know, take take Blend, for example, for example, Hani mentioned, you know, you can only do it for 20 accounts, when you do it for 20 accounts, you can, you know, put a lot of effort into it. And then you take the rest of your target list and you, you know, you do them on a one to few on or one to many bases. So, so that’s how you are able to basically take some of these things that, that you’re doing, scan them for, for one portion of your target market, but then really get very granular and very detailed on, you know, on the ones that are really critical and strategic for you.

Peter Mahoney 30:38
That’s great. That’s very helpful. And the, and the like everything, it feels like it’s an evolution for people, right, you need to, you need to start, you need to get more refined as you go over time. So a honey is you look for blend to to measure the outcomes of your ABM efforts. How do you how do you think about that? You don’t have to share the specific numbers, obviously, but what are the kinds of outcomes that you expect to measure? And how do you feel about it so far? What any near you in?

Honni Marks 31:14
Um, isn’t the World Series over?

Peter Mahoney 31:17
Yeah, I’m famous for using analogies about things. I don’t know, I don’t know anything about sports. So I use sports analogies. I’ll use you know, war analogies. I don’t know anything about anything. But yes. So we’re I don’t know if it’s over. But what do you mean, are you in any way?

Honni Marks 31:34
Oh, that’s a great, I think it depends on the account. I think we’ve made more progress on on some of the 20 strategic accounts than we have others I would say. I’m admittedly on a few are probably in the first inning. And I think on others were maybe in the fifth inning. You know, what is challenging about the strategic accounts is the movement, there might not be movement for a long time. So as I touched upon earlier, looking at the increased engagement by month is very helpful. And in particular, engaging with the right personas, the right target audience. Those are all things that we’re looking at in terms of measurement to see how we can truly have these campaigns help move the needle. So I think it just depends on the account. And what what’s going on with that, I would say first between first inning to fifth inning.

Peter Mahoney 32:28
Yeah. So do you have? So specifically the the metric that you look at is some kind of an engagement score? Yes. So that’s the leading indicator where the the ultimate business result is going to be more sales for the strategic accounts, obviously. But the the, the first step is getting better and deeper engagement within those accounts, is that correct?

Honni Marks 32:55
For the strategic accounts, I’m also working on I guess, I would call this special project, which is somewhat account based marketing, I’m working with some of our smaller customers that are in the financial services space. And we’re looking at metrics in terms of monthly funded loans through blend, and so I’m doing a number of campaigns with them, that are highly targeted, developing very personal assets, for them videos, I’m really partnering with their marketing team a lot more just to try to help out and push some of blend messages within for them to reach their customers. So, you know, I would say the metrics for those customers are different before the strategic accounts right now. It’s really about engagement and conversion.

Eran Livneh 33:49
Yeah, I think the ones that they mentioned the other ones, the metric varies probably, you know, some some level of adoption. So they’re trying to increase adoption within these accounts, which again, for for customer for existing customers, that’s that’s a great metric and a great use of ABM.

Peter Mahoney 34:10
Yeah, that’s, that’s great. And obviously, probably measurable. And you talked about some of the, in your case, it’s loans processed or something like that. So you have an actual, an actual application feature consumption metric that you can look at, which is, which is great. So that actually would be a great analysis to be able to say, Have you no, and the question is, do you create a control do you say, I’m going to take the people outside ABM and compared to the people inside ABM and look at to see if there’s been a faster change of adoption? Have you if you looked at that at all, or do you just say I’m gonna, everyone’s gonna get this?

Honni Marks 34:54
It’s a great question. As of right now, it wouldn’t really be fair. Because some of these marketing efforts with customers are fairly new to the company. So I don’t think there’s an even comparison to say, you know, we’re going all in ABM for these accounts. You know, ultimately, the goal is that we will scale out these ABM programs to all of our customers. And as Iran talked about, we’re really trying to put those strategies in place too, because you know, you’re trying to make every single touch highly personalized, highly relevant. Well, how do you scale it out where there are so many unique qualities to all these different customers, and basically how they do their business as well.

Peter Mahoney 35:37
So honey, is there anything that you know now, about ABM and your ABM efforts that you wish you knew before you started out on this journey?

Honni Marks 35:50
Oh, boy. Um, yeah, I mean, there’s many, many things. I think, you know, sales alignment, there was a lot of learnings there about, you know, I think, with COVID, and everything being virtual, it’s harder to build those relationships with sales. So going back to what I touched upon before, I think, just recommending how one on one conversations, if you’re trying to gather information on accounts, with 20 people on a zoom call, it’s really hard to gather some of that information or have people speak up and say, you know, ask a lot of questions. So I would say that was a learning for me. And also, I won’t say it was new, new to me, but really the the amount of time it takes to do discovery to do research to dig around Salesforce. To try to pull up data, I would say that’s, you know, there’s just no replacement for really getting you’re rolling your sleeves up and doing it, it just takes a lot of time.

