Andrei Zinkevich on this episode
Andrei Zinkevich, co-founder of Fullfunnel.io, is a revenue operations strategist with 18 years of experience building and scaling account-based marketing programs for B2B SaaS companies. In this episode, he reframes ABM not as a technology-driven or overly complex motion, but as a cohesive, holistic revenue generation strategy that integrates sales and marketing around a carefully selected set of target accounts.
The core thesis is simple: ABM works best as a unified sales and marketing effort focused on high-probability accounts, requiring minimal resources—as little as one marketer and one SDR—when executed strategically around customer research and targeted awareness activities. Rather than separating inbound and outbound into silos, successful ABM collapses these into one prioritized list of accounts that both teams work together to engage, nurture, and convert.
Zinkevich challenges two common mistakes: oversimplification (assuming ABM is just programmatic ads and cold email) and over-complication (purchasing expensive intent data and ABM software before validating fit). The reframe he offers is that understanding your customer's buying process—who the decision makers are, what triggers their need, what evidence proves they have a problem your product solves—is far more valuable than tools. He walks through practical account selection criteria (revenue potential, product-need evidence, business signals, account awareness), the importance of building multiple tiers of account lists (declared intent, highly engaged, and awareness-stage accounts), and how to create awareness without large ad budgets through customer research, field events, industry partnerships, and peer communities.
The episode covers practical frameworks for scoring and prioritizing accounts, executing ABM pilots with lean teams, and running weekly ABM pipeline reviews to dynamically update account focus as engagement signals emerge. Zinkevich shares real examples of how Fullfunnel.io itself ran a Nordics market launch with a co-hosted event, demonstrating that enterprise pipeline often comes from activities that appear unscalable but drive real revenue.
What we cover in this episode
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0:48
Defining ABM in 2024 ABM as prioritizing accounts likely to convert and creating awareness among the buying committee through research and personalization.
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4:47
Avoiding ABM Over-Complication Rejecting expensive intent data and software in favor of understanding buying processes, signals, and product-need evidence.
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12:57
Building Account Lists with Tiers Three categories of accounts: declared intent, highly engaged, and awareness-stage accounts that demonstrate any level of vendor awareness.
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17:58
Sales and Marketing Alignment Collapsing inbound and outbound into one cohesive motion where both teams work from the same prioritized account list.
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21:37
Running ABM Pilots Lean Proof-of-concept programs with one marketer and one SDR, minimal budget, existing technology, focused on defined markets or verticals.
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28:10
Awareness Without Ad Spend Field events, industry associations, peer communities, customer co-hosting, and multi-touch engagement to raise account awareness.
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34:49
Account Scoring and Prioritization Scoring criteria: revenue potential, product-need evidence, business signals, firmographics, and level of account awareness.
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50:30
Dynamic Account Lists Weekly ABM is not static; weekly reviews of engagement data drive account prioritization and movement between tiers.
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53:04
Practical ABM Execution Real-world example of Fullfunnel.io's Nordics field event co-hosted with partners, generating 76 signups from manual outreach.
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45:00
Buying Committee Research Deep one-on-one conversations to identify decision makers, champions, power users, and their roles in the buying journey.
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30:48
Cold Calling Strategy Sequencing LinkedIn, email, and phone outreach with value props (events, content, insights) before direct sales pitches.
The lines worth sharing
ABM is all about prioritizing accounts that are likely to be converted into sales opportunities and creating awareness among the buying committee members.
Andrei Zinkevich · 0:48
A lot of markets are unwetted, which means companies are not problem aware. You can't sell to companies that aren't problem aware.
Andrei Zinkevich · 6:30
We shouldn't separate ABM from other motions. There should be a cohesive model where sales and marketing work together on the same account list.
Andrei Zinkevich · 17:58
You can run ABM with just one marketer and one SDR allocating at least 50% of their time to this motion.
Andrei Zinkevich · 28:00
Common questions from this episode
What is ABM and how does it differ from traditional inbound and outbound?
ABM is a unified approach that prioritizes accounts likely to convert and creates awareness among buying committees through research and personalization. It collapses separate inbound and outbound efforts into one cohesive strategy where sales and marketing work from the same prioritized account list.
Can you run ABM with limited resources?
Yes. ABM pilots can run with one marketer and one SDR dedicating at least 50% of their time, using existing technology and minimal budget. Success depends on focusing on the right markets and accounts rather than scale.
How do you build an account list for ABM?
Combine firmographic data, business signals (hiring patterns, funding, press releases), product-need evidence, and engagement signals into an account score. Prioritize by revenue potential, problem awareness, and likelihood of conversion. Update weekly based on new engagement data.
How do you create awareness for target accounts without ad spend?
Use field events, industry associations, customer co-hosting, peer communities, and multi-touch outreach (LinkedIn, email, calls). Sequence value-adds like events or insights before direct sales pitches to warm accounts.
What is the most common ABM mistake?
Applying sales territory criteria to account selection instead of validating product-need evidence. This forces companies to rely on volume and spray-and-pray tactics rather than strategic prioritization.
How often should you update your ABM account list?
Weekly. ABM is dynamic, not static. Run weekly pipeline reviews to identify newly engaged accounts, move accounts between tiers based on engagement signals, and adjust focus based on evidence that accounts are in market.
SEO meta description
Andrei Zinkevich from Fullfunnel.io reveals how to launch ABM with minimal resources by focusing on the right accounts and collapsing inbound and outbound into one unified motion.
