About this episode

B2B lead generation has had to reinvent itself over the last decade.

Sales teams have always taken an account-based view. They think in terms of target accounts, buying committees, opportunities, and relationships.

Marketing, though, has often been trained to think in terms of leads.

That creates a problem.

In B2B, you are almost never selling to one individual. You are selling into a buying team. And the bigger the deal, the more people, departments, and functional areas get involved.

That is why many B2B marketers eventually hit a wall with a purely lead-based approach.

Account-based marketing is not just a campaign. It is not just advertising to a list of target accounts. And it is not just marketing.

ABM works best when sales, marketing, customer success, and other revenue-generating teams operate together around the accounts that matter most.

That is why I interviewed Jon Miller, then CEO and co-founder of Engagio. Jon and his team had just released the second edition of The Clear and Complete Guide to Account-Based Marketing.

In this conversation, Jon explains how account-based marketing differs from traditional demand generation, why marketers need to adopt the language of accounts, and how empathy, relevance, and measurement all fit into a stronger ABM strategy.

About Jon Miller

Jon Miller has spent his career building marketing technology companies. He co-founded Marketo with Phil Fernandez and later co-founded Engagio, an account-based marketing platform.

Jon brings a deep perspective on marketing automation, account-based marketing, revenue teams, customer data, and how B2B companies can move beyond lead-based thinking.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Jon Miller and Engagio
00:14 Why Jon started Engagio
02:20 How Jon defines account-based marketing
03:13 Net fishing versus spearfishing
04:35 Why ABM is a go-to-market strategy
08:07 Why marketers need to stop thinking only in leads
10:09 How empathy and relevance fit ABM
18:04 Tips to do ABM better

A few things worth taking away

  • ABM is not a campaign or tactic. It is a go-to-market strategy.
  • Traditional demand generation is like fishing with nets. ABM is more like spearfishing.
  • ABM works best when sales, marketing, and customer success coordinate around target accounts.
  • ABM should focus on the full revenue journey: landing new accounts, accelerating deals, expanding relationships, and retaining customers.
  • Marketers have been trained to think in terms of leads, while salespeople think in terms of accounts.
  • One of the biggest shifts in ABM is getting marketing and sales to use the same language.
  • Empathy and relevance are two sides of the same coin.
  • ABM requires understanding the pains, motivations, and emotional risks buyers face inside complex purchases.
  • Many teams pick too many target accounts and then cannot deliver the personalization required.
  • Starting ABM with advertising alone can create disappointment because ads are not a strategy.
  • You cannot be account-based if your systems cannot show account-level data.
  • ABM metrics should focus less on quantity and more on quality, engagement, and relationships with the right accounts.

A few lines that stuck with me

“Account-based marketing is spearfishing as opposed to net fishing.” — Jon Miller

“ABM is a way of running your go-to-market.” — Jon Miller

“If it’s just marketing, it’s not a strategy; it’s a campaign.” — Jon Miller

“We taught marketers to talk about leads.” — Jon Miller

“Empathy and relevance are really just two sides of a coin.” — Jon Miller

“It’s not about counting the people you reach. It’s about reaching the people that count.” — Jon Miller

Resources mentioned

You may also like

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Full transcript

Brian: Well Jon, welcome. Why don’t you start by telling us a little bit about your background and what inspired you to start Engagio?

Jon: Sure, great. I’m excited to be here and have a chance to hang out with you again. It’s been a while since we talked.

My background: I’ve been in marketing technology almost my entire career. My undergraduate degree is actually in physics. When I was coming out of college, I ended up doing a lot of work with companies that were trying to take advantage of all the customer data they had to make decisions.

Because I came to marketing with that quantitative and analytical background, that led me into a series of marketing technology companies that were basically all about trying to use all that data to drive better customer decisions and one-to-one interactions. I was very much inspired by the Don Peppers and Martha Rogers book The One to One Future.

I worked at a company called Exchange, and then I was an early employee at a company called Epiphany, which was probably the leading marketing technology company of the mid-90s.

After we sold Epiphany, I co-founded Marketo along with Phil Fernandez. I think that’s arguably, or maybe not even arguably, the leading marketing technology company of the last 10 years or so. It recently sold to Adobe for just under $5 billion.

So I had this long career in marketing technology, but one of the trends I think is always true is that marketing is changing all the time, as well as the underlying technologies. I felt about four years ago that Marketo wasn’t, frankly, moving fast enough to keep up with all the new trends and changes in how marketing was done.

So I was inspired to start a new company that would really be seeking to build out the next generation of marketing products that could take advantage of all these new trends. One of those big trends is what’s now known as account-based marketing. That is where I really decided to start and focus, to have Engagio be a platform for account-based marketing.