Peter Mahoney 37:00
In a run from your perspective, if if a company’s listening to this, and the marketer saying, Wow, I thought I should think about ABM, what are the kind of attributes you look at in a company to say, yeah, it’s that’s a valid kind of ABM would be a valid strategy, valid strategy to at least explore for the company. What What do you think they should be looking at?

Eran Livneh 37:26
Yeah, I think I mean, again, the companies I work with are primarily b2b software companies. So I would say that, you know, to 95% of them, if not 100%, ABM strategy would be applicable. In my mind, even if your software can serve, you know, an infinite conserve anybody which which something exists doesn’t exist. But let’s say it does, I would say that for a portion of your marketing can definitely go towards ABM because you want to own specific spaces. We’ve seen your market no matter how large it is, you know, if you think about, you know, the bowling alley dialing strategy from Crossing the Chasm. If you’re a software company that is starting, even if again, eventually you want to conquer the world. You know, you need to start with a well defined segment. And essentially, you know, going back to your question, any company that has a finite and well defined target market can use ABM. And I would say again, any company that doesn’t pay me to daddy, so so in my mind is pretty much everybody.

Peter Mahoney 38:43
Well, you It sounds like you’re not listening to your targeting strategy. Iran. If it’s everybody, then you prep, that’s not a very tight target market is it? Although to be fair, you actually did say, b2b software company, so I’m just tweaking you. And,

Eran Livneh 38:59
and, you know, when I started doing consulting, that was my my first decision, right? I mean, because you can be a marketing consultant, and you get calls from anybody and everybody. And I was very adamant that no, I am only going to work with b2b software companies. Because that’s what I preach to them. And that’s what I’m going to practice. So, yeah, so that’s the answer to your question.

Peter Mahoney 39:26
Excellent. So very targeted, start small. So I’d call it well, maybe it’s not ABM. It’s baby M. To start small. Right. There you go. All right. Well, that’s that’s great. So So tell us I think we need to get toward our wrap up here where this has been fascinating though. tell tell us a little bit more about maybe Honey, you can start where can people learn about blend if we happen to have some great financial institution marketers listening? Where can they learn more about blend

Honni Marks 39:58
at WWW dot HSN. dot com.

Peter Mahoney 40:01
It’s all right there. Great domain By the way, God, I’m jealous. That’s amazing. And in Iran, where can people learn more about market capture?

Eran Livneh 40:11
market capture that calm? One word,

Peter Mahoney 40:14
also a good domain?

Eran Livneh 40:16
Yeah. So absolutely, we’d be happy to talk to anybody that is interested in chatting about ABM,

Peter Mahoney 40:23
especially if you’re a b2b software company. Right, which is, exactly that’s, that’s what you do. And well, we’ll put links in the show descriptions for people to learn more about a blend and market capture and in honey and in Iran. So really appreciate your your time today and your great insights. Hopefully, people will find this really helpful as they start to think about their journey into into ABM or expanding their journey, if they’re already started. So what Kelsey, I think we have our one more favorite question to ask.

Kelsey Krapf 40:59
Yeah, honey, we’ll start with you. What advice would you give for CMOS or those aspiring to be one?

Honni Marks 41:06
Great question. I mean, I think what comes to mind, since we’re talking about ABM is why not ABM, you’ve got to make you know ABM part of your strategy as a VP cmo. There’s just no way around it. With the whole world being digital, digital and virtual. You have to be unique and stand out. And it has to be personalized for you to be successful. So that would be my advice.

And Ron,

Eran Livneh 41:34
yeah, so I’d go back to what I wrote over 15 years ago, know your customer by name. If you’re trying to market. You need to know your customers, you can call it a BM you can call it anything else. But if you don’t have the basics, you’re not going to be able to be successful at marketing to them. So that would be my advice.

Peter Mahoney 41:57
Great advice. I’m not surprised coming from your run. That’s great. Well, thank you so much. And I think Kelsey, let’s, we’re gonna take it out from here.

Kelsey Krapf 42:06
Thanks so much Iran and honey, appreciate the time learning about ABM and make sure to follow the next cmo and plan on Twitter and LinkedIn. And if you have any ideas for topics or guests, you can email them to the next cmo at planet

Peter Mahoney 42:21
Comm. Or you can go to our cool new landing page

Unknown Speaker 42:26
on our

Peter Mahoney 42:27
on our website. All right, great. Thanks, everyone.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai