abm measurement mayhem

Everyone’s talking about ABM, but when it comes to measuring it, most teams are flying blind. In this episode, we sit down with Mason Cosby of Scrappy ABM to break down what actually matters when it comes to tracking success in account-based programs. Spoiler: it’s not about booking meetings off your awareness campaigns. We get into the biggest misconceptions around ABM measurement, how to make it work without a $100K tech stack, and what you can track with just ad platforms, spreadsheets, and a bit of common sense. Whether you’re running display ads to cold accounts or trying to prove ROI to the CFO, this is the no-BS guide to ABM measurement that everyone in B2B needs.

Podcast Transcript

Andy: What’s up, up, everybody? Welcome back to another episode of Digital Banter. Joining us today is Mason Cosby, founder slash CEO slash. Whatever else you wanna throw into that title for scrappy, a BM two time guest. Welcome back, Mason.

Mason: I’m surprised you let me back on. Uh, but this time hopefully it’s actually helpful.

Andy: Well, just to keep you level said there’s a three time guest that you’re still catching up to, so you gotta catch up to task We’ve had around three times, so you got one more to catch up. That’s fair. I, I don’t think I’ll ever beat Taz. She’s been well, she just likes to talk and that’s why we bring her on, so.

James: Oh, it’s easy. It’s always the easy first episode after we take a hiatus. You’re also on ’cause you’re an easy first, second, third, I don’t know, easy early episode. I mean, really the reason next week, lemme, lemme know. I, I’ll be there next week. The real reason is because people keep asking us, uh, silly questions about a BM and what better way to pick your brain than bring you on here?

James: And then I can just send them a video.

Mason: Uh, can I out myself real quick? Sure. So James texted me and was like, Hey, how do you think about a BM measurement? And I totally forgot and left him on red. And then about two weeks later I got an invite to do a podcast interview on a BM measurement. So I think that’s actually why we’re here.

Mason: You wanted to corner me to talk about it? Is that right? It’s very, very much

James: it for sure’s it. And I needed to do some, I mean, we did the whole, everybody knows your mantra about no tech stack and early wall cro. Walk, crawl, run, so we don’t need to do that again.

Mason: Crawl, walk, run. But yeah, we’re there.

James: Yeah.

James: Run. But that’s what they do. They run first because they buy 6 cents in there right off to

Mason: fall in their face and then get laid off. But that’s the past episode. Let’s talk about measurement.

Andy: Well, before we get into that. The one thing that we’ve started to do with this season is kind of everybody talks about, you know, their life in B2B, things like that.

Andy: But nobody ever, you know, grows up and says, oh, I wanna be a B2B marketer. Like you don’t just come out of the womb and say, oh yeah, I want to go, I wanna go into B2B, I wanna work with tech SaaS, things like that. So what we wanna know is, how the hell did you get into B2B? Like, we find all these back stories so interesting.

Mason: Yeah. So. Uh, really long story short, uh, as is the standard case, you know, I thought I was gonna be a pastor. Uh, so I was a volunteer youth pastor for four years, uh, and then I worked during that time. Uh, the. Didn’t make a ton of money. Uh, ’cause when you volunteer by its nature, they don’t pay you. And I met this really, really cute girl and I was like, well, I want to get married.

Mason: So I asked the church if I could have money and they were poor. So the answer was no. So inevitably I realized, oh, that that path isn’t going to happen if I like. Wanna actually be able to provide for a family. So I had a friend that said, because I was, uh, working in B2B sales, so I was a full funnel account executive, like sourcing my own pipeline, closing my own deals, managing my own accounts.

Mason: So like hard job, also straight commission as a side note. Um, so like, just tough. Um, also selling print advertising. So, you know, I really stacked the deck against my favor. Uh. So essentially I worked two volunteer jobs, is what I’m trying to say. Anyway, long and short. Um, I had a friend that was just like, man Mason, you’re like actually pretty good at making money and like helping people make money.

Mason: And you could probably make a good living doing that. And like for me, I side note like I earn a lot of money with the goal being that I actually give a lot of money, so I fund a lot of missionaries or my church or things along those lines. That’s kind of been my main, main mission personally, um, is to grow businesses.

Mason: Because if you help other people grow significantly and then you can take a small percentage of that, that percentage could still be a lot of money. Um, so that’s how I ended up landing in B2B is, uh, focusing on the mission of now funding the church and funding missions. And I. Just really got focused in on how do I do marketing half decently And I think it’s gone pretty.

Mason: Okay.

James: Have you done the LinkedIn post of, uh, what almost becoming a pastor has helped me learn about B2B marketing?