Target keywords
ABM strategy
account-based marketing
Andrei Zinkevich
Fullfunnel.io
sales and marketing alignment
account list building
ABM with limited resources
problem aware
buying committee
account scoring
lean ABM program
outbound strategy
demand generation
RevOps
B2B SaaS growth
Read the complete conversation
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Read the full transcript · 55 KB · Andrei Zinkevich
EDDIE REYNOLDSWelcome to RevOps Corner, where we talk about how B2B SaaS companies scale through revenue operations by interviewing amazing guests and sharing what we see in the trenches every day here at Union Square Consulting. Okay, today we've got an exciting episode on how to launch
EDDIE REYNOLDSABM with Andrei Zinkovich, co-founder of Full Funnel. We're going to dive into what ABM really
EDDIE REYNOLDSis, the most important components of ABM, and how to launch ABM with as little as one marketer and one STR with no software and no ad spend. This is a really exciting session that I really enjoyed and I hope you enjoy it as well. Hey Andrei, how are you doing today? Hey, thanks for inviting
SPEAKER_04me. Excited to chat with you, all things related account-based marketing. I'm excited about it as
EDDIE REYNOLDSwell. So I wanted to kick this off and just ask, how do you define ABM in 2024? It's all about
ANDREI ZINKEVICHprioritizing accounts that are likely to be converted into sales opportunities, right? And focus on your marketing and sales efforts on creating awareness among the buying committee members, understanding their needs and personalizing your offer so they see a clear value and clear way how your product helps
SPEAKER_04with their challenges and jobs to be done. So I always think of ABM as the spectrum. I know it can get
EDDIE REYNOLDSvery sophisticated with targeted ads. So I'd love if you could share with me, how sophisticated does it get? What is the most advanced version of ABM in your mind? First of all, I would love to highlight
ANDREI ZINKEVICHtwo things. We don't need to over-sophisticate it and we don't need oversimplifying it, right? So let's start with the second one. What is oversimplification? Oversimplification is assuming that ABM is all about programmatic display ads and outbound and steroids, right? So all you need is ABM software to run the sets and then any sales automation software to spam people, right? This is not ABM, first of all. Now, our complication is when you kind of start buying all potential software, right? And then you start checking even things that are not really essential in the beginning. And they are like very, very complicated, complimentary to the ABM approach. For example, the keywords target accounts are looking for, right? You pay, I don't know, like solutions that provide that intent 50k. Then you are going and pay, for example, G2 for their intent data, right? So looking for the accounts that are reviewing different testimonials, right? On their portal, et cetera, et cetera. So I would say that over-complication comes from investing into these types of solutions, what you really need to do, and basically that would be an answer to your question, what you really need to do is understanding the buying process of your target accounts, right? Which means you need to have a holistic overview of how these people buy, what triggers their buying process, who is involved in that buying process, right? Whose budget is paying for your solution? And next, the most important thing is how can you make accounts problem aware? Because I bet, and this is the reality of B2B markets, right? A lot of markets are unwetted, which means that companies are not problem aware, right? So this is kind of essential. And for you, it means that you can't literally sell to companies, you can't sell your software, your product, right? To companies that are not problem aware. So that's, this is kind of the essence. It could be super sophisticated, right? If the buying journey is super complex, and then you want to kind of dive in and understand all the touch points with potential buyers. But I think that's not really the case. In most cases, whenever you'll understand what triggers it, right, then you can translate it into signals, right? What signals should we pay attention to so we can identify these accounts that would be likely to be converted into sales opportunities? Next, what are the channels of influence? Basically, how can we create awareness among these accounts? How can we engage with the buying committee members? And next is the account research. Account research is always divided into two parts: collecting the publicly available information, right, about these accounts, which kind of could be used as a product need evidence. And then there are always things that you can validate only through one-on-one conversations, right? So this is only the way how you can understand if that account is in market or not in market, right? So that's basically it. Yeah, and you've kind of alluded to a couple of the questions I wanted to ask, and where I wanted to
EDDIE REYNOLDSgo with this next is how simple can it get, right? So you talked a lot about accounts that are not yet problem there. So let me see if I understand this. What we're talking about is we have an outbound team, outbound SDRs, and they're cold calling Pepsi, for lack of a better example. I know that's probably not, I mean, obviously Pepsi buys B2B SaaS, so it's not a bad example. We're calling Pepsi, and the decision-makers of Pepsi just do not understand that they have a problem that your solution can solve. So with ABM, what you're talking about is you're doing a number of things to try to get marketing content in front of them so that they understand that there is a problem, so you can combine those
EDDIE REYNOLDSefforts with your outbound calling and have a better conversion rate over the life of the efforts to
SPEAKER_10convert that prospect into a customer. Is that about right? Yeah, absolutely correct. So let's quickly nail down the most common mistake, right? This is when
ANDREI ZINKEVICHcompanies apply platform graphics criteria to account list building or just getting a sales wish list, you know, and it's all about, hey, this is my sales list because all these companies are in my area or in my territory, so I want you to target them. And that is, nobody cares if there is like a product need evidence or no, right? And obviously, then what can you do? You only can play the game of numbers, right? This is why everybody thinks we need technology because it's not realistically possible to market to thousands of accounts in a meaningful way, right? Now, the second thing here is, like you said, whenever you build a list of accounts, that list should have three subcategories, right? The first one is declared in them. So these are the accounts like the hand razors, right? Those that are willing to talk to you. Sometimes, I mean, like usually, this should be accounts that are already in your pipeline, right? So you work on pipeline acceleration and all together kind of try to win the deal faster. So just to clarify, we're talking about accounts that have
SPEAKER_10engaged with your marketing and raise their hand saying, I would like to talk to sales.
