AMA: Docker SVP, Growth Marketing (CMO Role), Andy Ramirez ✪ on Account Based Marketing Strategy

I treat my internal stakeholders the same as I do any customer. I seek to understand what matters to them, what jobs to be done they have, and then I position my proposals to ensure I address those. For the most part when you need a teams support in any kind of marketing it's because they also have a vested interest in the result. As an example. If the team is going after a very specific set of accounts and needs the PMM org to provide some content specific to that segment I ask my team to first do the research. What do we have already that meets the needs? (Job to be done: create net new content that helps further meet customer needs and pain points) What are the gaps between what we have and what we think we need? (Job to be done: align content to audiences and their needs, don't be too broad) How can the output created drive value beyond this specific campaign? (Job to be done: maximize the impact of your work, create as much derivative work or reuse as possible). One other tip here, make a habit of thanking and giving credit to stakeholders who participate in your campaigns. When they can easily see the value they are driving you'll find over time that it becomes much easier to get support.

This is another answer that varies depending on your company, the maturity of your GTM, what kind of sales motions you have (PLG, PLS, Sales led, etc.), who interacts with accounts, and more. Here are some of they key stakeholders I've worked with and why. These are NOT in a particular order. * PMM - One of the primary functions of product marketing is to understand the industry, personas, pain points/needs, jobs to be done, and how your products and services align. They are a key source of information when you're looking to understand how to translate that into ABM. Firmographic details we should consider. Target titles. Etc. * Field Marketing - The field is another key area of information. Geography often plays a key role in how you decide your strategy, what plays you run, where you have more opportunity, etc. * Your executive team - This one is waaaay too often overlooked. In every company I've been in most execs spend a great deal of time around customers, partners, competitor, analysts, press, other industry players, etc. Please include your exec team in developing your thinking. They have so much great information and want you to succeed as much as you want to. Let them share their knowledge and help you fine tune your targets and approach. * Customer success - Another often underleveraged team. I can't tell you the number of times I've come up with something I think is going to land and a CS person says "my customers don't really care about it like that, but if you said it this way it would work" and they've been absolutely right. They hear customers at their most emotional, in times of their biggest frictions, when they have the biggest needs. This is a gift, customers are literally telling them exactly what they want. Why would you waste or ignore this? * Sales - If I have to explain why sales is a critical partner we need to have a much bigger discussion ;-) I know you said internal, but if you company has advisors, an engaged board, a customer advisory board, customer champions, or anything like that please also take advantage of them.

What a great question!! I'm certain I'll totally fail to give an answer half as good as the question but here goes. * Metrics - How the ABM processes, campaigns, etc. are measured. Are we meeting benchmarks. E.g. click through rates, conversion rates, account penetration rates, etc. This helps ascertain the health of the program. * Analytics - This is looking at the trends and what they tell you about your strategy. E.g. this type of content does better on these metrics for those segments. Or we're getting more of this kind of feedback from customers from CS so need to address with content. * Insights - The knowledge you gain when you truly understand the above and your external data (e.g. industry reports). Insights are when you create a new understanding. For example when you find a product gap all your competitors have that you can leverage to win a particular segment easily. Or that a particular channel is best when targeting a specific segment and persona. These are your advantages.

In a perfect world there would be a single dashboard listing all my content, with search, GenAI summaries, and automations to promote, demote, or flag content for review. What I'd want to know is: * When was the content created? * Who wrote it originally? * Who last edited it? * What is a brief summary of the content? * What products does this content relate to? * What personas does this content serve? * What jobs to be done does this content address? * What are the key needs, pain points, addressed in this content? * When was it last reviewed? * Are there any time sensitive components in this content such as product screenshots, technical instructions, customers logos, etc. that need to be regularly reviewed for current relevancy? * How has this content been used already? (websites, campaigns, social networks, 3p networks, etc.) * What stage of the funnel is this for? * Is this high value enough to be gated? Probably more. But ideally I'd love a tool that helps me very quickly filter content based on criteria like these. Allowing my team to ensure content is reviewed regularly, updated or removed, technically accurate, still valuable, hasn't been overused, etc.