Mason: No, because I got a degree in marketing with the intent of using that degree in marketing to help me as a pastor. So I actually did it the other way around and it didn’t work. Interesting.

James: Okay. I’ll say this is one of those rare cases where we have. Three people in the same room that actually all have degrees in marketing. I feel like that’s like, that is the rare, almost non-existent case for most, I mean, certainly most B2B marketers,

Mason: and you’ve got three people in the room that haven’t used their marketing degree probably.

James: You’re absolutely right. I think every single thing that I learned besides learning on this, the four Ps,

Andy: every single thing he’s learned, he is learned from me. That’s, I’ll, I’ll finish this sentence for him.

James: That’s not true. I got this job because I had an internship, uh, doing PPC management for e-commerce companies.

Andy: Anyway, before we go into a completely different motion than what we’re here for. So let’s talk about a BM and I wanna understand Mason, like in that B2B world, what drew you then to talk to kind of focus on a BM as your passion point? Great question.

Mason: Uh, so after the job selling print advertising, the obvious logical next step is to become the marketing director and sole marketing hire at a growing FinTech company.

Mason: Obviously. Uh, so that’s what I did. And, uh, I didn’t know what I was doing. So we inevitably, I like somehow learned enough online and realized like, oh, I should like hire an agency. So there was this agency that we hired, uh, that ran performance marketing and said, oh, you guys are like a perfect fit for a BM.

Mason: And I was like, what’s that? And then they explained it to me and I was like, what is everybody else doing? Uh, because it just made, coming from a sales background of saying like, oh, I want my best fit customers and I’m gonna spend all my time, energy, and effort focused on those. Just made like a lot of sense.

Mason: So, uh, we built an a BM program for that FinTech company. ’cause it was, it was, it was a vertical specific organization that did lending software, which is a side note if you know me. I love Dave Ramsey. So I didn’t last super long at that lending software company. Uh, but after that I, I was like, this A BM stuff is like really, really interesting and very neat.

Mason: So I landed at an EBM agency, uh, and then the story picks up from there. So I’ve been in the, like doing ABMS dedicated for probably five years at this point. Um, but that’s how we landed is I was at a FinTech company, worked for an agency, and they’re like, a BM is a good idea. And for them, that was like LinkedIn advertising.

Mason: But then the more I dug into it, I was like, oh, this is like a whole world. And now I spent way too much time thinking about this world.

James: I didn’t realize that a BM was a buzzword five years ago. I thought that was like, I think we’re in like year two or three of that.

Mason: Oh no, man. This thing is like

James: 10 years old called a BM.

James: Yeah. What was the acronym before a BM? Uh, it definitely was one for sure.

Mason: Key account. So like, it was primarily owned by sales, and then marketing caught up and was like, oh, we should like focus on good customers.

James: Naturally, they came up with an acronym and here we are

Mason: pretty much, uh, hold on. I actually wanna

Andy: go ahead.

Mason: Well, I’m googling when. It was, yeah, A BM is, B2B was published in 2019, which San book, uh, that was in my mind one of the things that put a BM more mainstream. So it was done before that, but then he published the book.

Andy: I think people still think of it as LinkedIn ads, though, if we’re just being devil’s advocate for a second.

Mason: Yeah, I have a lot of work to do.

Andy: Well,

James: I, well, so let’s dive into the actual topic about measurement here a bit. ’cause Mason, you’re not wrong as far as me cornering you the. What triggered this conversation? So like, now a BM as a buzzword has blown up. I say as an example, you could just do a LinkedIn post, use the three letters, A, B, M, and it’ll probably get more engagement than anything else.

James: Now it literally in the last, I don’t wanna say it was this week, but it was like two weeks ago, three clients in a row asking me about benchmarks and measurement for a BM. Uh, I’ll be honest, I had a little bit of a hard time with it. And then when. We were talking to you. I think that you kind of, you almost like outlined the three separate examples that we had because I guess where I was struggling is like a BM is like kind of completely customed to whatever brand you’re working for.

James: Everybody’s strategy is different and like you gave, I. I don’t wanna steal your thunder, but like three categories of a BM, uh, account expansion, uh, growth and what was the other one?

Mason: Acceleration. So it’s acceleration. Uh, yeah. And

James: all of those clients, it was like 1, 2, 3. I. Those were their three separate goals and it’s like, well, I can’t benchmark against any of this stuff.

James: So I dunno. What’s your, what is, what is your advice as far as We’ll do like the walk, the crawl, walk, run. I’ll get it there. It’s right eventually, um, for a BM measurement.

