Ops Cast
Behind the Scenes of ABM Strategy with Marketing Pro Xander Broeffle
Text us your thoughts on the episode or the show!
Have you ever wondered how the lessons learned from managing a theater stage can revolutionize marketing operations? Xander Broeffle, our esteemed guest and the Senior Director of Marketing Operations at CS2, shares his story, one that elegantly weaves together his experiences from a family foster home to the spotlight of stage management and into the strategic folds of marketing operations. This episode peels back the layers of Xander's career trajectory, revealing how the skills of caregiving and orchestrating theater productions have influenced his approach to marketing, strategic planning, and leading a team that's as dynamic as any cast of characters.
Strap in as we navigate the complex terrain of career transitions and dissect the essence of Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategies. With Xander's guidance, we uncover the transferable skills that can catapult an engineer into an advisory board member and delve into the power of diversity in enriching professional environments. Our conversation takes a critical turn, challenging the relevance of ABM and its inconsistent application, urging a shift from a tool-centric to a strategy-centric mindset. Get ready to rethink the way you deploy ABM as we discuss the imperative of aligning sales and marketing for a winning go-to-market approach.
In our closing act, we focus our lens on the operational backbone that underpins effective marketing strategies. Xander advocates for the 'aim small, miss small' philosophy, highlighting how marketing operations professionals can transition from technical mavens to strategic architects within their organizations. He offers his wisdom on selecting target accounts and the iterative nature of campaign refinement, emphasizing the pivotal role of continuous analysis in ABM campaigns. This episode is a treasure trove for anyone looking to understand the scaffolding that supports impactful go-to-market strategies and the strategic alignment that drives success in marketing operations.
Episode Brought to You By MO Pros
The #1 Community for Marketing Operations Professionals
We've been HACKED! (just kidding)
If you love our show, you gotta be sure to tune into Justin Norris' show: RevOps FM
Text us your thoughts on the episode or the show!
Have you ever wondered how the lessons learned from managing a theater stage can revolutionize marketing operations? Xander Broeffle, our esteemed guest and the Senior Director of Marketing Operations at CS2, shares his story, one that elegantly weaves together his experiences from a family foster home to the spotlight of stage management and into the strategic folds of marketing operations. This episode peels back the layers of Xander's career trajectory, revealing how the skills of caregiving and orchestrating theater productions have influenced his approach to marketing, strategic planning, and leading a team that's as dynamic as any cast of characters.
Strap in as we navigate the complex terrain of career transitions and dissect the essence of Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategies. With Xander's guidance, we uncover the transferable skills that can catapult an engineer into an advisory board member and delve into the power of diversity in enriching professional environments. Our conversation takes a critical turn, challenging the relevance of ABM and its inconsistent application, urging a shift from a tool-centric to a strategy-centric mindset. Get ready to rethink the way you deploy ABM as we discuss the imperative of aligning sales and marketing for a winning go-to-market approach.
In our closing act, we focus our lens on the operational backbone that underpins effective marketing strategies. Xander advocates for the 'aim small, miss small' philosophy, highlighting how marketing operations professionals can transition from technical mavens to strategic architects within their organizations. He offers his wisdom on selecting target accounts and the iterative nature of campaign refinement, emphasizing the pivotal role of continuous analysis in ABM campaigns. This episode is a treasure trove for anyone looking to understand the scaffolding that supports impactful go-to-market strategies and the strategic alignment that drives success in marketing operations.
Episode Brought to You By MO Pros
The #1 Community for Marketing Operations Professionals
We've been HACKED! (just kidding)
If you love our show, you gotta be sure to tune into Justin Norris' show: RevOps FM
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by MarketingOpscom, powered by the MoPros. I am your host, michael Hartman, joined today by one co-host, mr Mike Rizzo.
Speaker 2:Hey, I'm the other co-host joining today live, live, live, but recorded for those who are listening to it now?
Speaker 1:Yeah, recorded live in studio? Well, in virtual studio, all right. So joining us today on this episode. We are going to be talking about account-based go-to-market architecture, and joining us is Xander Braffle. Xander is currently Senior Director of Marketing Operations at CS2, a marketing ops rev ops consultancy. His career and life has provided many experiences, ranging from caring for the elderly, taking part in the arts, working with cutting edge technologies and collaborating in the business world. Prior to CS2, xander worked as a Director of Global Marketing Operations for Stratasys. He also spent nine years in a variety of roles at Code42. So, Xander, thank you for joining us today.
Speaker 3:Well, thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it. I'm looking forward to the conversation today.
Speaker 1:I am too, since I've been in many places where ABM has been something we've talked about but not actually pulled the trigger on. So I am here to learn just as much as our audience is, because when I was like getting ready for this, I do a little more of a dive into people's background. Let's start with your career journey, and there are things in your background that I discovered along the way, and including your involvement with theater, which I think an interesting one. But would you just give us a brief rundown of a little deeper than what I just did, of your career and you know as much of that and things outside of sort of the in quotes right traditional professional journey that you think have had influences on, kind of what you do now, how you look at things and where we're going?