ANDREI ZINKEVICHCorrect. Correct. So, or submitted the form on the website, right? Or they already, they used to talk to sales. And so all together, marketing and sales start working on accelerating the opportunity, right? Now, the second list is highly engaged accounts. And these accounts usually, if you'll talk to anybody who has a strong experience in sales, right? Usually, they will tell you a list of criteria, what makes account a perfect fit, right? They would say, okay, they meet this specific firmographics criteria, then these are specific business signals. So like this certain circumstances are true in this specific account. And next, they would list a few parameters, right? That account is aware of our company, etc., etc., right? So then you start transforming this into signals, right? What can tell us that this is true? So for example, they might say, okay, this account has visited our website in the last 30 days, several times, spent, let's say 10 minutes in total, and they were checking demo, pricing, integrations, etc., etc., whatever you define as a high-intent page, right? Next, we know that we have already a few name-bound committee members in our marketing automation software. Maybe they signed up for our webinar. Maybe they are engaging with our LinkedIn ads, whatever. Maybe they are engaging with search leadership content. So we assume that account is already vendor-aware, right? And somehow, they are evaluating our product, right? The key point here, the key point and the key question here, what are the criteria that tell us that account would likely to have a need in our product, right? And the second one is, if you'll ask sales, what are the accounts you are going to bet your compensation on, right? How would you describe them? So you just cover together this criteria, and this is the main list, your active focus list, right? I remember once we chatted with you, you asked how many accounts you need to focus on. In reality, this list would be a list which we call opportunity development list. You start all together thinking about, we have collected all of these insights, right? How can we personalize our offer to these accounts? How can we build internal champions, right? What collateral should we share with them considering, oh, what we still don't know about these accounts, so we need to collect this information and then kind of develop opportunity. And lastly, the majority of the accounts that should be selected of ABM, they should demonstrate any specific level of engagement. Not high intent, right? But any level of engagement, because then these accounts are already account aware, right? Vendor aware, sorry. So for you, it would be way easier, especially for the sales team, it would be way easier to connect and engage with the buying committee members. You start holistically looking at all demand generation activities that you are running and extracting accounts that fit your ideal customer profile. Next step is basically developing account scorecard, right? Account scorecard is what we must know about these accounts to be able, first of all, understand are they in market or not in market, right? Next, are they problem aware or problem unaware, right? And next, what is the evidence that they have a challenge that our product solves? And for that biggest part of your list, the goal is not opportunity development. The goal is account enrichment, getting in, first of all, this information, because otherwise you won't be able to sell. Obviously, you can do the old-fashioned approach. You can do cold calling, like you said in the beginning, you call, you know, director of Pepsi and, "Hey, do you need this software?" No. And that's it, right? That's not the point. The point is to validate as fast as possible, are these accounts, can we actually sell to these accounts? And if yes, then how can we raise awareness among the buying committee members? How can we connect and engage with them? So they become, they will start demonstrating interest in our product, hence we can practically focus on them.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAwesome. Yeah. And I want to talk about that, but I want to back up and think about how we build these lists. So let's say, let's use a concrete example. Let's say that our ideal customer is a B2B
EDDIE REYNOLDSSaaS company that has between 500 and 1,000 employees that are headquartered in the United States. You know, we go even deeper, right? We say that they sell a product for between 10 and $100,000 ARR. They have, you know, a sales team, they have a marketing engine, et cetera, et cetera. So we're talking about firmographic data, we're talking about technographic data, and then we drill deeper and we say, you know, in an ideal world, they have had multiple people engage with our content. You know, maybe there's some third-party intent signals out there. We can, you know, tap into Sixth Sense or another provider there. And then on top of that, there are some triggers. They just raised a round of funding. So now we have all of this data, right? Now, this is like the perfect ideal customer. Now we take the next step to the next account and it doesn't have all of that, right? Now, when you think about ABM, let's say, for example, that the next account doesn't have any marketing engagement whatsoever, no intent signals, but otherwise it's a perfect client. Is that our outbound list? We download that from Zoom Info and we start cold calling those people and that is separate and in addition to ABM. If they, let's say it's a different account and they go and they download a white paper, is that an MQL and that's separate in addition to ABM? Or do you think of ABM is replacing one or both of those motions? So we don't, we shouldn't separate ABM from other
ANDREI ZINKEVICHmotions. I think this is kind of the mistake that is happening everywhere. So first of all, you need to have a cohesive model, right? Whenever you run demand generation activities, print awareness activities and sales should be a part of these activities. I firmly believe that sales must work on creating awareness among that strategic accounts, right? And they should always identify the strategic accounts and validate, like we just discussed. Okay, if that's completely cold account, but they fit our ideal customer profile, right? How can we validate? For us, the most important question is how can we validate are they in market or not in market, right? And then if there is a strong evidence that they have a challenge our product solves, that should be the key, right? And for us, it would be essential for us as an organization, it would be essential to create playbooks to get this information. Now, when you build a list of accounts, right? Again, ask anybody from sales and they would always tell you, we want marketing to make sure that the accounts that we are kind of prospecting are vendor aware at least vendor aware, right? That's always what everybody from sales says. So the point is that if we have like identified account, but we have zero clue, are they in market, right? Do they have a challenge that our product solves? First, like I would, first of all, I would talk to marketing, okay, let's include it into, let's include that account in our demand gen app. While I'm, as a sales rep, I'm going to kind of quickly validate that information. I would try to kind of get to talk to multiple buying committee members and see where they are in their buying journey, right? Now. So is this just one motion then? So, I mean, are we replacing outbound and inbound
EDDIE REYNOLDSand we're just saying all of our efforts are going to be a cohesive, holistic ABM motion? Correct. Correct. Correct. Absolutely correct. I don't believe, I don't see, honestly, I don't