Mason: Yeah. So the first thing I wanna outline is when we’re building the program. We need to align playbooks or programs or campaigns, whatever terminology you want to call it, but we need to align what we’re actually doing with where a buyer current journey.

Mason: And I say that because about 30% of the people that have tried to work with us in the past year, which is we’ve had about 200 sales conversations in the past year and a half, 30% of them were currently running third party intent as the trigger for the display advertising, with the goal being to book a demo.

Mason: And if there’s no engagement, these like. If, if somebody doesn’t know that you exist to go from, I don’t know, you exist to, I’m now on a demo, is like a really significant leap. Um, it, it happens, but it’s not common. So if we are benchmarking the goal of an A BM program, being the first touchpoint should convert into a demo, uh, of course your AVM program is failing.

Mason: Like that’s not gonna work. Um, so. I, the reason I start here is we then think through any A BM program in the context of what we refer to as an account progression model. Another framing would be the buyer’s journey. Uh, we use account progression model as a couple of core stages. There’s six, so awareness.

Mason: Initial engagement, meaningful engagement. M-Q-A-S-Q-A opportunity are kind of the six core stages that we look at. And what we want to do is we wanna understand what we’re actually doing at those stages, with the goal being of how we drive a buyer to go from one stage to the next, and then we measure success at each stage.

Mason: So that is how you actually start to focus on, okay, well what is the measurement here? Because again, I have a, I actually have a target account list for us. And the way I’m approaching, it’s slightly different. I don’t recommend this for everybody. Um, ’cause sometimes you need to get buy-in from your executives.

Mason: And the fun fact about being a CEO is I’m bought in, so like executive buy-in is there, um, but we’ve got a target account list of 2000 accounts that the goal is to have a meeting with 75% of them in the next five years. So, like my timeline is like way longer. But I mean, if I can get a meeting with 75% of 2000 accounts, that’s 1500 meetings in a five year time horizon, I feel pretty good about that.

Mason: So. We are then measuring very differently because of the goal of the program at a high level, but then also the sub goals at every stage of their journey.

Andy: So couple questions then. Let’s start with like the basics when we talk about like definitions, right? So an MQA and SQA, marketing qualified accounts, sales qualified account.

Andy: Would you say that those are the same or different than an MQL and an SQL?

Mason: Uh, typically different. So when I think about MQA versus M-Q-L-M-Q-L is focused on the individual, whereas MQA is focused on the account. So typically there’s a bunch of different ways you can measure this. I’m gonna take a step back from like tactical measurement for a moment and think about what is the purpose of every stage.

Mason: Yeah. And then if you can identify the purpose, you can then identify, well, how do we know that in the context of our current programs or tech stack? So awareness is what it sounds like. Do they know? And like nobody’s, nobody likes that as a measurement criteria, but like can guarantee people that know you exist are exponentially more likely to buy from you than people that don’t know you exist.

Mason: So kind of important. That’s step one, step two of initial engagement. The goal here is do we know they have a problem now that they’re exploring viable solutions? Not that they’re even looking at our stuff, but like, do they have a problem? How do I measure that? It’s typically significant content engagement with our content.

Mason: ’cause I spend about 70% of my time talking about problems. So if people are like resonating with the content that we talk about a lot, it means they have a problem. They may not wanna solve it, but like they at least acknowledge they have a problem that should be solved at some point. Um, meaningful engagement is then we know they’re exploring viable solutions.

Mason: So there’s a couple different ways you can look for that. One of the ways that we’ve looked at that is like review websites. So if you’re using G two intent. You can actually see, oh, they’re like actively looking at different review websites. They are asking for a solution. M QA is then I know these accounts understand our solution uniquely.

Mason: So I think about that as multiple, right? Fit decision makers or buying committee. Um, and I use the word buying committee. More so than decision maker. ’cause like the CMO or the CFO is typically the one that actually signs our contracts, but I spend most of my time talking to senior marketing manager, director, or sometimes VP, depending on the size of the organization.

Mason: So they may not actually make the decision, but they are the person that is the internal communicator that is convincing the decision maker on our behalf. So when I think about it, do I see multiple influencers or people that would typically make a decision, at least looking at our website, at which point, if they haven’t already booked a meeting, we then reach out to get the meeting booked using use case and case study content.

Mason: And the primary goal of an SQA is I. That’s the first call is like, are they actually qualified, not based on fit, because they should be qualified at least from a firmographic perspective, meaning like revenue, industry, headcount, that kind of stuff. You may do some ICP criteria qualification based on psychographics, which is a fancy way of saying like, are they actually nice?

