Hello everyone and welcome to this Marketing Office Hour. You've invested in marketing automation, you've set up your campaigns, your scoring models, your nurturing flows. In short, you've done the hard work and you're finally generating MQL. Congratulations. But it's not really enough to generate business, not always. Too much volume leads dedicated to late and often frustrated to salespeople who can't find a strategic account in the mess. Today, I'd like to take a look at why the MQL model is reaching its limit and about how a more account-centric approach, ABM, can help you get to your prospect earlier in the cycle and better align marketing and sales. So, why are your MQLs no longer enough? Everything started 15 years ago when suddenly for the marketing automation solution arrived, such as Markito, Eloqua, Pardot at the time and later on HubSpot. That scaled lead generation. Basically, you created content, you put that on your blog, you attract people, even with ads at the time. And then you put some nice forms on your website to convert anonymous traffic into known people in your database. You detect their preferences, you educate them with nurturing flows, put the scoring model in place, and for the hot leads, you pass them to the sales who qualify the account, generate opportunities, and that led to some revenue. At the time, it was pretty simple because the market was new and everything was easy. But those solutions, Markito, HubSpot, Eloqua, have scaled the lead generation in quantity, but not necessarily in quality. Why is that? Everybody has used the same playbook for 15 years. And now, as the consumer, the prospect, we know the rules. So, I will push you to this article I've written based on an interview from John Miller, the founder of Markito. So, why the playbook is not working anymore, basically, is this Gumball machine effect. Everybody believes that you just have to push more budget in the machine and it will generate leads in the end. The fact is no, because we have learned the rules. We don't want to click anymore into email. We don't want to fill out form. We don't want to click on your ads because we know that we will be tracked. We will receive nurturing flows. We will have an SDR calling us in five minutes to try to sell something. So, this marketing playbook that's worked very well for 15 years is a bit broken now. And it needs to be reinvented. It's still working in some areas. For instance, if you're a startup on a pretty new market, that's a strategy that's still well working. And especially if you're interested in acquiring new names. But if you are on a mature market targeting large or enterprise accounts, that's not sufficient anymore. So, now if we stop two minutes on how we model the reality so that it was easier to manage and work all together on the funnel. Basically, we've defined those very important notions here, the MQL and SQL. So, the marketing qualified lead, the sales qualified lead. Basically, we said we will simplify reality because reality is a bit too messy. And we need to have reporting. We need to have evaluation incentives. So, we need KPIs on which we can work when those marketing automation solutions were defined. And that's where the MQL became a paramount. What we say, basically, and this is what we see in this simplified version of the reality, which we call the funnel to represent the buyer journey. Let's go in detail here. Let's go in detail here. Thank you. Yeah. If we take a buyer journey. Basically, a person can arrive anywhere in the buyer journey. But we forgot that. We said, oh, no. We will say that first the person arrives on, has a journey that is anonymous. So, that you don't know exactly what she does. But let's imagine the person click on an ad in an article in LinkedIn. Then visit your blog. Read an article, which is one of our videos. So, we are on the top of the funnel. And the person is anonymous. So, you don't have any email in your database. Then, your content convives this person. And the person decides to fill out a first form to download the white paper. So, this person becomes known in your database. And here, we decided to, for instance, have those pre-MQL status like cold, lukewarm, or hot. There are plenty of other terminology. Depending on the company. Then, this person accepts to receive an educational program. Read several content. Answer a quiz. So, the scoring is progressing. And she's progressing down the funnel. And then, when the person fills out a contact form, the score becomes enough so that the marketing has enough trust that the person could be reached out. And will not insult the sales. So, that's where the MQL was put. And it's a very important step. Because this is where the marketing hands over to the sales, the person. So, it became naturally an objective for the marketing to generate as many MQL as possible to push to the sales. That's where the default of this philosophy will come evident. So, then, the sales development representative or business development representative takes over the person and try to qualify this person having a first interaction with him or her. Trying to identify if there's a budget, if the person is a decision maker. Is there a project in a correct timeline? So, this is the bent, basically. And if yes. And if yes. The person is passed over to a sales representative. And that could become some revenue. And here we are at the bottom of the funnel. So, we have other steps behind. But this frontier between marketing and sales became very important and became an objective per se. We forgot that it was just a step in the journey that we defined to simplify reality. And it became a very important step. where all the effort of the marketing where all the effort of the marketing were focused. For 15 years, maybe all the marketing teams I know were evaluated and incentivized on the number of MQL they generated. It's not the