Brian: Well, there are a lot of definitions out there about account-based marketing, and I’ve talked with CMOs and VPs who see account-based marketing as just good marketing.

But I’d love to ask you, you just had this new book come out, The Clear and Complete Guide to Account-Based Marketing, and you’re on your second edition. How would you define it?

Jon: First of all, let me just say I’m really excited about the book. It is a second edition. I wrote the first one about three years ago, and I’ve learned a ton more about ABM in the last three years.

I’ll start with a colloquial definition of ABM, then I’ll give you my formal one.

I think the colloquial one I like to use is a comparison back to the kind of marketing that we did with Marketo. That is the marketing that I like to describe as fishing with nets.

When you’re fishing with nets, you run your campaigns and you don’t care which specific fish you catch. You just care: did I catch enough? Then you can do lead nurturing and lead scoring to run it through the system.

But when you’re going after bigger or more strategic accounts, or maybe you’re going after your existing customers for expansion, or you’re in a narrow industry, any time you have a specific list of named accounts, you don’t want to wait around for those big fish to swim into your net. You’re going to find ways to reach out to them proactively.

It’s much more like fishing with a spear.

To me, that’s the simple definition of account-based marketing: it’s spearfishing as opposed to net fishing.

My formal definition is that account-based marketing is a go-to-market strategy that will coordinate personalized marketing and sales efforts to land and expand at target accounts. Can I explain what some of those words mean?

Brian: Yeah. If you could break that out, that would be great.

Jon: First of all, I’m very precisely calling it a strategy. ABM is a way of running your go-to-market and how your sales, marketing, and customer success teams work. It’s not a campaign or a tactic.

So you really do need to say, “We use ABM as our go-to-market strategy, or at least one of our go-to-market strategies.”

Second, ABM is really all about being personalized. There’s so much noise in the market today. If you’re spearfishing and you’re trying to reach the right people at the right companies, somehow you’ve got to break through all that noise. The best way to do that is with relevance, resonance, and empathy, which I know we’ll talk about.

ABM is actually a misnomer because we’re saying it’s account-based marketing, but right there in my definition I’m talking about marketing and sales. I think we should talk about that a little bit more later.

ABM is about landing and expanding. Especially today, so many companies earn revenue through subscription models and recurring revenue models. Just focusing on new business, which is what net fishing is all about, is really a limited, myopic focus.

ABM expands, or changes, the marketer’s mindset to focus on the entire revenue journey: landing, creating new pipeline, accelerating existing deals, and expanding and retaining existing relationships.

ABM plays across all that. That’s why I chose that definition.

Brian: Well, it makes sense, and I appreciate what you’re talking about: the overarching trend. CEOs are focused on lifetime value, LTV, and CAC, customer acquisition cost. ABM is providing an answer to that.

There still is so much confusion out there, and you say ABM isn’t just about marketing. How do you mean? How is it really different from demand generation? Because I still think people out there, even though we’ve just talked about the definitions, are still getting confused.

Jon: I always thought it was ironic that we called the category Marketo played in “marketing automation.” People thought marketing automation meant you have fewer humans doing less work.

The reality is the exact opposite. When you buy a tool like Marketo, or any marketing automation platform, it requires work. People have to do stuff.

In many ways, marketing automation is a misnomer in the same way that ABM is a misnomer because ABM is not just about marketing.

If you’re focused on the entire revenue journey — creating new pipeline, accelerating existing deals, expanding and retaining relationships — that can’t just be marketing. It has to be an orchestrated business initiative between the different functions.

Frankly, if it’s just marketing, it’s not a strategy; it’s a campaign.

At Engagio, and with a lot of our customers, their strategies are not called ABM. They call it something like account-based everything, or the account-first initiative, or something as simple as account-based sales and marketing.

I’ve seen all of those at play, and I think it really is the right way to think about it. Otherwise, as I said, it’s just a campaign.

Brian: I think that’s a huge distinction, especially as people are thinking toward the future.

I liked in your book, as I was reading it, you have a quote: “Salespeople never talk about how many leads they close. They talk about how many accounts they closed.”

Do you find that marketers see this differently, and why?

Jon: Well, yeah. I mean, this is my fault and a little bit your fault.

Brian: Sure.

Jon: We taught marketers to talk about leads.

Brian: Right.

Jon: Literally, we called it lead nurturing and so on. The technologies that we use, like Marketo, for example, were built to be lead-based systems. You can’t even log into Marketo and look at an account, for example.

So we created this world where marketers talked about leads and salespeople talked about accounts, which almost by definition meant they were not on the same page.

That’s not the only reason marketing and sales have trouble getting along, but it certainly didn’t help.