Mason: And like good to work with. Um, I, that’s at least in the services space, like we don’t work with mean clients. I just, because truly it’s like not worth me losing people that hate their job. So like, I don’t work with mean clients crazy. Anyway, uh, so that’s SQA and then opportunity is they’re actually qualified.

Mason: And you could also refer to this as a essay. Uh, sorry. SAO. So sales accepted opportunity. Yeah, but I just think of it as opportunity. So those are the stages, and again, you then identify clear measurement at every single one of those stages.

Andy: What would be your recommendation? I mean, a lot of what you said is obvious, let’s put it that way.

Andy: And to your point, like it’s kind of also a, a common sense thing of, you know, making that transition from, let’s say demand gen and MQL measurement to a BM and MQA measurement. Like if your M QLS are based off of ICP fit, uh, things like that, like in theory, your MQs should automatically be of that fit because you’re.

Andy: Moving in an AB motion and you’re defining who you’re going after, like. No shit, they should be a fit otherwise. So I think like you would think, yeah, you would think, right. So like what is your, do you have any suggestions on somebody making that jump from, let’s say demand gen measurement into a BM measurement?

Andy: Just at like that, like criterion level and how to rethink or reprogram yourself and or the infrastructure to move from kind of moving away from. Let’s say like ICP as a primary component of an MQL versus other criteria on the MQA side.

Mason: Yeah, this is gonna get a lot of hate, sorry. Um, but I, I think the easiest transition for many people, and as a starting point is they’re doing demand gen typically based on what they anticipate the ICP to look like versus named accounts.

Mason: So just a simple transition of calling out. We wanna engage these accounts and then actually shifting your marketing programming from a promotional perspective to focus on those accounts, even if you see M qls. But if you have M QLS at target accounts that you intentionally went after, like that is a step in the right direction.

Mason: So you don’t have to massively change all of your current measurement capabilities. And that’s why there’s gonna get a lot of hate because to transition. This, this is one of the, like, it’s ACT measurement’s. Actually one of the top SABM programs fail. So when we actually look at it, I, I’ve seen many people actually like go through the exercise of shifting their tech stack to focus on account measurement before building the program.

Mason: And that that process can take like three to six months, which super, super well. So like, it’s hard. So what we’ve spent is a bunch of time building a pro, like building reporting for a program that doesn’t exist yet. It’s like that’s a. That’s hard. Um, and then you gotta go back to the board or your executive team and be like, yeah, like we got the dashboards.

Mason: I mean, there’s nothing in ’em, but they, they’re there. Um, or, but I mean, that’s the flip side is we build the program, but we don’t have accurate reporting on it yet. So we don’t know what is and isn’t working. So it it’s a chicken and egg situation. So like my recommendation is actually this is, this is where people are gonna hate me, but like, I think you leave a lot of the reporting.

Mason: The gate the same. And the primary goal is did we go after the people that we actually wanted to get? And do we at every stage have clear measurement criteria, yes or no? And again, if it’s the intentionality of, we said we were gonna go get these accounts three months later, they showed up on our product pages when like, that’s it.

Mason: Um, six months later, are they like actually booking a meeting? When did we know every touchpoint along the way? No, but you now know what gaps to go and fill in the context of your current program. So again, that’s the crawl stage. Now if you wanna walk and run, I gotta be honest, like there is inevitably a point where like it does make sense to invest in the right technology.

Mason: ’cause the technology is what makes it easier to scale. But again, I, my primary message is like, stop trying to scale things you don’t even know if they work. Like make it work first. Don’t overinvest. Get it right. It will be busted and duct taped and it’ll be hard, but then you can go and solve the hard parts knowing it works.

James: Yeah, that one’s tough. And I like, I feel like what we see people do all the time is we move to an A BM motion. We wanna track account based user journeys. And like once you do that, so like you’re taking your demand gen reporting that you have, you just mentioned that your account list is 2000. You’re essentially doing that 2000 times for 2000 accounts.

James: This is like almost like what they expect as far as the, uh. The level of reporting in the program. Okay, so how did this one do? How did this one do? How did this one do? And I feel like they jumped so far down that rabbit hole that they lose track of, okay, well how is the entire program doing?

Mason: Yeah,

James: and like you said, the, I mean, that’s a shit ton of work to do that level, give that level of insight.

Mason: And again, I wanna be super clear, we’re on a podcast episode. There’s no client here to push back, so like what I’m about to say, it sounds really easy, but just like, why do we need one-to-one reporting at the awareness stage? Because we, I mean, we can’t technically get there. It’s just really hard. And like, is that the best use of resources?