quality. It's the volume. And that's where the model we use became more important than reality, which is basically generating business. We don't want to use this model too much. So, that's what happened in these 15 years. And that's where we reach the limits now. What are the limits? So, the first limit is that as we were focused on the volume, we generated too many leads with too little focus. So, and as we are generating a lot of MQL. So, and as we are generating a lot of leads, a lot of MQL, it became noise and not signal. And the strategic accounts that the sales have identified as priority one, two or three are deleted in the mass. I know teams that who for instance don't, will not reach the quota of MQL for this quarter. You may tempted to, change a bit, change a bit the scoring model so that more leads are pushed to the MQL stage so that you reach your quota. And here, what we do exactly is the contrary of what we want because we push to the sales less qualified leads. Leads that have less chance to convert to sales qualified and opportunities. So, the whole model and the way we incentivize the marketing teams is wrong and push to more volume, less quality. The result of that is that the sales cannot prioritize efficiently. And unfortunately, the time for the sales is not infinite. In a day, you have only 24 hours. So, if you pass 99% of your time on a market, a non-strategic account, it gives you a non-strategic account. It gives you not enough time to target the strategic account. The second limit is that the MQL arrives too late. And here, there's a very subtle statistics I know. 80% of the buyers choose a brand they already know. So, if you are present at the beginning of the buyer journey, you have the highest chance to be chosen in the end. Whereas, if you arrive in the buyer journey only when, for instance, the prospects want to launch an RFP, you will not certainly be the one in the end. Why is that? It's a simple psychological trait of the humans. If a brand helps you to understand a problem, choose the right solution, educate you, you will feel some attachment to the brand and you want to give back what the brand just gave you. If we take this, I go to another journey. So, this is another article I wrote about how a real buyer journey happens. So, I took the example of Cathy here, who is hired and has to work on Markito and discovers that she needs to be trained. And so, she discusses with a manager and she tries to search for a marketer training in French. That's where she will find some content on our website. And she will have a look at other websites also and she will discuss in her buyer journey with one of a friend of the university who is also working on Markito and recommends heavily the training. from Merlin Leonard. And so, she will then see a quiz on Facebook to evaluate her own Markito level. And that's where she will become known in our system because she will do this quiz. But what we see here is that Cathy had a lot of discussion with her manager, with her friend. She did some research beforehand. And the first piece of content she went through was one of the one from Merlin Leonard. So, this is where we need to be present at the beginning of the stage because if you educate your prospect at the beginning of the stage, you have the highest chance to be chosen. And if you don't do that, they will be educated elsewhere at your competitor's place. And it's becoming more important now that you can be educated by AI and the chat GPT and other systems like that. You need to use some technology to detect that Cathy is actually looking for a marketer training. And this is what intent data can help you with. So, here, usually, all the marketing actions are arriving too late when the person has already done a lot of research. And basically, the choice is made. So, we need to somehow come earlier in the cycle. This is where ABM intent data will help us. The third limitation is that, again, the sales and the marketing are not aligned. Why is that? Why is that? Because sales build all their strategy around target accounts. They say, this is the highest priority account we have defined, tier one, tier two, tier three. And this usually is not shared with the marketing who has a volume objective. We want to generate 500 MQLs this quarter. And the sales and so, okay, but none of them match our target accounts. This leads to wasted time friction, lower trust, even sales not looking at all at the MQLs. So, this is where transitioning from a traditional lead generation center around MQL to ABM can be the solution. And here, we will switch our philosophy from leads to accounts. Why is that? Why is that? Because at the end, it's the account who will sign the opportunity. And we know that in the buying journey, usually not one person is involved. We have five, seven, nine persons involved in a B2B journey. So, it's the account. And more important than the account, the buying group is important. Not the individual. It means that as marketer, we need to have a coordinated action on the individuals of this buying group, not just one individual. Obviously, we will still do everything we do on marketing automation. But as soon as we detect that a person is interested in our solution, we need to identify who around this person at this company is working with so that we can engage in a coordinated action in a coordinated action, all those people. ABM, by targeting accounts and not person, will remove this pressure from the generating volume. What we want to do here is we want to achieve a 100% conversion of those accounts. And those target accounts. And those target accounts have high value. So, high value, less volume compared to what we do with the leads, which is high volume, less value. And we still need KPIs to work. So, we will build another funnel, but not a lead funnel. We will build an account funnel. And those will be two different ways