The fact your categorizing your content and really considering what funnel stage its for is a great start. You likely have a sense of where you should be. Trust this sense. Maybe your company awareness is quite high but visitors just aren't really figuring out why your products matter to them, time to add more middle funnel. Maybe you're getting lots of interest but not converting opportunities to win, lets arm sales with better bottom of funnel content. This should be flexible. But.. here's my basic balance. * I want about 50% of content created to be top of funnel. Having great awareness would be an awesome problem to have but very few companies have that. The rest of the funnel doesn't matter if you don't have the top. * 20% is middle of funnel. You shouldn't need a lot here if your product positioning is good and you understand your audiences. The quality of the content matters more than the quantity here. Your content can be broader in nature by addressing more pain points, needs, jobs to be done, etc. * 30% bottom of funnel. Here you need to spear fish. You have to create content that speaks to very specific needs. So by virtue of that you have more to do and it's ever changing. Prioritize this based on how often it is asked for and will be used.

Someone once told me that the average adoption rate of martech platforms is close to 5%. Meaning that of all the features they make available the average customer only uses about 5% of them. I don't think this is exactly right but I believe it to be directionally accurate. Trust me when I say I have a little experience with the accuracy of that. This is wasted opportunity, not using features you're paying for. So you need ADOPTION for new martech solutions. Get a few folks internally to become champions of it, get them training anyone that can get value from it, create guilds, highlight successes, make yourself the best customer of that platform possible. Suddenly you'll be getting way more value than you pay for. Way easier said than done but if you can accomplish escape velocity the ROI will absolutely be there, if not you'll likely throw away money blame the vendor and try something else.

I'll be blunt, if you're not using intent I believe you're wasting money. Yes, intent data is expensive. I know it seems counter intuitive how often we have to spend money (buying intent data) just for the right to spend some more money (marketing to those accounts). I look at it this way. If I took you to a place that does paintball, paintballs cost $0.10 and the room will be pitch black. BUT you could spend an extra $20 to get glasses that let you see exactly which players are on the other team, would you buy them? (ok also imagine you win $1000 if you win at said paintball). Of course you would. You need to see who you're targeting or you're just shooting blind. Paintballs might be cheap but they're not that cheap. This does not mean you should break your budget buying intent data tomorrow. I do believe you can get a lot done and a good marketing machine going on basic fundamentals and low hanging fruit at the start, so wait until the time is right. But for most companies I mean the time was two years ago and they've been pushing this off for too long.

Hopefully I'm understanding this question right in thinking you want to know what companies to target, not the target goals of my company... I'm going to answer the former but if I've totally misunderstood your question please forgive me. What companies I ask my teams to target is decided based on a number of factors and these factors do fluctuate between companies and sometimes between time periods (e.g. you may be experiencing a period of great new customer acquisition but need to address churn or expansion, which would shift your targets). Here are some things I like to consider. * Positioning alignment. If we've done our job well we know the audience for our products, their pain points / needs, jobs to be done, and how our products help meet those. We build campaigns in AMB around a narrower scope of those. For example lets say a new enterprise feature at your SaaS company is specifically for customers who have government contracts. You'd narrow your targeting for this campaign to SaaS vendors with FedRamp approval and likely to their gov focused AEs or partners. * Intent. There are so many ways to infer intent at an account level. From what they do on your own website to analysis from third parties like 6Sense or HG Insights. Some marketing teams consume and combine intent data from multiple sources to maximize their chances of getting accounts the right marketing. * TAM and PMF balance. Your new product might be amazing for SMB and Mid-Market companies but when accounts start getting bigger than 1k users it stops making sense. You wouldn't want to target large enterprises because the product isn't right for them, you wouldn't want to target super small companies because the cost of acquisition might mean years to recover your investment if the price point is low or the initial contract sizes are too small (this might be a good PLG target though). * RAD (or RADO). Retain, Acquire, Develop, Optimize. Your own customers are also targets. Do you have a retention problem and need some support to keep them here? Do you have large customers with small contracts and lots of opportunities to expand/develop? Do you have an opportunity to build better long term contracts by ensuring your customers are right sized? There's definitely time to consider these. * Pure firmographic targeting. Sometimes it is real simple, we need to sell this product to companies above 1000k employees who are headquartered in major cities and sell managed services. I'm certain there's lots more to consider but if I keep writing I'll spend all night on just this answer. Infinite possibilities here. The goal is; be thoughtful, maximize your potential ROI, and make sure you can actually target those companies. Test, prove your targeting and campaigns. Expand from there.

I don't see them as fundamentally different than all up marketing KPIs, but the emphasis likely changes. Some you might value more are: * Account penetration / engagement * Average deal size * Win rate * Average contract value * CAC/LTV * NPS * Influenced expansion / retention I care about all of these as a marketing leader but I expect the numbers to be fundamentally different for target accounts in an ABM approach.