Mason: Because everybody has limited resources always trying to get the best result, so. We c we can, like in theory, uh, you could focus on large enough accounts to where you can do one-to-one programs at the awareness stage in LinkedIn and get 300 match contacts on that company and only run a program to that one company to 300 contacts and see their levels of engagement and each campaign group, like in theory, we can do that.

Mason: Is it worthwhile? Probably not, and that’s okay. I look at it. The other thing that I think through a lot is like one to many, one to few, one-to-one. If you look at our content, we actually don’t talk a lot about that concept, um, because I’m, I don’t actually think it’s that important for a shorting program.

Mason: What I wanna focus on is ideally a one to fewer, one to many at the top. That then becomes more one-to-one as they show increased levels of engagement, and we can then effectively personalize based on first party engagement. My primary goal is to convert third party contacts into first party contacts that we can then really personalize journeys for and experiences for not at the awareness stage or the initial engagement stage, but more than meaningful engagement on stages.

Mason: So again. You can way more easily get one-to-one level reporting and actually like map out the journey once they’ve actually entered into your CRM and have a relationship before that. The goal is just do they engage with our stuff, yes or no? Do they have a problem? Yes or no?

James: Do you have any advice specifically for the awareness stage?

James: Because I think that that’s where everybody struggles the more, because we talked about this last time about the, one of the common issues with a BM is you have these account dream lists that frankly, like the brand probably hasn’t ever heard of. You probably doesn’t know you exist. And like that’s step one is to get on their radar.

James: Like what are some like early indicators that you can look at to tell whether or not they’re on your radar?

Mason: Yeah, I got to experience some serious humble pie at, uh, B2B MX this year. ’cause we got the opportunity to speak and I, I just asked the audience and I was like, Hey, who’s here because of the title.

Mason: And like 90% of the room raised their hand. And then I was like, who was here? ’cause they like, have followed along with scrap a BM content. Two and a half people raised their hand. Like literally who was like, I was like, wow, awesome. So like, I thought like, ’cause I, I’ve spoken at B2B MX now four years running.

Mason: Like I thought our brand was like known and it’s not. Um, there are a lot of people that don’t know that we exist and like, so when I think about it from that perspective, like the advice is for starters, look at the target account list and identify where they currently live and how you can show up in a way that is not intrusive.

Mason: I say the word non-intrusive. This is another thing that we’ve started to talk a lot more about is direct and indirect channels. So direct channels would be like LinkedIn, dms, email, phone call. I don’t want to use direct channels unless I have something really good to say where there’s an expectation, because that’s an account way more quickly, typically speaking.

Mason: Um, whereas in indirect channels, we can show up through paid media, through organic, through uh, events in a way that is not intrusive and it’s more inviting. So I think about that at the awareness stage. I would not. Typically recommend using direct channels. At an awareness stage, you’re gonna have more difficult tracking because they’re not direct channels.

Mason: But the goal is to go from awareness to initial engagement and ideally make sure you’re like webinars for this purpose. ’cause nobody likes gated content. But with a webinar, it’s kind of gated content like. They have to give you their information. It’s really like webinars for this purpose. Um, and then for me specifically using LinkedIn a lot, we use LinkedIn events and I actually, this is gonna get really tactical for a moment.

Mason: Uh, but I filter by industry and then state, like actually the state in which people live in. And then I invite people in that state and I go state by state. So I make sure I hit everybody versus just the industry criteria. Um, so over the course of three months. I’ll get everybody in my network that’s in our target vertical.

Mason: And because my awareness stage play is continuing to connect with people on LinkedIn that are our target accounts, they’ll then get opted into our events if they register for our event and then I actually have their data captured and they can move into meaningful engagement. So like that’s what I’m saying is my awareness stage is connecting with people on LinkedIn and like that works for us and I’m happy with that.

Mason: My initial engagement is in an event that’s a, a low barrier to entry event that’s run through LinkedIn where they use the registration form. I. Then they’re opted into our content and they start to get weekly content from us where we show up as familiar and then we can follow up one-to-one based on their levels of engagement.

Mason: That’s it.

James: So you mentioned gated content. I’m gonna, is there a time and a place in the cycle for that?

Mason: Uh. I as an, as a marketing agency, lean super far away personally from gated content because our industry and agencies have done a really, really bad job with content. And, uh, we would like gate infographics, like, not hypothetically, like we gated, we gated an image like how dumb.