to see the world. So, the lead funnel is linear, centered on the individual, sorry, and focused on quantity. On the account-based funnel, we define the account we want to target first. And that's a fixed number. We will not add any new account. It means that usually when a company. It means that usually when a company implements the ABM strategy, they have a dedicated team working on ABM account-based marketing. And they have the counterpart in the sales. But there's still the traditional lead -centered marketing operations that have also their counterpart in the sales. But they work on completely different ways. So, if you have a group of accounts. So, they don't overlap at all. If I come back on the funnel here. So, we had this funnel on person. And the parallel we have here is we will work a bit earlier in the cycle. So, this anonymous part we had earlier will be split into qualified and aware. Qualified are all the accounts we want to target at first. And we will set up the parameter very strictly at first. It means we cannot catch whatever pass in front of us. We want to target those very important accounts. And we will expose those accounts to marketing campaign ads, targeted ads using intent data. We will try to find who in those accounts is currently looking for keywords, for instance, related to our offers. So, so that we can target efficiently. So, so that we can target efficiently those accounts who are currently looking for our solutions with targeted ads. And if this person from those accounts come on our website, we will push the accounts to a status aware. Meaning that we know that some people in those companies have seen certainly our ads and have decided to come on our website. So, so that we can target efficiently. Then that's where the traditional marketing automation strategy comes into play. Because those person will convert at some point on some infographic, on some forms, on some videos. And those accounts will become engaged if enough people become known and have score in the traditional marketing automation solution. And then the MQL here is replaced by the MQL here. And then the MQL here is replaced by the MQA, marketing qualified account. And opportunity. So here, what will be important is not the number of accounts that we have at the beginning. Because we decide that. It's the percentage of conversion we will have at each step. That's where the philosophy is completely different. We switch from an objective of volume in MQL to have the most of the account we've chosen. So we want to be pushed toward the customer step. So the core concept of ABM we need to follow. Four rules. You've understood. First, we define our priority accounts to target account list. And so it's something very well thought at the beginning of a strategy. We do a lot of segmentation. We try to find accounts that match our best customers. So accounts that have the most probability to convert to account. And for installation like Demandbase does that very well. Then in those groups of target, in the target account list, we will identify, thanks to intent data, which of the accounts are actively researching for issues they have that our offer could help. So we will then map and engage. We will then map and engage the decision committees. Not one person, but the whole decision committee through marketing campaigns, targeted ads. And if when the person become engaged, classic nurturing flows. And so here, the sky's the limit. We have a lot of possibilities at our disposal. And with a very fun sales sequence, with tools like Outreach, Outreach, Southloft, or Human Banker. And we will try to personalize a lot the experience of this decision committee. Why is that? Because we have less accounts to target. So we have more time to focus on the personalization. So we'll try, for instance, a very classic personalization is to personalize your email and link page per industry at first. Or by sub-part. Or by sub-industry. So that you do a very good first impression, which is crucial for converting the account. So you've understood. Your marketing automation solution will not disappear. They work together. There are a lot of things that the ABM solution will not do. And usually it's placed above the marketing automation solution in the funnel. And the ABM solution will use all the signals gathered by, for instance, your market to recognize that an account switch from aware to engage. Because, yeah, we've seen in market to that a person has converted a form, has converted through a form, or looked at a video, or downloaded infographics. So that's things that the ABM solution will not do and rely on your marketing automation to do. And the marketing automation solution will still remain the backbone of your execution. Yes, you can trigger action from your ABM solution. But all the complex logic of campaign execution will remain in your marketer. ABM provides strategy and prioritization, which account to focus on. And together, it becomes orchestrated, data-driven, and aligned with the sales. So here, for instance, in demand-based, we will be able to target and qualify accounts. And for instance, we will have this AI agent that will recognize the best accounts that match your ICP. We will be able to detect accounts when they are researching through intent data, expose those accounts on targeted ads, gather the buying group, engage individuals on the marketing automation, other sales, and MLM model solution. So all that is not possible in your marketer, which is very great to listen and capture the person's interactions and score and engage individuals, but not the account or the buying group. So, MQLs are not dead, but they are clearly insufficient in complex B2B sales and other days. ABM solves the three gaps, volume, timing, and alignment. And in our next session, we will see how Markito can help you take the first step toward ABM. Talk to you soon, guys. Bye.