ANDREI ZINKEVICHsee any sense into having silent motions. I believe in cross-functional teams, right? Where all teams are aligned, basically all of them have revenue targets. Because only then you start thinking holistically, how can we get that revenue, right? Then you stop thinking about MQLs, you stop thinking about some vanity metrics that have no business impact. Because the first thing that you can develop in the organization, and as you know, most companies, they have horizontal setup. So, which means like there is like awareness function, demand gen function, demand capture and function, everybody focuses on different metrics. But ultimately, the worst thing if sales are missing revenue quotas, right? While somebody in marketing celebrates their success. Hey, you know, where is traffic? What's the business value, right? So if I'm missing the revenue targets, then sales would be always basically treating marketing as a cost center that has nothing with revenue generation. So that's why I believe that there should be a cohesive approach. I would, we should always start from that point, right? What are the markets, what are the segments, or what are the clusters where we have higher win rates, shorter sales cycles, higher ACV, right? So that would be the first thing. We should always focus on and double down on these segments. Next, what are our best clients in these segments on these markets, right? And by best clients, I mean, companies that generated highest revenue so far, and the top fastest deals. Because sometimes the, you know, companies that generated most of revenue, it could take you, you know, year and the half to generate that contract, right? So nobody, I mean, it makes no sense to proactively focus on acquiring these accounts. I'm not saying that you shouldn't do it, you should, but your list shouldn't be limited only by these accounts.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, of course. So right now you're effectively talking about defining your ICP and your buyer personas. But that's the first step. It's just, it's, first of all, it's not before ICP. It's all
ANDREI ZINKEVICHabout, okay, where should we focus our efforts to generate revenue, right? To hit our targets. That's the first question. Yeah, absolutely. So I want to clarify one thing. I think it's interesting. You
EDDIE REYNOLDSsay most companies are doing this, most companies are doing that. And so I don't know the world that you
EDDIE REYNOLDSplay in, but you know, just like mathematically speaking, most companies, 94% are
EDDIE REYNOLDSunder a million in revenue and probably have no marketing at all. And then we work with larger companies than that. But some of our customers have little to no marketing today. And our own company, we have limited marketing resources. And so there's a part of me that wants to ask, how simple can this get? I mean, if the only thing you have is one or two marketers, and all you have is email and maybe LinkedIn DMs or LinkedIn posts, and of course, like the ability to do cold calls, can you still run an ABM program? Or do you need a whole team of marketers and ad spend and lots of technology to do this? No, absolutely. And as you know, we are always
ANDREI ZINKEVICHpromoting the philosophy of pilot programs, right? And pilot programs, these are small scope programs with a limited team, limited budget and existing technology. You shouldn't purchase anything. Additionally, you shouldn't come up and say, hey, I need to hire agency or hey, I need, you know, a big budget to run programmatic display ads. No, the key point is you start small, literally doing all the things that we have discussed so far, right? Next step is always whenever you define this best accounts, right? Let's say top five by revenue, top five fastest deals. Next step is analyzing in details the buying process and the buying committee, right? And literally who you need to define is the decision makers, basically people whose budget paid for your solution. Next champions, who was selling your software in house, right? And lastly, the power users, people who are using your product on a daily basis, right? Then these champions, you need to, first of all, this would be the core people you need to focus in the ABM programs, right? So what was their buying journey? You need to kind of have, in ideal world, you need to have one-on-one conversations with these people, right? What triggered that buying process? How they were basically evaluating vendors? Where did they go? What information they were looking for? How did they present your software, right? If they were checking competition, how did you see your solution different? What they loved, right? What are the red flags in marketing, et cetera? With power users, you can talk about their jobs to be done before and after, right? So what's happening? What's the tangible business value they're getting out of your product? And for the decision makers, you can validate this through champions, right? What is the impact on the business, right? Usually it's like additional revenue or cost savings, right? In most cases. So that's kind of the key. You need to understand these typical patterns, right? Where did they, as well, where did they learn? You can ask who they are following, from whom they are getting professional information. And after this, all you need to do is just map out five to seven programs that's kind of aligned with the entire journey. First one, how can you create awareness, right? And by awareness, I mean, not only how you can attract attention to ourselves, but also how you initiate change management, right? So they're dealing with a specific challenge. Maybe they are not even challenge aware. That would be the truth for the majority of accounts, right? So how can you pinpoint their attention to ineffective ways of running specific operations inside their organization, right? Next, where you can find these people, right? Where you can engage with them. Everybody thinks immediately about LinkedIn. But in reality, let's say you are silent to manufacturing organizations, and you are silent to engineering departments. These people are not active on LinkedIn. So you can run ads, you can send emails, you can have the best automation software, but that would be a waste of time. So the next question is how basically you can connect and engage with these folks. For this specific example, I'm just sharing from practical experience, right? There are usually specific industry associations, right? And they are running a lot of field events. This is where these folks come, you know, engage with each other. By the way, the same is true for pharma segment, right? So these people usually meet offline and have these peer-to-peer conversations. So for you, potentially, the best way to raise awareness among your target accounts and basically meeting with your client committee members would be partnering with these associations, co-hosting the events, doing, you know, content collaborations, et cetera. So that's the thing. Next. So let's, before you go to the next point, let's dive into awareness a little bit. So let's say that you
EDDIE REYNOLDShave really limited channels. And let's say, for example, that you're not, you don't have any ad budget, because I think it's easy for me to understand how you might do this with ads. You've built up this target account list. Now it's difficult or inadvisable to put them on your email list, especially in Europe, but even in the United States, right? Like we don't want to just throw them into HubSpot and start emailing them. We don't have ad spend. You talked about some industry associations. How else would you raise awareness with this? And I ask from the perspective of what we're doing internally, where we're getting a lot of visibility on LinkedIn. We try to drive people to our newsletter, but at the end of the day, we're not going to just add people to our email list so that we can get in front of them. So what would you advise a company in that state to do?