Mason: So I personally, I. Would rather just give the content away and be super helpful and be known as a generous brand. So like that’s my approach. Um, other industries, I’ve actually seen gated content work really well, specifically in like, um, something industrial clients that we work with, which was surprising to me, do really well with gated content.

Mason: Um, I. I think it’s because those are older industries, so they’ve not been abused as much, so people are more open to opting in for things like that. So I think it’s industry dependent.

James: I think you’re a hundred percent right. I think the MarTech industry specifically has created the boom of. Anti, you know, don’t get your content, give it away.

James: And, and they’re right to an extent. But when you are working with like those older school engineering, manufacturing, like, which is a big majority of the industry, it’s just, it’s like one of those things where the MarTech brands have the loudest voices. So that’s what everybody thinks now, even though.

James: Some of the old stuff still does work. I wouldn’t now, I would not gate a, uh, infographic, but certainly a meaningful piece of content or a webinar or something like that, I think works well. And then on the ABM side, ’cause like, I guess where we run into it and there’s more of an issue is like they’re using it to track engagement on those accounts.

James: So like you mentioned, as far as like. Like what? How do you track a and ask a question? How do you track a meaningful engagement on content? At the account level?

Mason: Yeah,

James: like.

Mason: Good question. Uh, a couple of ways. So one, like, depending on how you’ve set up your HubSpot, you can aggregate actually all your contacts associated to an account level and actually see the number of contacts that are engaging with specific content assets.

Mason: But that requires them,

Andy: sorry, just to cut you off, but that requires them to be known within the system. Mm-hmm. Correct?

Mason: Mm-hmm. Okay. Yeah. So like meaningful engagement. So if we, if we had the graphic pulled up for our account progression model, married with our, um, activation playbook concept, which is essentially the activation plays are the different tactics.

Mason: There are two kinds of triggers that we operate off of. One is a list based trigger, and then the other is signal based triggers. So list based triggers are like, you pulled this from ZoomInfo, they don’t know you exist. Uh, I, I spoke at a full funnel summit this morning and they actually sent me a list of 175 contacts.

Mason: So list-based trigger, like you came to my session. Awesome. Um, but they’ve not opted into anything from me personally. And the further down the account progression model you go, meaningful engagement as actually the last stage where we even consider doing list-based triggers. And I actually personally, our, my team thinks a little bit differently and they’ve got other use cases, but like, I personally don’t think you should do list-based triggers past the initial engagement stage.

Mason: At the meaningful engagement stage, the goal is that we know that they have a problem they’re actively trying to solve. So if you think about list-based triggers, that’d be G two reviews as an example. So to your point, they need to be opted in at some point, like we need to be able to track them.

Mason: Otherwise, it’s really hard to trigger different programs based on their stage. And then the, the final thing is if you think about the account progression model as their affinity towards your brand and their familiarity with your brand. Like at a certain point they should say, this brand has actually been helpful.

Mason: I want more from this brand. It’s just not the awareness stage, like later. Um, so that’s how I think

Andy: through it. Yeah. So you started to touch on kind of two questions that I wanted to reframe that James kind of brought up. The first one was, and they. Go hand in hand basically, but like how do you measure known versus unknown progression, which is kind of what I was coming with from that HubSpot question.

Andy: And then tag team with that is like when you need to create. A data point where they become known, right? Which is that gated content essentially, or becoming a hand raiser reaching out in some respect. Like where if we treat, if we say gated content for the purpose of this conversation, where does that ideally fit within that progression model and in that buyer journey?

Mason: Yeah. So I’m gonna pull back and go back to what is the, what is the purpose of every stage? So like if the purpose of the awareness stage is that we can validate the know we exist. Like it is not hard to export your LinkedIn followers. Like that’s a relatively easy thing to look and look through. Uh, so there’s that.

Mason: And like if the goal of awareness is to identify that they know we exist, check at the initial engagement stage. Do they have a problem that is content engagement? So that could be they opt in for a webinar that could be they’re signing up for our newsletter. That could be they’re showing up on all of our social content, like.

Mason: I’m, I’m walking through the things that I have done, um, or like at an event, like no one goes to a session at an event because they’re like, oh, I’ve already completely figured this all out. Like they go to a session at an event because they don’t know what they’re doing. And I say that lovingly, but like, that’s why they’re at the event or at the session so we can validate.

Mason: They likely have a problem that they’re trying to actively solve. I dunno that they’re looking for solutions. They think this session might be the solution. Great. But those are list-based triggers that you can measure. And then you move to meaningful engagement, which is they are actively looking for a solution of some kind.