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. I always say you know, our history defines who we are today and it's all of those experiences that you have that ultimately brings you to the point where you're at today. And, like many of your other guests, I certainly did not grow up thinking I was going to be a marketing ops professional. While I'm glad that I am now in my 30s, that was definitely not the dream, even in college. So you talked about caring not the dream even in college. So you know, you talked about caring for the elderly. That was more my family. So I grew up where my family actually ran a foster home for adults who had disabilities of a variety of types, and so, while I was an only child, I was always raised with multiple folks in the home and had brothers and sisters throughout my time and still do, which is awesome and that sort of care and empathy really carried me through my entire life and I can attribute a lot of just like my personal being to that. But yeah, thinking through, I grew up thinking I was going to be an actor and then I moved into what is called stage management for live theater. That's what I was kind of doing shortly after college and stage management is you're keeping track of everything. You are the first one in and the last one out. You are managing, you are taking notes, you're sharing that across with the set designer and the lighting designer and the costume designer and you're taking care of the actors and you're doing all of this. All of this work kind of sounds a lot like marketing ops, where you're taking, where you're kind of keeping everything connected. Um, so there's a lot of, there's a lot of the skills that I had just even from the arts, you know in a different way that that really helped to contribute to some of the strengths that I bring to a marketing operations role.
Speaker 3:So at Code42, I was a tech guy, started in support, eventually moved my way into IT. When I was in IT, I was a business analyst for our Salesforce team and so I actually started more on the sales operations and then marketing side. But I was working as a Salesforce business analyst, taking in requirements, figuring out OK, how are we going to do this lead management process? What do we need for lead scoring? How are we going to do our quoting? So it was a lot of the. It was a lot of the business process that needed to happen, but I was kind of the partner you know more than I was driving the requirements. And then eventually over time I was like I wanted to drive the requirements, I want to really really build this thing out, and so that's what moved me into marketing operations and revenue operations.
Speaker 3:We had opportunities, we had people either leave the organization or a new team needed to be restructured, and I had all of that great experience being the person who was gathering the requirements and saw what worked and what didn't work and really took the next step to take that to the next level. And so I always say I was eight, nine years at Code42. I rebuilt our funnel like five different times, five different ways, and so it really helped me get a lot of at bats. And now I'm at CS2. I've been here now for two years and I work with some incredible clients.
Speaker 3:I lead our marketing ops team, so I have three direct reports and we are responsible for kind of all of the fingers to keyboard work that takes place. I do have a couple of clients that I lead as well. So it's nice I can do the strategic work and I can work on all of the roadmap projects and helping our clients take it to the next level, but then I can also get into the weeds and solve the problems that need to be solved within all the marketing automation technology. So it plays to a lot of strengths that I've gained over the year.
Speaker 1:That's great. So with CSU, I want to make sure so. Are you both doing internal sort of marketing ops or as well as client facing stuff, or is it just?
Speaker 3:one of those Great, great, great question there I am. We are only external facing. But the way that? But the way that we are structured, we have client leads that work directly with the clients, building out roadmaps, taking in the strategic requirements, kind of fleshing things out. And then we have a team of MOPs people that we are working with our external customers, but we're the ones that are like fingers to keyboard getting the stuff done, and so I lead that team.
Speaker 1:Gotcha, okay, makes sense. I liked how you started this. You know your point about the things in your life that led you to where you are now. Right, I think it's easy for a lot of people to go. I wish I had, or hadn't had done this, or not that or vice versa. Right, and I, I think I don't know how long ago it was, but I came to this conclusion, like I like who I am now and where I am. You know there are. Are there things that I wish were better or worse for your better? Really Sure, but like it was that combination of all those experiences that led to it, and I think that's that's a good thing to to think about getting a hundred percent more that you can embrace that, the better.
Speaker 3:you know, embrace the experiences that you had, even if it wasn't necessarily like the right path. You know, I feel like, yeah sure, Maybe my mid, my early 20s it would have been great if I could have been immediately in corporate America and immediately doing marketing and where would I be? But then I wouldn't have had all of the cool experiences that I had that kind of shaped me into the unique individual that I am. My only regret is not paying enough attention to math. I wish I had done a much better job with math growing up.
Speaker 1:That's so funny.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's interesting.
Speaker 1:I have just recently been the, so I graduated from college with an engineering degree although my friends who were electrical engineers would say I'm a pseudo engineer because it's sort of an offshoot of industrial engineering anyway but that the school had reached out and it was asking me to come back and be a part of an advisory board from an?
Speaker 1:Um kind of from a professional setting as opposed to an academic setting. And we just recently had conversations and it and it's really interesting to me to think about that particular education and how I still apply a lot of what I did, what I learned, to my day-to-day job. And so it's kind of interesting because they're asking me to be kind of a voice, especially for those who don't want to go on to do a graduate program, to provide feedback and input on how that can apply to helping these people go to either another graduate program that's not in engineering or to go into a professional career that may or may not have engineering in its background or in its components. So I think there's a lot of value in sort of being open to different ideas and learning from all those things that you get opportunities to do three, yeah, 100 all right now that I've totally taken us off track I mean, what is?