I think a big part of ABM, put simply, is marketers adopting the language the salespeople use and being on the same page.

Brian: Yeah. I think salespeople have practiced, in some ways, the very things you’re talking about in your book. They may have called it strategic account selling, major account selling, or target account selling.

But they did focus on these accounts. As you talked about, now marketers are coming alongside salespeople and working on these accounts together.

We’re going to talk about some process steps, but I wanted to step back to something you said earlier: there’s so much noise out there. We have more channels, more content, and more technology to reach customers than ever before. But connecting with them has never been harder.

I am, of course, a big proponent and fan of empathy. How do you see building empathy for our customers to bridge that gap of connection and trust and account-based marketing fitting together?

Jon: In ABM, once you’ve identified the accounts you want to go after and the people at those accounts you want to reach, you’ve got to find a way to reach out to them and engage them.

It’s such a crowded, noisy market, and people love to ignore unwanted marketing and unwanted messaging.

I think at the core, if you want to cut through the noise, you have to find a way to delight your prospects, educate them, and add value to them.

Empathy and relevance are really just two sides of a coin. If you empathize with your prospects, the people you’re trying to reach, it means you understand their pains.

If you understand their pains, you’re going to be in a much better position to teach them something about their specific economic motivators and their specific pains. That is how we stand out.

I think it’s very much like The Challenger Sale, which is so popular on the sales side of the equation. That’s what the best salespeople do. They teach, and they tailor, and they do that by having empathy with their customer.

So very much these things go hand in hand. I’m sure you have additional thoughts on that because you’re the empathy expert.

Brian: I certainly do. For our listeners, we had Brent Adamson, who is co-author of The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer, so we got Brent’s thoughts about this.

I’ll share my perspective. At a deeper level, you talked about pains. Neuroscientists have shown that we rationalize our decisions, but all our decisions are based in emotion.

So what we need to do is connect to, as you talked about, the pains, but also the results people want.

We have to think about when they’re making a purchase, where it’s a complex sale, and ABM is oriented to that. Multiple people are involved.

What causes us to change is that we see something in it for us. What causes us to stay stuck is like trying to climb a mountain.

If I want to climb and I have to take other people with me, some of them don’t want to go. Or I’m concerned about how they feel about doing this. How will my team see me?

I’m going to be concerned about whether this is going to add 10 extra hours to my week when I’m already maxed out.

There’s this personal stuff happening inside your customer because we’re all customers. We all make decisions emotionally.

What we need to realize is that just because it’s B2B, we think it’s less emotional. But the reality is the stakes are higher. It’s more emotional.

That’s the thing I find: we’ve got to tune into every stage of the journey and what’s happening.

Jon: That’s a great point.

The only thing I’d also add is I think the emotions in B2B tend to be more about avoiding negative emotions, whereas B2C might be about seeking aspirational emotions.

Because in B2B, there’s such a disconnect between the fact that if you make a good purchase, your company is a little bit better off. If you make a bad purchase, you can lose your job.

Brian: Yeah. Often people start journeys by saying, “Hey, I’m learning about this, and I feel inspired and hopeful we could actually do something.”

Pretty quickly after that, it goes to despair. Like, “Oh my gosh, is this even worth it? I want to try to get this into our company, but it’s so hard.”

For that person, they’re really saying, “Do I want to do this? Is it really going to be worth it?”

As you talked about the pain, changing is painful. There’s so much there.

I loved that you laid out a process based on what you’ve seen as a proven approach: these seven ABM process steps. We probably don’t have time to go through all of them, but where do you see marketers getting stuck or needing to put more attention in those seven ABM process steps?

Jon: For the listeners, I’ll summarize the seven steps down and keep it simple. It’s really about who, what, where, and measurement.

Who do you want to go after? Which accounts? Which people?

What are you going to say to those accounts that’s actually going to be empathetic and relevant?

Where is how you actually get that message in front of them. What channels? How do you orchestrate those interactions?

Then the last piece is measurement of the whole thing.

In terms of your question, where do people get stuck, it’s really a maturity curve.

Obviously, to start, you need to pick your accounts. That is a process that has to go hand in hand with sales. The companies that are less mature can get wrapped around the axle right there. They just can’t find a good process for how marketing and sales actually collaborate around an account selection process.

Once they’re past that stage, the next area I see people get stuck is that they pick too many accounts to really be able to deliver the level of personalization and relevance that’s truly required to be successful with ABM.

I’ve seen people pick 200 tier-one accounts. Having 200 tier-one accounts means you are not creating a bespoke, customized interaction with deep account-relevant research at every one of those 200 accounts.