ANDREI ZINKEVICHYeah, that's, that's why I mentioned a few solutions, right? First of all, you always need to run this customer research, one-on-one conversation. So aside from the buying process, I would always ask, who do you follow? Where you are getting the professional information from? So usually that would be the way, right? And maybe associations of these niche communities would be your primary source of creating awareness, right? So these collaborations. Next one, let's, I would share a few ideas because if, if your audience is easily accessible on LinkedIn, that's completely different story, right? So we can talk about leadership, collaborations with certainly like a lot of these things. But let's say if, let's take the hard example, if they're not easily accessible, right? There are, there could be a few ideas. If you have good customers or let's say well-known customers in a specific region, right? What you can do. And if you have a good, strong case study with that customer. So you can basically co-host an event with these customers. Basically you ask to rent the conference room, or maybe if they have, you know, if they're in the office building, there are other bigger conference rooms. And you, what you used to do, you kind of borrow their print and you start calling the accounts in that vertical, right? Calling or inviting through different challenge. Hey, you know what? We are hosting this event at Boston, let's say with this company, right? So the companies like they know and kind of trust, right? So they might not be trusting vendors, but they trust these companies. And we want to talk about these specific best practices. This event is designed for, then you name the specific roles. I would love to invite you personally, right? So that could be the first step. And you do this field events. Sometimes you can do the virtual events, but in reality, if there is an opportunity to host a field event, it would be way more beneficial, right? So that's, that's one of the things. Potentially, you can do, again, if you have some budget for this, you can partner with some local sort leader and pay for the gig, right? And tell, hey, you know what? We want to educate our target accounts about this and that. And by the way, like, obviously we are going to compensate, you know, logistics and pay your gig. So would you be willing to kind of co-host that event with us? And we are going to take 90 minutes to kind of to talk about this and that. It's not product pitching, but we want to educate our target audience about best possible solutions, right? And then you'll leverage this again. Hey, you know what? We paid this guy to, you know, to run a workshop and I would love to invite you, right? So for you, it's just free to attend. So you are kind of borrowing the reputation and print from this specific people who they already trust, right? From whom they are already learning. And you do this events, right? So that's, these are literally a few solutions that you can leverage. I think in terms of generating pipeline and opportunity.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThese are some great examples, but some of them are dark funnels. Some of them are hard to track. And so I realized we skipped over, you know, how to build out this account list, but basically some of these
EDDIE REYNOLDSthings you're sharing are great, but you can't measure them until that company ultimately comes to your website and is somehow identified and makes it into your marketing funnel. So effectively, if I'm understanding you, what I'm hearing is, is you can use these pretty standard marketing tactics and they're just simply measuring their engagement, just like we would with inbound. And I assume that is to inform whether or not these accounts surface to the level that we want to have people start calling them. Another approach, if let's say that would be ideal outcome, because these accounts are already vendor
ANDREI ZINKEVICHaware, right? And then you will have higher success rate, right? Sometimes that's not the case, right? And especially for the companies that, you know, that's going to a new market to a new segment, right? That's, that might be a problem. So in that case, again, I would be thinking about where we can borrow the target audience. That's, that's kind of the key, right? If sometimes it would be okay, this is the association, you might pay association initially, right? And that would be a better investment than just, you know, running, running Google ads or whatever, running LinkedIn ads. So then basically you can co-market with them. You can work together on the market research. You can tell them, Hey, I want to interview people from these specific roles, from these specific companies, from your association list members, who would be the best fit? Can you connect me with these people, right? So this is what we have done in the past in several, let's say conservative or hard reach verticals. That could be the case as well. So you leverage them initially. Then let's say whenever you have initial pool, even not even maybe not clients, but at least opportunities with whom you have built relationship, right? Maybe if you took the previous example with the, with the events, right? Next step is, would be literally looking at the connections, right? Usually in this conservative markets, people know each other, right? So you can see who is connected to whom. Sometimes there could be multiple ideas that you can do. You can start, let's say virtual events, like one of our clients, they do this for HRs from the enterprise organizations, you know, Procter and Gamble, Kimberly Clark, etc. So worldwide corporations. So there is a WhatsApp group. And every month, there is a discussion, okay, this is like the hottest challenge that we have. There are not so many HRs that in that group, let's put it like this, right? So and then they think who would be the best person to kind of run around table or maybe share the experience. Or as our client says, they can basically, if there is nobody in that group, and they don't know anybody from clients, right, from their clientele, they hire a sort leader to cover that specific topic, right? And then how you can leverage it, how you can utilize it, you can reach out again to the accounts. That's why I, again, want to emphasize on the importance of account research, you know, that this specific list of accounts, these accounts have this challenge, right? So you reach out and say, hey, you know, we have this peerless group, and every month we are hosting or whatever, every quarter we're hosting these events. And I know guys, you like, probably dealing with this, would you like to join that call, right? So it's always about trying to activate them. So in this example, you're potentially talking
EDDIE REYNOLDSabout a cold call. And so instead of trying to pitch a sales meeting and pitching, you guys should maybe attend this virtual event, because it might be relevant to you. Yeah, correct. But I would love
ANDREI ZINKEVICHto, before calling anybody, I would love to try to do any engagement, any possible meaningful engagement before calling them. If they're not active on LinkedIn, I would still, I mean, I would still try to find their profile, obviously, only when you see the gray empty profile. And in that case, you need to ignore that person. Otherwise, if that profile at least filled in, you can, you know, find the recent post, but usually maybe they're, you know, resharing the company news or liking the company news. You use it as an example, you send personalized connection requests. They might not reply because they're not active on LinkedIn. That's fine. Next day you can, and I'm talking from sales perspective obviously now, right? Next day you are, okay, guys, I tried to, you know, I saw that I'm following your company. I saw this news and I decided to follow up. Probably you're not active on LinkedIn. You ignored my message. That's absolutely fine. By the way, we are hosting this event and I wanted to invite you, right? So let me know if you are interested. You don't send a link immediately, but you kind of apply, you know, like you want to get that permission first. They didn't reply. Then you can do a cold call and hey, try to connect you, you know, then. And the reason why, because we are hosting this event and I thought that would be valuable for you. So it's really interesting what you're
EDDIE REYNOLDSsharing because I've done a few podcasts recently. I'm not sure if we've released all of them yet. I know one we haven't, we interviewed John Barrows about the outbound process. I talked to Renee