Speaker 2:what is the track for this show anyway?
Speaker 1:Is it a show?
Speaker 2:I think it's just community building in a micro like one-on-one or one to a couple people conversation. It's just community building, right.
Speaker 1:Sure sure.
Speaker 2:Broadcast for building the community.
Speaker 1:No, I mean, I think, one of the things. Well, hopefully our audience appreciates these sort of I guess I'll call it a sidetrack, but I think it's always for me very interesting and gratifying to hear people's stories about how they got here, Because I say this all the time I don't think there is a common pattern yet, and some of that speaks to the lack of this being seen as a discipline where there can be training, although I think that's changing being seen as a discipline where there can be training, although I think that's changing. But I do think it does speak to the diversity of backgrounds that can end up in this kind of world, and I think there's something powerful about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. I keep advocating with some of the professional peers that I have outside of marketing operations, um, as I was journey, journeying to build I mean, xander, you probably don't know this, I don't know why you would, but we actually like, designed an entire, like web app let's call it right when I said, hey, how do we obfuscate, like the, the identity of these individuals in a meaningful manner so that people can come in and, like, try to find someone with the skills that they need for an open role? Right, like, uh, so a hiring platform of sorts based on, based on you know, your, your unique, uh, sort of skills and tech stack experience, et cetera. Um, and and my, my aspiration was to dovetail some of the learnings that we come, come up with from that sort of journey in this community, building into, basically, how, how do you break into careers? Like, I have this whole vision for a product called career path or right, and uh, and I'm not, I would be thrilled if someone went and built it, which is why I'm happy to share it.
Speaker 2:But basically, like, it's exactly this, like you, xander, are saying, hey, I learned these things in this totally, completely different space, but the things, the talents that I picked up are transferable. Right, like I can transfer some of that experience into something else. Right, like I can transfer some of that experience into something else. Right, I would make the argument that my wife, who was a industrial sort of like industry property manager for corporate real estate, right, that people management of there's a leak in the roof and the contractors and the vendors and the this, like those skills are highly transferable to a whole number of things. Right, yeah, you could break into tech and go into customer success. Nobody's going to be pissed off because there's no leaking. You know roof but they're. They might be pissed that their leads are leaking. Right, but like, hey, you could figure out how to people manage right and and deal with conflict and all that stuff, anyway.
Speaker 1:So I agree. Should we just switch topics completely and talk about how hiring process is broken because of things like that, because people don't see?
Speaker 2:I think we could do another show about this, but I at least got us anchored on possibly leads linking and coming back to there we go.
Speaker 1:That's what we're looking for, yeah, so let's honor what we've told in a, in a in our, in our show description.
Speaker 1:Right, we're gonna be talking about abm, what? So let's get, let's get into that topic. I mean, I'm not even sure if we should still call it abm. So, xander, when we talked before, you know, I think we agreed that the way people are quote doing ABM today is really inconsistent different. There's probably different definitions, I guess, especially now that you've probably been through it both in the corporate world and then with clients through CS2, right, can you elaborate on what you mean, like, what do we mean by? First of all, maybe I don't know if you want to define what is ABM, but you know what are you seeing and what have you experienced in terms of different types of types of ABM? I need to write air quotes around a lot of this and with that.
Speaker 3:Mike, did you lose Michael as well?
Speaker 2:I'm back, I think. Yeah, just uh, for maybe just start back at here. I'll put a little marker here.
Speaker 1:Uh, start back at for our audience, hartman okay, can you elaborate that on that for our audience, zander? Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. So you bring up a really good point Should we even call this ABM? And the answer is no, I don't. I don't think that it really values anything by calling it ABM outside of and I will say this outside of we've spent 10 years trying to educate people not in sales and marketing on what ABM is. So you don't want to change it too much, and that's the reason why, when we started talking, I'm trying to frame this more as an account-based, go-to-market strategy, an account-based, go-to-market architecture, because you are working this has to be working between both the marketing team and the sales team, and then, in an ideal experience, you're carrying this into your customer base. So you're including your customer success teams, you're including your product teams.
Speaker 3:But let's not go that far for our conversation today. Just like, if we can just get marketing and sales to align in the right accounts, we're going to be better off than the majority of organizations that are saying that they're doing ABM. Yeah, and I think that where I see a lot of the problems is I bought a tool, so I'm doing ABM, or I hired an ABM manager, so I'm doing ABM, and you're not starting with what is the actual strategy that we are trying to accomplish as a go-to-market team to get the right accounts to become customers. That's what you're trying to do, but we keep on trying to solve it by solving some of the necessary requirements of a good account-based approach, but we're not starting with what is the true strategy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I, I just want to say I think it's my observation now, years into ABM, uh, as a, as a topic, um is like it's almost like there's these like um invisible shadow hand, like puppeteers, that are trying to like dangle us along on the like the software solves your problem. Narrative. Like you remember when like marketing automation came along. On the like the software solves your problem. Narrative. Like you remember when like marketing automation came out and everybody was like, oh, like this will just like leads will just show up by you know, marquetto or whatever it was Right, it doesn't matter what tool it was.
