Brandon Redlinger and his colleagues at Engagio (now Demandbase) played an influential role in my return to a marketing role in 2017. After spending 6 years working in sales and business development, I was intrigued by what he and the team were building: a way to help marketers engage teams of people at companies in a coordinated way, instead of just focusing on individual leads. As a seller, I knew there typically was a whole team of people – a “buying committee” – involved in most enterprise sales, and the ability to run marketing at scale in a way that involved all of them just made sense to me. Further, their idea that “people spend time with you before they spend money” is a concept that has helped me evangelize account-based marketing (ABM) since then.
I wanted to talk about Brandon about the ABM Market Research Study he put together, as I found it to be an incredibly well-produced report. Besides the insights that I found helpful for my own planning, there were several aspects of this project that caught my attention. I recently caught up with Brandon to discuss. Below is a summary of our conversation.
About Brandon
Brandon’s last three roles have been as either the first or second marketing hire in the organization. He has built the marketing function and team from the ground up a few times now, most recently at Engagio.
“Engagio co-founder and CEO Jon Miller brought me in 4 ½ years ago for what he called ‘brand and demand.’ A lot of that was the content marketing side of things. Since being acquired by Demandbase, I’ve focused my work on demand generation, with support for other marketing functions.”
Designing the survey
The survey originated partly as an ABM tactic for the company and partly as a demand gen tool. Questions were designed by Brandon and one of his marketing colleagues at Engagio. As ABM practitioners themselves, their knowledge of the space helped them come up with questions for the survey.
“We knew account-based programs are based on people, processes, and then technology. So we used that framework to guide question development.”
“We asked questions like, ‘Who’s on your ABM team? Who’s the leader of your ABM team?’ Process included areas such as, ‘How are you actually doing the ABM?’ For technology, we asked questions like, ‘How are you doing lead to account matching? Which marketing automation system are you using? What other technology do you have hooked up that your ABM team is using?’”
Brandon defined success in ABM as return on investment in these programs, and by asking about this in the survey, it allowed him to show what high performers were doing in the survey results.
“We wanted to know how high performers were thinking and doing versus those that are not getting those same results.”
This approach of defining success and cutting the data on the characteristics of successful participants is powerful.
“I remember trying to design the questions themselves and asking myself, ‘What’s the headline that I could write off this?’ It’s forming a hypothesis and saying if I think that most people would probably answer it this way I can write a great headline off that. But if the data doesn’t actually support that, or if my hypothesis is wrong, then I don’t use it – but it’s still good information to have.”
The most time consuming part of this project? “It was question development for sure.” But the thought that Brandon and his team put into the questions became obvious when looking at the results. It’s a good reminder to anyone looking to do a similar project: don’t breeze through this step too fast.
Start with the end in mind and develop questions that will support your goal.
Leveraging partnerships
The most recent survey included six other participating companies, and I wanted to learn more about how he managed this process.
“We offered category exclusivity. That was part of the pitch: partners would be the only ones to get all the information that respondents were providing about their category of software.”
Brandon did all the outreach for this. “We have pretty strong relationships across the board so when it came time to put a list of target partners for this we looked at who had been the best partner in the past and also who really aligns with our buyers.”
Partners were also involved in a creative way to promote the results and drive leads “We told them, ‘If you hit this threshold, then you’ll get the whole list. Otherwise we’ll match.’ So, we’re asking you to hit 200 registrants. If you get 50, we’ll give you another 50. But if you get the 200, you get the whole list. That tends to motivate people a lot.”
Summarizing the results
One thing that stood out to me reading this report was how they editorialized it to show the insights behind the data.
“I collaborated on producing this report with a colleague, Katie Martell. She was an analyst for a few years before branching out on her own and becoming a marketing consultant. Because of her analyst background, I would ask what her take was on some of these findings. I’d often tell her, ‘Here’s what I think. Here’s how I see this. What do you think?’ She had great feedback across the board – she was amazing.
“Running some of those pivot tables on the results took a lot of time, but was helpful in finding out what’s the trend and what was the answer to this last year? And then looking at what is the response this year and how did it differ?
“I love the 2020 ABM Market Research Study a lot because it’s the third year in a row that we’ve done it. We’re starting to see trends. It’s not perfect because it’s not the same companies every single year that they’re taking it. But in aggregate, it’s very representative of our audience and how that audience has evolved over the years.”
Putting the results to work for sales and marketing
Once the survey was complete, Brandon produced a webinar with Jon Miller to go over the findings and provide commentary. “Of course, Jon Miller’s a big name in the marketing community. People want to hear what he has to say. We got a lot of people on those webinars.”
The survey also ended up becoming a powerful tool for their sales team. “A big challenge is measuring ABM. This survey gave us the ability to go have intelligent conversations with companies that participated.”
Before, their sales team had to be looking for cues on social or their blog to try to figure out what challenges a prospect may be facing. This survey provided all of that intel.
But some enablement needed to take place. Brandon had to educate his internal team – especially the sales team – on how it would be used.
“We didn’t want the sales reps to go into the conversation and say ‘I read the survey that you took’ because that could cause people to hesitate to take the survey in the future. Instead, we provided them with templates and then they could tweak the templates however they want.”
Business impact
The overall results they achieved from this program exceeded their expectations.
“We are measured on SQLs and pipeline. This was our top performing piece of content for the year. It more than doubled our average SQL production, and doubled our typical pipeline performance.”
Summary
I was really impressed with not only the topic but the way Brandon promoted the survey through partners and empowered his sales team to deliver business results. Whether you are building a software company or not, there are lessons from his approach that you can use in your own research.
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Download the survey results here, and follow Brandon on LinkedIn here.