Mason: And I’ll give the example of like when people are looking for a BM, that might be a fractional cons. That might be an agency, that might be a big agency, that might be a software that might be. Any number of things. It might be a course like, but they’re actively looking to figure out how to do a BM better and we wanna be a part of that consideration set.

Mason: So, I’m sorry to give you kind of a Duke answer, but I really want people to look at their own current programs and say, oh, this is where this program fits. How are we measuring that? And then as far as it relates to gated content. It is probably, if you’re gonna run with some form of gated content, it’s probably the initial engagement or the meaningful engagement stage to get that conversion.

Mason: Because post that it’s MQA and MQA is like straight up signal based. Um, now with certain tooling in place like an R B2B or a warmly or a six Sense or whatever, where you can de anonymize website traffic. You may not need anything to opt in to see that they’re actively looking at your product pages. So that’s where it gets into tooling is helpful.

Mason: Like way easier to be a carpenter with like the right tools than no tools. It’s hard to argue with that. It’s just making sure that you have the actual skill set to use those tools well versus buying the tools, thinking they’ll give you the skills.

Andy: All right, so then let’s talk about tools that are needed for the crawl stage of measurement.

Andy: Yeah. What are they? Uh,

Mason: CRM and marketing automation platform like? That’s it. Like HubSpot? Yeah, like I’m running an A BM program. Uh, I will give this caveat. We actually just moved to active campaign for our marketing automation. Um. For any of you that have been in the really early stage, don’t me wrong, I love HubSpot.

Mason: I have bled orange for quite some time, but that price hike from starter to pro is a lot. So active campaign, same functionality, but like half the price. So it’s hard to argue with that. Um. But we’ve been running an A BM program and running an A BM program that actually has automation capabilities focused on segmentation.

Mason: So we did a lot manually. ’cause we didn’t have a crazy, huge audience. Our newsletter was like 4,000 people. Um, from an audience subscriber size, so like relatively easy to segment that audience based on firmographics. But as we’re now growing, we need more automated functionality. So like, that’s about it.

Andy: I’m gonna push you on that. So is Active gonna Campaign going to give you the insight into the. Unknown accounts or only the known contacts.

Mason: So in order to get unknown, you would need some form of data enrichment and like sure, if you would like to, to do that. But that’s an additional cost. And I actually think that a lot of people can start a marketing program based on their existing CRM to like validate that the model works.

Mason: So I. That’s why I actually only say, Hey, you don’t need this to get it started. Now, inevitably you’re like, shoot, I don’t have enough data. Great, let’s go get a data enrichment platform that then gives you specific lists that are, uh, filtered by your firmographic criteria so you can then drive that engagement to that specific list.

Mason: But like honest honestly, sales Nav is like a thousand bucks a year. And if you really need something to get started, you can build a lot of great lists using Sales Nav.

Andy: All right, so then what tools are in the walk stage? Because I think where James and I run into this is like, we have clients that think they’re in the run stage.

Andy: Number one, they might be in the walk stage, but in reality they’re probably in the crawl stage.

Mason: Yeah. So, uh, walk stage then focused on identifying tools that fill in gaps. And I think about moving from automated or from manual to automated. So like, I’d actually say we probably just for ourselves are like, I.

Mason: Toddling into walk stage for our O and A BM program, which is why we went from a lot of manual processes to now setting up automated segmentation and then creating individual content journeys based on segmented audiences at a persona and industry level. It’s like, but I didn’t start there. I just like made content that I thought would be helpful for my target accounts.

Mason: So I would look at the current process and say, where do we spend a lot of time, energy, and effort that works? And how can we automate that without losing a human touch? And I, I’m intentional on that framing because some people will hear automated and think, oh, I should automate my outbound sequences.

Mason: And no, like, you still need a human touch to do some form of manual research, but audience segmentation to give the right list based on levels of engagement. That is not like you can automate that and get the same result, if not better results than a manual segmentation.

Andy: All right. I know the answer to this between all three of us, but I want to get this as a snippet that we can send to anybody, uh, as the consultant, the agency, the strategist that is outside of the organization, whatever you want to call us.

Andy: Mm-hmm. What level of access do we need to the tech stack to do our jobs effectively

Mason: is n of my contracts. And I get redlined on it, and I push back every time I’m a system administrator in HubSpot or Salesforce in order to actually do the job. And now if you don’t want that, that’s fine. That just means we’re hopping on a call and I’m walking you through it, buttons to click, and it’s a waste of time for everybody.

Andy: Thank you. Captured,

James: kinda love those calls, the walking through buttons to click. It’s always so stressful too because, oh God, I feel like those are the most stressful calls.