Speaker 2:It felt like on the other side, was this magic, right? You turn on the switch and like things just flow and I feel like abm was like this continuation. Like there's these like secret puppeteers out there trying to like continue this narrative, right, you, oh, like. So I feel like abm tools today, sort of accidentally, do that like probably without real intention, right, but they, but they like they center around this like complex, strategic, go-to-market initiative and make it seem like, oh, this is going to make my problems go away. It's just a magic. I turn it on and the reality is like, if you're even if you're building a company, you have to have a strategy and an opinion about how to build the company and the problem you're solving. Well, you have to have a strategy and an opinion about how to build the company and the problem you're solving. Well, guess what? It's the same thing, folks, like, if you want to do ABM, you have to have a strategy and a problem that you're trying to solve, and then maybe you should go implement the tool.
Speaker 1:So, anyway, it's just even if it's, even if you don't believe it's going to just start the cash register ringing, right, and yeah, I think that's that's the worst, right? Yeah, I bought this fairly.
Speaker 3:Okay, let's call it. It's an expensive tool, right? I think that that we can all agree. Data is expensive, um, and so you get into these contracts and I I feel like a lot of those contracts end up sitting as shelfware, because maybe you had like the one champion who was like I'm going to use this and I'm going to use it to power my advertising and then it's going to bring just highly qualified accounts into the system and we're going to be able to work these as leads and it's just going to flow. But I don't want to bother the rest of the teams. I don't want to make anybody change the way that they approach their work. I think I can just solve it on the backend and you know the, the vendors they they're they can't sell a really complex problem. It's really hard to do that Right. So they have to make it as simple as possible.
Speaker 1:And then as a result.
Speaker 3:it kind of turns into well, I have the tool, aren't we doing it right? And then you start to figure out what's the process that you have in place, what are the people that you have in place, what are the things that you're doing and not doing differently, because you want to do account-based and it's just not working.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I mean this could easily get into a. Let's bash all those vendors out there that are selling ABM, and I think that does a little bit of a disservice to I think some of this, the responsibility for some of these things where you end up with shelfware or not fully utilized platforms, things like that is because people don't have the strategy in mind about how is this helping to, helping us do something different or aligning with our go-to-market strategy. And just from my personal experience, I think just about everywhere I've been in the last 10 years, someone has come to me and said, yeah, we want to do ABM, can we go do ABM? And my response has typically been well, first off, what do you mean? Do you mean? Do you want to just go buy software or do you mean right, do you mean it? Do you want to go just go buy software or do you mean like we want to do a strategy?
Speaker 1:And I say, if you want to do the strategy, I think the first thing you do is, to your point, xander, like let's go align with the sales team on what are those top x number of accounts and how do we want to go at them. And then usually I'm going like is there a way we can solve this with like. Can we do a test run with our existing tools and technology and people, even if it means some manual stuff for the short term? Have you run into similar things, and I'm curious. Generally, what's happened for me is you can't even get past the first step of finding the target list.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. So you have a data vendor that's not necessarily a quote unquote ABM vendor, but it's a ZoomInfo or a Clearbit or something that they can start to gather some better account data One. If it's just the marketing team that's saying let's go select accounts, or it's just the sales team saying let's go select accounts, well there's already a misalignment between those teams.
Speaker 1:Totally agree.
Speaker 3:So I always say it has to be head of sales, head of marketing. Let's get aligned on what we are going to target and let's tear out those accounts. Start with your ICP. There's quite a few organizations that still don't really know their ICP, or their ICP has been changing right. Maybe they started in a certain segment, they're trying to move into a different segment, so that evolves over time.
Speaker 3:So really get aligned on who your ideal customer profile is and build that as your baseline. But then, from an account-based perspective, it's get that baseline and then figure out within that who are you going to target? You already know that you have a bunch of accounts that are a good fit. Now let's start to target the accounts that are going to give you the biggest revenue potential, whether it's, you know, it might not be whales for everybody.
Speaker 3:As soon as you say revenue potential, I think it immediately goes to the giant enterprises, but you might find that your product sells better in the mid-market. Well, let's get the upper end of the mid-market then and start to really prioritize those accounts. You can do all of that work without intent data, without all of the other pieces that end up coming into just a technology solution. Technology solution that I would venture to say that if you had all of your marketing dollars going toward those targeted accounts that you've selected as a cohesive team and you know that your sales team is ready to jump on them when they're ready, and you know that the marketing team is providing the right air cover, you're going to have more pipeline from those accounts.
Speaker 1:I'm curious what you think about this too. Mean, you mentioned icp, which I think that's a another term that gets thrown around that has, like, everybody has a different idea of what that means, um, kind of like persona, right, so, um, so let's set that aside. But if you know, one of the things I think you maybe you were hinting at, at least that've seen, and I think is becoming more and more important is this idea of buying groups. I think this is another aspect I think a lot of teams don't really spend a lot of time in is looking at what is the profile of the accounts where we win and what does that look like, both in terms of what are the activities that tend to do, do that, and what does the buying group look like typically? Like do we have, is it a committee? Do we like, do we know who those key decision makers are, who's the one with, like you know, how important do you think that is to this aspect of really understanding those accounts compared to, just say, demographic, chromographic, you know, intense signals.