EDDIE REYNOLDSCohen at Norwest. She runs marketing and she's an operating partner over there about, you know, sort of the death of the MQL. And I also interviewed Carrie Cunningham at Sixth Sense. And we were talking about dark funnel intent and all of these conversations have overlapped into this main concept, which is I don't understand the separation of inbound and outbound. What you're talking about, a lot of the examples you're sharing in my mind are just basic best practices in marketing and basic best practices in outbound sales. But what's interesting about this conversation is combining them. So the problem that I have with inbound is we're saying, okay, we have this net that we're casting very wide out to the world and we are buying ads or we're posting on LinkedIn or we have a newsletter or whatever. And we're driving people to our website or we're doing SEO and we're getting them to download a white paper. And then as soon as they download that white paper, we hand it over to sales and we just start hammering them with cold calls and they're nowhere near ready. They haven't been warmed up. They haven't been nurtured. They haven't been educated. Maybe to your point, they're not problem aware. Clearly they're, they're, they're brand aware, but maybe that's it. Then separately, we go into zoom info and we download a list oftentimes of just a bunch of companies that happen to fit some just basic criteria, industry, revenue, head count, nothing more than that. And we start spraying and praying them. Neither of these things work really well. So what I'm guessing we're going to do in this conversation is talk about how we take both of these concepts and we narrow it down. We have a really tight account list and then we're trying to figure out how do we get in front of this account in meaningful ways through these, you know, standard marketing activities as well as these standard outbound activities. But the entire effort is is combined. It's a holistic focused effort. And I, there's a lot more I want to ask you about, but at a high level, am I understanding it correctly? Absolutely correct. So ultimately you end up with a question, how all together we can drive revenue
ANDREI ZINKEVICHthis quarter while creating future pipeline. This is essential. A lot of companies, they try to squeeze out maximum of the existing, you know, let's say engaged accounts. So like you say, okay, let's do this, you know, spray and pray approach, cold calling, cold email and everybody. But if nobody replies, what's next? Maybe you'll generate a few opportunities this quarter, but your future pipeline looks very light. And then you'll start dealing with the problems, right? Because you already did all this outbound activities who are going to call. I mean, obviously from that point, companies start, okay, let's even broader, let's develop even broader ICP, right? So let's try to call anybody who might be interested. And what we do is, and what you described holistically, instead of this, okay, what accounts that already demonstrated vendor awareness and potentially, right? High intent. So let's call high odds accounts, right? Accounts that are likely to become sales opportunities. We define this. And that's kind of, this is a good measurement for your demand generation function. Obviously, like two lists declared into companies that come and tell, hey, I want to talk to sales, right? And highly engaged accounts, accounts that kind of, that you practically are going to activate together with sales. And the biggest part would be accounts that demonstrated some engagement, or maybe in some cases, there is no engagement at all. You are going to a new segment, to a new market, right? Whatever. And then the case is, how can we, like you said, how can we validate that they have a need in our product, right? Because if some of them don't, we kind of disqualify them. Next, if they have a need in our product, how can we make them problem aware, right? So, and then you start thinking in terms of these activities, you start developing these collaborations with these buyers collecting, which we call, the goal is account enrichment, right? Getting this information. And next, how can we accelerate, how can we accelerate the nurturing, right? Maybe it makes sense to run these events. Maybe in some cases, again, I'm just sharing a few practices, right? Maybe it makes sense to suggest so-called, you know, strategy sessions or inspiration sessions, like one of our client does. It's all about reviewing the current status quo processes, because if the client is not bought in that they have a process problem, they are not going to buy your, to buy your product, right? This is for the problem. Andre, if you'll forgive me for interrupting, like you're sharing
EDDIE REYNOLDSso much valuable information, but it's just, it's a lot at once. I want to break this down into smaller components. So let's just talk about the account selection. So we want to build this account list.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd the account list is an account list that we want to market to in whatever ways we can. And maybe we do have ad spend and maybe we can put targeted ads in front of them. And, or we want to call these folks and start to warm them up. How do we build this account list? And this is something I'm thinking about myself right now, because you can, in theory, grab a lot of data. We talked about firmographic data, technographic data. We talked about past marketing and sales engagement. And then you also have third-party intent data. Do you have a view on the best way to actually combine very large set of data here and analyze it to pick your account list? Is this ultimately coming into an account score, for example?
ANDREI ZINKEVICHYeah, let's make it really simple. Account score, account score and model exists only to prioritize accounts because you have limited resources. You can't, I mean, if you are not Procter and Gamble, you can't, you know, actively marketing to thousands of accounts, right? So when you prioritize, when you build a list of accounts and you want to prioritize what accounts you are going after, right? Who are you going to prospect? I would pay attention to several categories. First is the revenue potential, right? Because we are going to focus on these accounts. Is the revenue potential enough to pay off these efforts, right? We spent our time, first of all. Next, next is product need evidence. You define together criteria that tell you that these accounts have a need in your product. I mean, let me share with you a simple example. We were thinking about recently analyzing different clusters of our clients, right? Typical example, a company, a PLG company, they have a challenge that they were always growing because of PLG motion, but that revenue hit the plateau and they're not growing anymore, right? They want to go enterprise and start actively generating enterprise opportunities, but they don't have the skill set, right? And obviously, ads outbound, et cetera, doesn't help. So what is the evidence of this? So first of all, visiting high-intent pages on our website, but if that's not the case, right, what is another evidence? They're actively hiring VP of sales and also enterprise account executives, right? Next, they might be hiring for ABM, you know, VP of ABM or ABM lead, et cetera. Maybe that's not the case. Maybe even for us, it's ideal if the current marketing team would be challenged with this, right? So next, they recently raised money and that means that they're going to reinvest in sales, right? That's why they're actively hiring these folks and they would be supposed to generate outbound revenue as fast as possible. But in reality, like you said, they would do a lot of sales activities. They won't end up in revenue, so they would need to kind of find the solution. So this is a product need evidence, right? Which is visible. What is not visible, we can discuss it later, right? This is only what you can get through one-on-one conversations. You pay attention to this. What are other criteria that tell you that they are good fit? Like you said, thermographics, headquarter, et cetera, right? These are the basics that usually everybody nails down. Next, what are other business signals? So maybe they mentioned in their corporate press releases that they want to go up market, whatever, right? So these different things. And ultimately, the level of account awareness, are they aware of us? And you can measure it several ways, right? Are they engaging with any demand gen activities that your company is running? Do we have any common connections that can introduce us, right? In ideal worlds, do we have X customers who are working for these accounts? So basically, you're prioritizing that relationship. And if you'll start, each of these criteria can have a different score, right? And literally, if you shouldn't have, you know, hundreds of criteria, it should be really a simple list, right? And altogether, marketing and sales, you start reviewing these accounts. Accounts that get higher score, you simply start focusing on them, right? This would be your sweet spot.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo we're simply going to create this account score. We've got the different criteria. We've got the scoring that we're going to associate with it. We build out this list and okay, Pepsi comes up number one on the list because of all these factors you just mentioned. And now we are either going to market to them through whatever channels we can, and/or we're going to pick up the phone and call them, maybe potentially share with them an event that's coming up or some other piece of value that we can share with them. If that was that simple, that would be the ideal outcome, right? But generally
ANDREI ZINKEVICHspeaking, first of all, you define the accounts. Next, you need to understand what we discussed before, right? You need to know the buying committee structure. Sorry, I don't mean to skip over all those
EDDIE REYNOLDSsteps. I just mean the final destination is that we've got an account list that we are either going to market to or we're going to sell to. And that is going to be all of our outbound and all of our
EDDIE REYNOLDSinbound, or there's going to be some other accounts that we're targeting in different ways. You're
SPEAKER_10basically saying you're building the account list that your entire sales and marketing team is going to go after together. Correct. So the only difference here, like I said, there are high odds accounts,
SPEAKER_11accounts that demonstrated already high level of engagement, those with the highest score.