Mason: Half the job is like, I know what I want to get to, but sometimes I gotta click around for a second. Like I gotta play with the filters.

Mason: Well, and if I don’t nail it, the filters the first time the client thinks I’m an idiot. Where it’s like, well no, I’ve just never had unfettered access to your tech stacks. I don’t know what properties are actually being used right now, so we gotta figure it out a little bit. Anyway, it’s

Andy: a whole thing.

Andy: Exactly. Because there’s so many different stakeholders that are involved in a BM. And forget even just like marketing versus sale versus customer success or mops anything. Let’s just look at it from the perspective of like reporting up, like what is your, what are your suggestions and recommendations to somebody that’s in that position that needs to showcase to the board, to CMO, the success or failure or learnings of an AB BM

Mason: program?

Andy: Yeah, like how, how should they go about thinking that?

Mason: Three dashboards. So Dashboard one is a marketing only dashboard that’s focused on account progression and actually seeing the levels of engagement to the best of our abilities. Uh, dashboard two is the shared dashboard between marketing and sales that shows accounts that are showing significant levels of engagement that are ready for outbound, uh, that are in pipeline and that have closed one.

Mason: And trying to actually see how do we move these accounts from high levels of engagement to meeting and then from meeting to actual opportunity. And then for opportunity to close one. So we want a shared dashboard. Um, and I say that because main dashboard, that is the actual metric of success in detail for the A BM program.

Mason: Uh, I think that it’s helpful to have a separate marketing dashboard that is like. How are we doing at the awareness stage? But like sales doesn’t care about that. Uh, what sales cares about is like, who can I outbound to today? And I say that lovingly, but like, however, wherever sales is getting involved from an account progression perspective, you want that on a shared dashboard.

Mason: And the other reason you wanna share dashboard is it really just helps to drive alignment because we’ve had clients that marketing have their dashboard and their. Automation platform and sales has a different dashboard in their CRM and because the data is passed from the marketing automation platform to the CRM and sales rejects the data that is passed over.

Mason: We’re looking at the same dashboard that use the same general criteria from a, from a property perspective and should be the same dashboard. But because we have different data sets, we see different results. So I’ve actually had clients where marketing is running the automation platform but was losing in the CRM, which is a problem.

Mason: So like same dashboard saying that that’s reviewed on a weekly basis by marketing and sales. And the last dashboard is an executive summary dashboard that just outlines accounts that are engaged and that’s the least important metric. Um, sales accepted opportunities, pipeline generated pipeline influence or accelerated.

Mason: Then closed one revenue or closed lost revenue. That’s also helpful to see the revenue that’s lost from our target accounts, um, because that’s actually a super helpful metric to then do a review and be like, oh, did we actually know what our best fit customer was? ’cause you lose all of your best fit customers, probably not your best fit, or you have a really bad sales team, or you have a terrible marketing team.

Mason: But that’s a problem regardless, and we should figure out why.

Andy: I like that one. Yeah. Straightforward. All right, man. Well, we always like to end. All episodes with one question, and that is, what’s the num easy, what’s the number one thing teams should do today to start measuring a BM more effectively?

Mason: Uh, create clear objectives for all of your programs by mapping them to the stages of the account progression model so you know how to measure the success effectively.

Mason: Because not every program will book a meeting,

Andy: darn it. Uh, we’re doing a BM. All wrong him. So I say we do more outbound.

James: Gotta bang those

Andy: dials, right? Bang those dials. All right, well, Mason, thank Mason. Thank you so much for joining us again today. How can people learn more about Scrappy A BM and kind of follow your.

Andy: Problem based content.

Mason: Um, I promise there is some solution oriented content. Like I’m not always a Debbie Downer. Um, but I am a lot actually, I talk a lot about all the data back problems. Um, so if you Google scrappy a BM, we took a Space Balls approach. So like that’s just the name of everything. So like we have the Scrappy A BM website, the podcast, the.

Mason: The LinkedIn page, which actually gets content now. Hired a marketer that like runs our social content, which is like super helpful as a side note. And then I still do my own stuff. So if you wanna like hurt here specifically for me for some reason, uh, just go look up Mason, Cosby. There is no r If there was an R I’d be more fit, more famous and more rich.

Mason: Um, for those of you that don’t know, it’s kicker for the Green Bay Packers former kicker. He’s now retired, which sounds super nice. Anyway, uh, Mason Cosby. I post a bunch of stuff about account based marketing and occasionally photos of my daughter.

Andy: Awesome. Well, thank you again, Mason. Until next time guys, we’ll catch you on the next episode of Digital Banter.

Andy: Catch you later.