Speaker 3:So I think that it's very important, but it's a layer right. Like if you're not getting the basic, the basic profile of of the right firms, the right organizations that you're trying to sell into, you can have the right buying teams, but then in accounts that are never actually going to close with you because they don't align either, they don't have the right technographic data, maybe they don't you know they don't have the right fit in some other capacity. But as soon as you get those accounts, then you're absolutely right. You need to have the right buyers within those accounts and it's nothing new. I think that sometimes when we, when we, when we, even when I post out to LinkedIn, it's like oh, there's the concept of the buying committee. The concept of the buying committee has been there ever since I started my career. It's not like this is anything new, but it's more defined and it's easier for us to get to that data than it's ever been before, with access to data tools and different personas. No-transcript organization.
Speaker 1:So I think what's interesting to me, what's coming through very clear to me and hopefully for our audience, is that none of what we just talked about is a technology thing. None of what we just talked about is a technology thing. It is does require effort for the team to look into this data. To look at historical activity, like you've got a lot of first party data right In terms of you like dig into your CRM platform and understand that activity with your. If you've got marketing automation, you've probably got activity that's tracked against those, so you can really you can get some really deep insights into what has worked. And then, if you can layer in then other parts of your data. But it does like it's not just a we're going to drop in a piece of technology and it's going to give us all the answers right yeah, yeah, I mean the technology comes into play.
Speaker 3:Play. There's plenty of customers that I'm working with right now that have the tech stack to be able to help support it, but we're not starting those in an ideal state. We're not starting those projects with. Just how do I optimize this piece of tech? I'm really trying to say exactly what we're talking about here. Is our targeting right? Do we have the right people in the database? Do we know who the right people are and do we have the right messaging to align to those?
Speaker 3:You know, if you, if you're in an organization that can sell into 15 different industries and you're trying to do an account based approach, maybe don't start in 15 industries. Maybe it's time to start in two, two and get some messaging toward those accounts so that way you can really start to capitalize and now you build a program around it and now you can bring on another two industries. But it's not about blasting everything and saying that this is my total market or even my serviceable market. You have to figure out what is the thing that you're going to be able to accomplish in the next six months.
Speaker 2:This is I'm I'm giggling because this is almost word for word the conversation that I had with my client who called me specifically about this topic. We have an account-based thing tool that we're working. Nothing is working. Nothing is working. We don't know why, and so we just and it was very flattering. So I'm going to try to touch on a couple of things that I think are important for our audience and I would love to hear your thoughts, xander.
Speaker 2:But this conversation that I had with them I said, first of all, I'm flattered that you came to me to ask about this topic specifically, because traditionally, marketing operations professionals aren't necessarily meant to sit there and try to guide your overall go-to-market strategy there, to listen in on what is the art of the possible and how do I potentially support the architecture to support that go-to-market hypothesis that you have. But not necessarily are the ones to help you come up with the hypothesis or these kinds of things when you say is the messaging right? My job as a marketing ops professional is not to tell you if it's right or wrong. My job is to give, is not to tell you if it's right or wrong. My job is to give you the tools to decide if it's right or wrong. I can implement the structure for you to test the messaging and get the results and tell you what those results were. But my job is to not come up with the messaging for you and it is not to tell you whether or not I think that that is good or bad messaging. That is not my job. My job is to help give you the architecture right, and so I had this whole conversation with them, exactly that right. It was like aim small, miss small. It's one of my favorite quotes. I've said it on the show a number of times and I definitely stole it from a movie, but I think that's exactly it. Right.
Speaker 2:You come up with, begin with the end in mind, have a hypothesis understand your products and your services that you sell into the market your TAM at a minimum your TAM and then from there, who do you think you could sell best into? If you're just getting started and you don't have any data on the other side to go, try to analyze who are top customers of all time or anything like this, then just come up with a hypothesis and then aim small, miss small and decide. Okay, we believe let's just articulate it in concrete examples we believe that industry A with product features A and B combined, sold to these three key personas, are the, are that will, that will yield a pipeline that we can, you know, hit X revenue on. And then you just see, you just go, you just go see if that works Right, and and so that that was.
Speaker 2:I was flattered to have been a part of the conversation around sort of like strategy and go-to-market principles and these kinds of things in trying to call out like from a you know, outsider's perspective looking in. But I wanted to hear you know Hartman too, right, I saw some head nodding for our audience when I was saying, hey, it's not our job to do some of these other things. And so I guess my question really in all of that, xander, is like you know CS2, you got a team around you. You guys are honed in really on operations. I, you know I'm sure you have some other practitioners that can help out with some of that messaging strategy stuff. But like does that resonate with you, right?
Speaker 2:Like, like, I'm going to talk to you guys about these. I'm going to ask you these questions, but I'm not going to sit there and give you the answer afterwards, right, I'm just going to ask the right questions, hopefully.