ANDREI ZINKEVICHRight. And for these accounts, you start thinking, okay, considering all of these insights we have about them, how can we generate this opportunity? And as I'm saying, maybe it could be, you know, hey, you know what, you're already connected to one of the buying committee members. You can validate, you can get some insider information. Maybe then you can say, hey, let's invite, you know, let's invite for a business breakfast, the VP of something, right? Where you can talk, or maybe let's have, if you want guys to run this one-on-one inspiration sessions, we can help you with this and that, right? That could be a breach between engagement and sales opportunity, right? At the same time, I always think that it makes sense to have a general nurturing program for all of these accounts. What collateral, what messages we need to share, right? And through what channels. Sometimes it would be possible, like we discussed, sometimes it would be possible through LinkedIn, you know, start leadership advertisement and organic content. Sometimes it could be only through associations. Sometimes it could be, it might happen only through, you know, one-on-one distribution. That could be also a potential case. So that's, that's kind of the key. And ultimately I, but I'm sharing just my experience. I'm not saying that this is the only one, one way. I was all the companies that we have worked so far. And also I'm thinking about conversation with Spears, right? Everybody who said that they had an event as an activation part. I'm not saying that it's all about product pitching, but event where you gather all these people in one place and you have a meaningful, meaningful topic, right? Where you kind of basically describe how to improve their jobs to be done, or how to fix their specific challenge. It has a drastic impact on the pipeline. Why? Because then all together you start thinking, how can we invite these people for sales? That's fantastic opportunity. Hey, we run this event. Would you like to join? Yes. What are the questions I'm collecting? You know, the questions from you to our SME. And by the way, I deal on guys with this specific challenge. So you can always use this as an opportunity for progressive profiling, right? Collecting the missing information. Then you have post event. There would be people who would be asking for them. There would be people who would be consuming. In ideal world, you need to create this, let's say, dedicated content hubs. And then you can see accounts that engage with this, that consume content there, right? So any questions that left uncovered. Yes, if you want, I can connect you to my SME. We can have, you know, a call about this and that. Collecting the feedback, et cetera. So it gives a lot of potential to have meaningful non-sales touches, right? And basically having an opportunity to nurture a cluster of all of these accounts. And then for sales, it's way easier. Even if you want to create immediate revenue, if you want to create pipeline this quarter, this pipeline would be next quarter, right? Next three, six months. Well, one of the things that I like
EDDIE REYNOLDSabout what you're sharing is I'm thinking about in the simplest form, a company that has a very small market team, a very small, you know, inbound and outbound team. It's hard for me to make a case that they should be doing pure inbound and pure outbound instead of this, because number one, we have a separate list. We've got these inbound MQLs because people downloaded white papers. And then we have these outbound prospects because they fit a list in zoom info. And it's like, why would we separate those? One is going to be better than the other. One prospect in outbound is going to be better than one prospect in inbound. And one prospect in inbound is going to be better than one prospect in outbound. We have finite resources. We only have so many people that can make calls and we call these inbound, but they're really cold calls. Like somebody downloaded a white paper. That's a cold prospect. They're just slightly warmer than that person you found on zoom info, but they may not be the ideal account. They may not have the right buying persona. They may not have all these other factors that are so important in our ability to convert. So now we've got two separate teams making effectively cold calls to two separate lists instead of just combining them and saying, let's go after the best list. And then secondarily, what I like about what you're sharing and some of these recent podcasts, we talked about this as well. If you call me, just cold call me and say, hey, you're the perfect account and I've got the solution for you. 99% chance my response is going to be, I have no interest in talking to somebody in sales about evaluating your product right now. Do you have such a better chance if you can say, Hey, we have this event going on. We have this piece of content. We have this framework that you might want, might be interested in looking at. I'd be much more receptive to that. Or even for example, just because we work in RevOps, I get pitched by vendors that sell into RevOps five to 10 times a week. And my response to them has become so cookie cutter. I'll say, Hey, if you have a five minute video sharing with me, like what your product does, I'm not only happy to watch that video, I'll pass it off to my entire team. But if you want to book a 30 minute or an hour long phone call with me or my team, like, I just don't have the time to do that.