There is a set of interconnected challenges there, but it starts with recognizing that you’ve got to be able to break through the noise and stand out. That requires being more relevant, and you have to right-size the number of accounts you pick to your actual ability to be relevant.

Then the third challenge that the most mature companies run into is scaling the whole thing.

Great, you’ve identified some accounts, and you’ve identified things that you can do that are going to help you stand out. It worked great in your pilot.

Now, how do you start to automate some of those steps to bring it to the next level and make sure that any time a target account is doing something interesting, your sales team knows about it and you’re following up appropriately?

It has to become a machine and not a whole series of one-act heroics.

I’d say those are probably the three areas, if you look across the who, what, and where, where people get into trouble.

Brian: That’s really good, Jon.

Along these lines, I wanted to ask, for someone out there who’s listening and thinking of beginning ABM, or someone who’s started it, do you have any tips or actionable advice you would give to someone over coffee if they said, “Hey, how do I do better?”

Jon: Yeah, a couple tips.

I think the first is that I see a lot of companies start their ABM journey with display advertising. I think they do that because it’s really easy. It’s an easy button. You just have to spend some money, give them your account list, and hey, you get to say you’re doing ABM.

But I’ve also seen that lead to disillusionment with ABM quite frequently because the reality is, I don’t care if you’re doing account targeting or not. Ads are ads.

Brian: Right.

Jon: I don’t click on ads. I don’t even notice ads. I’m sure that’s probably true with a lot of other executives.

So my first tip is don’t get seduced into thinking that you can really just start with ads. I think of ads as a nice thing you layer on top of an existing program, but not your first step. That’s my first piece of advice.

My next piece of advice is that you really have to think about your technology infrastructure.

At Marketo, I started trying to do ABM with Marketo and Salesforce and the systems that I had. It was hard because those are lead-based systems, and the data in those systems doesn’t wrap into your account.

I made my marketing operations team crazy just trying to set up the processes so I could even measure whether or not we were having an impact at the account level.

If you’re looking to start, I think it’s worth thinking about: what is your account foundation? How do you look at data at an account-based level?

It’s kind of obvious when you say it that way. You can’t be account-based if you can’t look at your accounts. But I see a lot of people missing that as a place to start.

Brian: That’s very good.

As I was looking through the book, this is a book you’re offering for free to people for providing information. You put a lot of effort and energy into it. It’s very well done.

What’s your favorite chapter in your book, and why?

Jon: My favorite chapter? Sophie’s choice. I’m not going to pick one. I’m going to pick two here.

Brian: Okay, sounds good.

Jon: First, I really like the whole part two of the guide, which is all about the different styles of ABM.

The concept of ABM entitlements is totally new in the second edition. I like it a lot because when I go and talk to our customers about how they take their ABM program to the next level, this concept always comes up: the different styles and the entitlements.

It’s related directly back to the problem I talked about earlier, which is that people tend to pick too many accounts and therefore aren’t able to deliver enough wood behind the arrow.

So I think part two about the styles of ABM entitlements is one of my favorites.

The other one I like a lot is this whole section on ABM metrics and measurements, partly because I’m a quantitative, measurement, numbers guy.

But it’s really struck me how different the metrics in ABM are from the metrics in traditional demand generation.

In a nutshell, the metrics in traditional marketing primarily focus on quantity. Back to net fishing, it’s all about how many leads did I generate? How many opportunities did I generate? How many people attended my webinar? How many people showed up at my event? And so on.

It totally misses out on the much more fundamental questions around quality.

First of all, are these the right people from the right accounts? It’s not about counting the people you reach. It’s about reaching the people that count. Are you measuring that?

Even furthermore, it’s about understanding the depth and the quality of the relationship. How engaged are these people with you?

Most salespeople would rather have meaningful engagement from a decision maker at a target account than 100 random leads. ABM metrics really embrace that concept.

Brian: Totally. That’s great.

Is there anything you wanted to add? Otherwise, I was going to ask what’s the best way for readers and listeners to get in touch with you.

Jon: We’ve been talking a lot about the book. The big thing I want to add is go grab it. It’s 175 pages. It’s easy to read, with lots of charts and tables, but it’s packed with actionable, useful information.

You can grab it on our website at Engagio.com/guide. Just Engagio.com/guide.

That’s a great way. If you want to see a demo of Engagio, you can check a box there as well, and we’ll get in touch with you.

If you want to reach me personally, probably the best way is over Twitter, where I’m just @JonMiller. J-O-N M-I-L-L-E-R.

Brian: Perfect. Well Jon, thanks again for joining us and sharing your insights. I’m really glad we got to reconnect after so long.

Jon: Yeah, it’s been great. Thank you.

Brian: Thank you.

 

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