Speaker 3:I think that that's the key for for where you can, where you can balance right, because it is a balancing act At the end of the day. I always say marketing ops folks, we are so close to the data, we are so close to the process, we're so close like we're being leaned on more and more and more and more when we're doing our jobs well. They want more from us and we can. I'm not here to criticize your messaging, but I am here to say do we have the right messaging for this target account? It's your job as content marketers to assess do we have the right messaging in place? And you need somebody that's in the organization, that's thinking about this at a higher level and at a strategic level and who can just help to drive the right conversations.
Speaker 3:You know I'm sitting in conversations with the CEO and the CEOs are going to like how do you know that this is the right target accounts, right target accounts? You know so. So like this, when you're, when you're doing this type of a strategic go to market change, like it could take you from the marketing ops manager, who's just known as, like a Marketo database admin, into a strategic role, because you're asking the bigger questions and you're really trying to figure out, like as a collective team, what can we do and where can we go um. But you're right, I mean, it's not, it's not your, it's not your job to dictate all of that, but I think that it is your unique opportunity to facilitate that move.
Speaker 1:So and then provide the data to make it I think my gut reaction to that is I don't, I understand where you're coming from.
Speaker 1:At the same time, I don't agree that it it shouldn't be your job to push back on messaging and things that you feel like might not be core to the ops function, and the reason why is not so much because I think everyone should be good at writing and content and those things.
Speaker 1:What I do think is important, though, especially for those people who aspire this is one of the things I think that has restricted or limited the growth opportunities for people who come up through marketing ops Is that they think of this is my domain and they don't think of it as I'm.
Speaker 1:Actually, I have a unique set of skills that others in the marketing team don't have. I have a broader. I have a breadth of disability into things that maybe they don't, and I just like anything else right, I can learn about how to develop content, how to build personas, like all these things that kind of typically fall into other parts of marketing. So I would be an advocate for, say, if you get that opportunity to be in those conversations, take it If you want to have, if you have aspirations to go beyond marketing operations and you want to see if you can become someone who could be ultimately leading marketing or leading a revenue function. I think it is incumbent upon you to not just say that's not my job, so I think that's the one risk I would put out there. That I think is anyway.
Speaker 2:No, I appreciate the. I definitely appreciate that opinion. This will be the second time in two weeks that we've had a disagreement on the show between the co-hosts, which is great. But no, but I, I actually I agree with parts of what you're saying.
Speaker 2:I think the the way in which marketing operations professionals have an opportunity to be a part of that conversation is really about well, first, let me just start by saying if you see that your CTA button is totally wrong compared to what you've done in the past, speak up and say something. Let's not be totally against the idea of speaking out against bad copy or bad content, right, um? But I think your unique opportunity to be a part of those conversations is is to to again go back to the word like facilitate and ask the right questions and say hey, how do you plan on measuring it? First of all, is there a plan on measuring the different types of messaging and how can I best support which messages work and how can I create a naming convention or a system for you to easily, for all of us to easily, understand what messages are resonating with the market? Right, you don't necessarily have to be a good copywriter, but you do have to have an understanding of what the goal is for the business and how to facilitate measuring that goal, and through that you're have to have an understanding of what the goal is for the business and how to facilitate measuring that goal and through that you're going to learn inevitably which messages are resonating.
Speaker 2:And because you're paying attention to literally the words on the page, you will eventually be able to turn around and go back to the team and say, hey, you know, guess what team you decided to? I see there's no test that we're going to run on this next campaign and you chose this copy based on the data that we've had before and we sort of touched on this, you know, in other QBRs this. I don't think this is the right message. I'm not going to rewrite this message for you, but I'm just letting you know that, according to the systems that we've set up before, the messaging that you're choosing to lead with on this campaign we're about to launch might not be the right one based on what we have, and I think that's a different kind of conversation around copy and content and go-to-market strategy. That isn't necessarily. You're not signing up to write it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think we're more aligned than it may have come across. But I'm like I across. I hate when I hear things. I don't want people to walk away thinking there's a limit.
Speaker 2:That means that I basically said something that made you think that it was actually I think it can be interpreted. It's not your job.
Speaker 1:Right, I want to tell this, xander, one of the things when you and I were talking about this whole topic early on, it was something about, like, a lot of these ABM, whether we again, whether it should be called ABM or not.
Speaker 3:Everybody knows what it is Right.
Speaker 1:So in these ABM environments like that, there's not, uh, an appropriate operations kind of resourcing that is associated with it, and I actually so. There's one place where I inherited in this case, a platform that was a specific platform, but we didn't have anybody resourced to really do what was truly needed to make the most out of it. So like, do you see that as well? Right, and what are the downsides of that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean if you are. So let's take I have a solution that's a account-based solution, demand-based, six cents terminus, something like that. Oftentimes you are relying on the intent data and their methodologies to bubble up accounts that are showing up, that they're in market, but that could be thousands of accounts. So if you don't have the right process in place to be able to actually take action on those, they end up going and they end up sitting, or the sales team doesn't understand what data points that they can get out of those solutions, or you don't have an admin in the solution making sure that the segmentations that you've set up to do all of your automated marketing is still accurate and still aligned, and so it has to have a process in place to understand what happens when I get a qualified account. So let's pretend that we have any target account solution. Oftentimes it's just like a checkbox on an account. I'd prefer to have a tiering system where you can really start to see here's tier A, b, c.