ANDREI ZINKEVICHThat's the reality. And I would give you even one more insight. So last week we were onboarding a new client and they were doing the customer research with their clients, right? And one insight came out of that calls. So they are targeting CTOs and the guy told, look, I'm CTO of 5k employees company, right? I'm getting so many unsolicited emails. I'm not even, you know, like that could be super personalized, but I don't really care if I don't know the sender. So nowadays it's not even, you know, to get your email open, people, your target decision makers, or even your champions, they must know you, right? So you need to somehow raise that awareness. And that's kind of the reality why outbound pipeline is declining. I mean, I'm sharing my experience. For all the companies I'm talking about, they're all complaining about this, right? So the second thing here is your question, how many people you need to have. Let me share with you a very practical example that happened recently. I always say that it's enough to have, especially for the pilot program, just one marketer and one SDR who can allocate at least 50% of their time to run this motion. Wait, sorry. Let's pause on that for a second. You're saying that you think you can run this with
EDDIE REYNOLDSone marketer and one SDR. Correct. Absolutely correct. And this is what we do with all of our
ANDREI ZINKEVICHclients. Just one marketer and one SDR. That's literally it. Why? Because even if, I mean, I spent 18 years in that space, right? I have years of experience of running this ABM program, but for every client, it's unproven motion. So we can't try to run a mass program for unproven motion inside that organization. The goal of ABM is to develop a successful proof of concept, and that pilot team becomes a center of excellence, right? So they start onboarding the rest of the team. So the key here is obviously, right? What we have discussed so far, making sure that we focus on the right markets, right? Verticals, right? And the right accounts, which is whom we are likely to generate opportunities. So if it's that expansion, so we select the right clients with the expansion potential, right? These things. Now, to give you literally an example, what we have done from our company, right? Full funnel. We don't have, we're a small team, right? Simple example. We wanted, for this year, we prioritized Nordics market, right? So what we did two weeks ago, we hosted a field event in Copenhagen. We found a local partner company called Dream Data, right? Which is attribution software, end-to-end attribution software. And for many years, we are partnering with Demandbase. So we validated, are you guys interested in Nordics? They told yes. So let's co-host this field event together, right? This was the ICP that we want to target. Altogether, we decided that it would be invite-only event, right? We don't have a huge network. We don't have strong presence there. That was partially a question that you asked me in the beginning. But what we did, right? Altogether, we defined, okay, let's send this manual invites. And we did this. So meanwhile, we started proactively targeting this specific list of accounts to somehow raising that awareness, right? So ultimately, we had 76 signups, 30 plus came from our site, 30 plus came from Demandbase and from Dream Data altogether. But whenever we had a joint signup list, so we were able to reach out to people. We were talking about their challenges, what they would love to learn, right? Why do they think these challenges are happening in these organizations? I'm not saying that everybody was sharing the full context, but we got a lot out of it. Next was the educational event and all of this face-to-face conversations. And we asked them, if you can, bring somebody from sales, right? So we can even talk to both teams, right? And this is basically what we are solving right now. We have all this discussion about joint playbooks, right? So we can hear sales. And we developed a very specific workshop, which is all about collaboration between marketing and sales, right? And this is a simple example that was executed just only by me and my co-founder, right? So that's a simple example of how the campaign could be executed, right? But the question here, that's, we need to prioritize it. And we need to allocate time to make sure that it will work. It's not possible if all the time you think, okay, I have time only to send, you know, I have time only to run ads or I want to find scalable channels. Like from my experience, enterprise growth, enterprise deals are not coming from the scalable channels everybody thinks about. They're coming from activities that seems to be not scalable, but they actually drive pipeline up
SPEAKER_03revenue.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. And so let's talk about that for a second. So let's use Pepsi as our example. And that is obviously an enterprise account, but you know, let's also just pretend like, I don't know, pick a random company that's a middle market. You want to go after them. They're the perfect customer, but they have no idea who you are. So does that make it on the list? Does it not make it on the list? I guess that depends on your account scoring criteria, but how often are you going to revisit that? I mean, so for example, you're doing an event and Pepsi or this unnamed mid-market account happens to come to that event. How often are you sort of reshuffling the list of the accounts that you're specifically targeting here? Every week. So from my experience,
SPEAKER_11because here's the, here's the misbelief about ABM. Everybody thinks that this is kind of a static
ANDREI ZINKEVICHmotion. You have one-to-one, one-to-few, one-to-many. In real life, the best programs are a mix of all of these programs. And you need, why I mentioned the cohesive model in the beginning, right? The more you are running demand generation programs, the better programs you run, the more account engagement you'll be able to drive. You'll be able to identify newly engaged accounts, right? Then for some accounts, like we discussed, you see that there is not enough product need evidence, right? Or basically these are bad fit accounts. So you just literally just qualify them. Every week, you update the scoring, right? Like you said, so for example, there were a few accounts that signed up, but next you spoke, some of them replied, which is obviously a better signal for you, right? One just signed up, another replied. And then for those who replied, you were able to collect additional insights, which means like we can put score, we can assign scores to this, but literally it's just a better signal. We have the communication. And then some of them even were willing to invite, you know, their sales team, sales leaders, and then ultimately they showed up. Obviously, you are going to prioritize this accounts, right? That's literally logical. And then you start developing this experience for them. Maybe you'll book a call, you know, a meeting after the event, right? Or a joint call, whatever, right? Hey guys, if you want, we can help you with auditing your current processes and help you to kind of revamp and improving them, right? So there could be multiple things. Or maybe if you know, there is like, maybe that could be a declared intent, they would come and say, hey, you know, I want to talk to you. Can you help? So that's, these are literally the examples. So every week, you need to run an ABM pipeline review meeting, right? You review your list of accounts, you need somebody in your team, you need to, you kind of need to have that role, right? Maybe it could be the same marketer who is in the ABM team. Maybe you can partially involve your RevOps manager. But basically, any new engagement data that was identified, you need to kind of cross share it with the ABM team, right? Sales should share the insights from all of these conversations, market marketing team should share all this visible engagement that was tracked, right? And based on this, okay, this account demonstrated the high spike, let's connect, let's, let's plan. Let's do this next
SPEAKER_03step, right? So that, that should be always the case.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAndre, this is awesome. We're running up against time. And I still have so many questions left, but we're going to have to end it here. Thank you so much for joining me. Tell me, how can people find
EDDIE REYNOLDSyou? Yeah, they can type Andre Zinkiewicz on LinkedIn. I believe I would be the only one person with
SPEAKER_04bolt here. So it shouldn't be a big deal to find me. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThis is a really fun conversation for me. Yeah. Thanks a lot for inviting me. It was a pleasure chatting with you.