Speaker 3:I have different approaches that I'm going to take from a marketing and a sales perspective based upon those tiers. But let's say that we just have target accounts. Do we have an approach to mark an account as qualified and then do we know what the steps are necessary in order to actually take action on those qualified accounts? Because I think one of the biggest struggles from an SDR, bdr perspective is okay, great, this account's in market, but who do I target, who do I message, what do I do? And so, kind of going back to our buying committee, if we don't even know what the buying committee needs to be, how do they know who to find on LinkedIn or in Zoom info or whatever tools that they have access to to really start to prospect against those accounts, have access to, to really start to prospect against those accounts? And instead it just becomes I don't know what I'm doing. So I'm going to go to the accounts that I'm already prospecting into.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean that makes sense right. I mean people go towards where the, the, the, the things, where they know more or there's less resistance.
Speaker 3:Yeah, right, yeah exactly.
Speaker 1:Pretty pretty standard.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm just gonna I know we're going to like go into this next piece of the segment here, but I just want to like um rah, rah to to like please, folks, if you have these tools, put somebody in charge of managing the sort of architecture of that.
Speaker 2:I have had one-on-one conversations with the mops person that works at a very reputable abm company, who is like yeah, in fact I've spoken to the head of customer success at that abm company and they're like yeah, the best possible way to take advantage of the platform is to have somebody who's in charge of actually administering and architecting this product. You cannot buy an ABM solution, just like you should not buy a Marketo without having someone who actually knows how to implement it. So, please, if you're investing in this stuff, go hire a consulting team. Go hire a contractor or a full-time employee someone, because you are not going to get what you need out of it. So I heard you say that, but I really wanted to emphasize it because it's been coming up a lot, not just with my client, but in conversations at like Adobe summit and all these other places. It's coming up a lot right now.
Speaker 1:So yeah, well, I would argue that that should go to any piece of technology that you're going to bring into your ecosystem.
Speaker 2:But I was like my eyes were opened recently when I got the training.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, I think you know the thing that's different about ABM maybe is that, like it's a, if you're doing a traditional model, where you're doing you kind of mass go to market, outbound, and now you're doing ABM approach, right, it's a different. There's a new technology that you're bringing in that requires a dedicated, you know, person who understands that, plus how it fits into the rest of the ecosystem and how you. It's this strategy. Yeah, all right. So, speaking of strategy, xander, one of the things you shared and I'd like you to kind of maybe talk through with for our audiences a framework that you've been kind of putting together for how to approach ABM at an organization. So why don't you, if you could share that as much as you want?
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. I. I kind of alluded to some of it. So, first things first. When you're thinking about, when you're thinking about your account basedbased architecture and approach, start with what are your goals of this overall program? Right, it could be to bring in new accounts from a prospect perspective. It could be for your customer base that you want to reduce attrition. It could be a multitude of solutions. It could be a multitude of solutions. So that is where your senior team, your CMO and your CRO, or whoever it is that you're working with, really should be aligned on what's the overall of the overall architecture to support those KPIs. But if the team's not even thinking about that, like, like, let's start there and really start to figure out, like, what does success look like In terms of you know, how would I? How would I recommend?
Speaker 3:Prioritizing and breaking down such a large initiative is into a few key areas. So we talked a lot about the first one and that is around selecting your target accounts, selecting your ICP, and you got to start with I know what accounts that I want to work and I know what I want to prioritize over the next six months. Right, these accounts in general, what we're recommending is it takes a while to actually drum up and generate business and demand within those accounts. So if you're flipping them out every month, which I've seen I don't know if you guys have seen this as well, but it's like my account list, my target account list, is updating all the time. It's like no, really really be methodical about this and give it some time to be able to have that, that demand generated and you can re review it. You know, maybe once or twice a year, but definitely something that that you need to have, uh, that you need to have dedicated some resources around.
Speaker 1:Sorry to interrupt, just just real quick. So the six months until I get, say, the night, do you think that makes sense if your typical sales cycle is, say, 12 to 18 months or longer, or does it? I mean, in other words, should there be something that defines that review cycle? That's tied to your deal size and time to close.
Speaker 3:It's tied to your deal size and time to close. Yeah, yeah, and maybe what I should say is I'm not saying that you have to change out your accounts, but it's a good idea to review those accounts Because, to your point, you could have 12 to 18 month cycles. But you might be like you know what, in terms of what I want to prioritize right now. I've gotten enough learnings by working these 100 accounts that I know that these 40, they're going to be more relevant, like early next year. So, okay, I'm going to move them out for now and then I can always bring them back in. But it's not saying that you have to say, well, you didn't, you didn't win a deal in six months, so it's time to it's time to drop those target accounts, but definitely something to just like kind of keep in a maintenance mode, but not in a rapid change mode. So you got target account selection kind of taken care of. The next piece is figuring out what your prioritization model should be. So this is where we would start to like, think about, like, okay, I understand what a qualified lead looks like. What does a qualified account look like? You don't need a third party tool to be able to do that. It's helpful. It's great if you can start to get some of that intent data and some of the on-site web behavior, but I would say that you have enough data from a first party perspective. An MQL doesn't mean that it's a qualified account. You really want to start to think about like what should my buying team, as we talked about earlier what should the collective team be doing in order to show that this account is primed and ready to go? Ideally, if you could have a technology it doesn't have to be a full out ABM solution, but a technology that can help to identify accounts that are coming to your website and write that back. I think that that's a really, really key piece because you want to make sure that you're, that you are, at least you know, highlighting the accounts that are engaged with you, even if they're not filling out forms on your website or doing some of those traditional demand generation conversion points Then what you want to do is you want to activate your sales team and you want to engage your sales team and your marketing team kind of across a funnel right, and so funnels serve their purposes.
Speaker 3:We do a lot of work when it comes to person funnels. I think that it's also useful to understand at an aggregate level where is this account at? Are they engaged? Do they have you? They have prospects that are engaging with them. Are they qualified? Are they moved into an opportunity? And then, ultimately, have they become closed one? But it's just good to know at that macro lens, where is my account moving through? And then you want to analyze the data and understand what's working and what's not working, so that way you can optimize that process over time. So you have account tiers, you have qualified accounts and then you have a form of account stages that that way you can really start to refine.
Speaker 3:Okay, that campaign didn't work. We didn't get enough people moved into the next phase of our funnel that we had as a goal. What can we do differently this time? And so you're constantly trying to iterate and improve. And that's where that team structure comes into play, right, whether it's the operations person that's making sure that any of the technology that's responsible for this is working, and then also making sure that you have the right like maybe you need to have your account based marketer who is really looking at these programs and really trying to figure out what is the creative solutions needed in order to move these accounts along, and then you of course have to optimize and and kind of repeat that cycle. That's the reason why we bring in that like six every six months is really figuring out. Do we have the right accounts in place? Maybe we did our best and we're just not getting any bites. Okay, let's tap back into our ICP and see if there's other potential.
Speaker 1:That's great. I think this is gold. So we'll have to make sure that we tell our listeners, when they tap in and go off the sidetrack, that you need to listen all the way through.
Speaker 3:Please stay with us.
Speaker 2:Stay with us. We have some chaptering stuff happening, thanks Thanks to AI, which is helpful. So yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:Absolutely Well. It feels like we just barely tip the tip of the iceberg here on this topic. I'm sure we could go on longer and unfortunately we're kind of up against the clock. So, xander, thank you so much. If folks want to connect with you, learn more about what you're up to or where you're sharing some of this stuff in other ways, what's the best way for them to do that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so the best way to be able to do that is on LinkedIn. So LinkedIn, xander Brafel, I think, is my URL. I try to post at least a couple of times a week. I provide information when it comes to account-based. I also love to just provide really tactical improvements that you can make when it comes to your marketing automation. As I said, I lead the mops team over here at CS2. So we learn all kinds of nerdy, cool things. So it gets very much into the weeds, and then it's also very strategic stuff that I try to share.
Speaker 1:So I think that's great Cause I think I think a lot of people want to get into like I know that strategy is important but like there's often like small tactical things that feel like they're small that can have huge impacts on, say, efficiency and productivity, and just like kind of your ability to chill, yeah yeah, exactly that's why I wanted to be in the role that I'm in.
Speaker 3:I'm like I love being 30 000 feet, but I really like being in the weeds too. So, like you, know, kind of find like, okay, I'm comfortable here, great, now I'm going to stretch up here. And then the other thing to just mention I, you know I'll throw, float this out here CS2.
Speaker 3:We do have a podcast, so I'm a co-host on that A really good one, yes, and it's really great content. I listened to it before I was an employee here, and then we're also starting. Probably by the time that this is out, we'll actually have some videos out where I'm doing a YouTube series, prioritizing right now some HubSpot work, but again kind of like, really, how do you build out good architecture when it comes to Marketo, and HubSpot is going to be my focus.
Speaker 2:Nice, fantastic, that's exciting.
Speaker 1:Great stuff.
Speaker 3:Xander we're going to see you at Moffsapalooza right. I would love to yes.
Speaker 2:I'm going to try and figure out how to make it happen. Let's get you there.
Speaker 1:Well, good, Well, Xander, thank you so much. This has been really first off. It was great to hear another story and great to learn, Like I really like I picked up new stuff here along the way as well. So appreciate that I'm sure our audience will be the beneficiaries, and so thank you for joining us.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Also to Mike, thanks for being here to support and add your flair to this, all your 30 pieces of flair. Yeah, a little office space reference there. A little office space reference there. A little office space reference.
Speaker 2:Nice plug, I like it.
Speaker 1:All right. And then also always thanks to our audience for continuing to support us and give us your feedback and input on guests and ideas, and for those who are interested in being a guest or have suggestions for topics or guests, please let us know. Until next time, bye everybody.