Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – So today I'm joined by Kevin Driscoll, who's the Head of ABM and Campaigns at Datadog. Kevin, thank you so much for joining us today.
Kevin Driscoll (Datadog) – Absolutely, great to be here.
Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – Well, thank you. So we've been back and forth a little while now and trying to set this up. So I'm delighted you could make some time today to talk about all things ABM. Now I was just checking out before we came on the call, your CV on LinkedIn and obviously ex IBM. I think you were there for about seven years and a plan and now Datadog. And it was also, I thought it was really interesting was the kind of the marketing journey, demand field, product marketing, campaign marketing, growth marketing. And obviously now at Datadog ABM.
So I think it's a fantastic journey that a lot of people are on, a similar journey from any inverted commerce traditional marketing through to account-based marketing. So let's just kick off with a question actually around your ABM philosophy. I think when we were talking before the recording, I think one thing you said to me was that a lot of marketing is getting lost in the shuffle. I thought it was quite interesting, so I made notes on that. How would you define ABM and the of the ABM mindset over at Datadog? And how do you think this kind of approach to marketing is actually helping you to deliver what you need to deliver there?
Kevin Driscoll (Datadog) – Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, the most important thing is that we are an account based growth organization, meaning we are very focused on pipeline growth within top accounts. And ultimately that's how we're measured. And so I think having that North Star metric for ABM and really any marketing helps solidify, you know, a litmus test of should we do something or should we not? Right. Because it's a question of, it going to produce measurable pipeline impact or is it not? And that helps kind of guide, you know, most of the decisions we make.
I mean, my philosophy is that ABM, especially when you start getting into hyper personalized one-on-one campaigns, a lot of the effort that can go in doesn't always translate to impact. Right. So really being very clear about what the outputs are for whatever your inputs. So for instance, if you are customizing messaging, you're sitting in account planning workshops with your sales leaders weekly, those need to be turning into landing pages or something else, right? And ultimately I think that pragmatic approach has been beneficial in driving impact and really prioritizing time management for my team.
Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – Yeah, think it's going to things that really talking about a North Star. think it's such an important thing that not everybody in ABM talks necessarily about that. And but just just out of curiosity over at a Datadog in terms of your North Star, what are you measured on there? This pipeline and that's and that's obviously aligned then with the sales, the sales teams as well, right?
Kevin Driscoll (Datadog) – Pipeline, 100%. Yep.
Kevin Driscoll (Datadog) – 100%, yeah.
Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – I think we'll dig into that a little bit later. We'll try and dig in a little bit into the ROI. So let's talk a little bit about paint for the audience. Can you paint a picture of what ABM looks like in your organization? Is it are you going, you know, white glove? Are you going wide deep? Talk a little bit about that if you can.
Kevin Driscoll (Datadog) – Yeah, I mean, I think we started certainly as a one to many kind of wide approach casting a big net, mostly because we didn't have a dedicated team that was focused on top accounts. That has since changed that's really allowed us to kind of flex our one to one or more bespoke. It's kind of that's our term for white glove is bespoke, but allowed us to flex those muscles a little bit more, which has been a lot of fun kind of working directly with salespeople.
But Datadog, when I joined, did not have an enterprise marketing function. They did not have sort of, you know, multi-threading marketing motion. And so I've tried to kind of, you know, translate ABM to help support some of those more nascent functions as well. And that's really how we started this account-based growth journey that I think has been pretty successful.
Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – And that's because obviously Datadog was more in the kind SaaS world.
Kevin Driscoll (Datadog) – Yeah, definitely a PLG company from its early beginnings. And not only that, just really focused on volume trials. All types of accounts are served by Datadog, everyone from, you know, garage band startups with two or three people in them to Fortune 500 companies. And so, you know, a lot of our marketing was built with the expectation that anyone could just download this and try it. I think that is certainly still true today, and it's certainly a huge driver of our continued growth.
You know, ultimately, there's certain accounts that are just not going to get on the hook that way. They may have security protocols in place that prevent trials. They may just, you know, be very satisfied for the moment, at least institutionally with competitive installs and those types of things require a different approach, I think, from the generic wide broad marketing.
Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – mean, it's interesting, Kevin, you said there and going back to the opening when I said that you'd been across everything from field to demand to campaign. You've had all those hats, right? You've worn all those marketing hats so you know what each one of those is able to do. And you just said something really interesting then you said that the approach that with the wider PLG is just not going to get them or get them hooked. So what is the magic thing that makes ABM work to hook them.
Kevin Driscoll (Datadog) – I think it's a couple of different things. First of all, it's personalization, which I know we'll talk about more at length, but I do think when you have a very broad horizontal product doing some sort of specification, either industry or the type of company or what you know about their existing pain, right? Those types of things can be really beneficial in increasing your response rate. The other thing is too, if you're not able to get in with a trial, a lot of times you just need to generate a broad swath of leads.
And so really going back to the basic fundamentals of demand gen, generating a bunch of leads from one account can be really helpful in getting a better picture of what's going on inside for sales reps. And that is a lot of times the first step towards getting a deal done. So I think it depends on the exact account, but really, you know, we have to take approaches that are meeting accounts where they are in that particular awareness journey with Datadog instead of just throwing our spaghetti against the wall and seeing what sticks.
Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – Yeah, and you obviously mentioned it as well, Kevin, about multi-threading as well. That's a huge part of what you do, I'm guessing.
Kevin Driscoll (Datadog) – Yeah. Yep. I am. I'm a huge proponent of multi-threading as a big component of what ABM should look like, because frankly, you know, it's one of the things that's very tough for sales to do on their own. And for marketing, it's relatively easy, right? If you've got your developer team really locked down, how are you going to break into security? A lot of times salespeople don't know exactly how to go about that. And marketing with our intent signals, with the contact database we have access to, that can be something where we can add real tremendous value quick. So I really am a big fan of that.
Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – And are you running campaigns like through LinkedIn and other media to kind of multi-thread into them?
Kevin Driscoll (Datadog) – Yeah, definitely. I mean, you know, it's also an event strategy, right? If you're having great success at kind of, we call them the HOK, hands on keyboards, but you can think about it like your users and most SaaS organizations. If you're having great success there, but you're struggling to break into the CIO, you know, executive round tables can be, you know, a huge or hospitality events can be a huge win.
The flip side, right? If you've got executive buy in, but you just don't have a lot of exposure to users, some more less expensive, let's call it, lead generation around content syndication, LinkedIn ads, Meta ads, even certainly with some of the enhancements they've made to their targeting. I think Meta is a great place for B2B advertising these days. So yeah, it just really depends on where you're looking to break in and then tailoring your tactics appropriately. But certainly LinkedIn is a huge part of our strategy.
Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – It's interesting you mentioned Meta there, Kevin. Not too many ABMers mention that to me. So it's an interesting one for the audience to dig into as well, right? Because you're saying that they're doing a better job.
Kevin Driscoll (Datadog) – I think we're starting to see the match rates with business profiles, meaning either work emails or matching to a particular account on the native side on Facebook are improving. But we're also seeing the portability of audiences between different channels out of whatever ABM tool you're using is doable these days on a smaller audience count than it used to be for Facebook. So both of those are giving us better access to Facebook.
I think, you know, if you've seen anything happen on Instagram in the past couple of years, the amount of B2B ads that I'm being served from the marketing perspective are increasing tremendously. I do think that it benefits in comparison to LinkedIn because the CPMs are a lot cheaper. And usually if you can get your targeting right, that means your cost per leads are going to be cheaper. So yeah, I think it's a real burgeoning platform for ABM.
Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – A good tip there for the audience to check out both of the whole universe of Meta and all the different companies and platforms that they own. One thing you were saying to me when we were chatting previously, Kevin, you said that your team wears, we're talking about hats again, your team wears two hats. One I think you said was campaign builders and one I think you said was enablers. Talk me through what those two hats are and how you handle that.
Kevin Driscoll (Datadog) – Yeah. So, I mean, first of all, we have to actually execute the programs that are going to develop the pipeline. Right. I mean, that's what we're gold on. But the reality is ABM typically are the ones sitting on a treasure trove of intent and engagement information that needs to be shared to sales. You know, we frankly don't see that the ROI is there for ABM for our commercial and SMB business, but they can benefit tremendously from intent and engagement data. You know, website information about whether accounts are visiting that can help tailor their outbound strategy. It can help them tailor their account penetration strategy. So all of those things really need to be, I think, a component of an ABM team, right?
Like, how do we serve the top accounts and generate that pipeline? But how do we also spend enough time focused on every seller that's out there at the company, every SDR, to help enable them and learn how to use the tools, how to use these signals appropriately to improve their PG because, you know, ultimately that helps the bottom line for the business and that's going to continue increasing the budget for ABM. It's going to help continue, you know, the growth of the business and it's just the right thing to do. So that's how I think about balancing it is like pipelines are our North Star. We've got to focus on that, but whatever time's left over, let's make sure that we are providing as much access to this data as we possibly can.
Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – Because one thing you were saying was around packaging up insights, I think, for your sales teams, right?
Kevin Driscoll (Datadog) – Yeah, yep. Yes, we do a number of different things. Salesforce dashboards. We give them direct access to our ABM platform, which they're able to use to determine signaling. You know, the other thing is we're constantly on the hunt for more nascent intent products, right? Comparison review sites. This type of stuff can be really valuable as opposed to the kind of old school black box intent products out there.
So all of those, we try and package up into email reports, Salesforce dashboards, plug into how sales is actually executing, right? Because as soon as you ask them to go outside of their normal workflows, you're going to lose half of them. And if you don't do a good job enabling on how to actually use that, you're going to get the other half to use it once or twice and then kind of forget about it. So the more we can plug into how sales is actually operating on a day to day basis and make our use cases really specific for them on when to use ABM tools and signals, that I think helps with adoption rates.
Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – I think just if we're going to jump onto that for a second, I think one thing you were saying was that your team spend, going back to the point around whether they're working on pipeline or whether they're working on the enablement or campaign building or this kind of insights work. I think you were saying, or you quoted the figure of 30 to 40% of their time was spent on these kinds of activities. And then it's so encouraging to hear you say that sales have direct access to your ABM platform. So what's the uptake like on that?
Kevin Driscoll (Datadog) – We currently have about 65% of our total sales force as monthly active users on the ABM platform. More than that on our Salesforce dashboards, which are just kind of summarized information from ABM and leads and that type of stuff. So I think the uptake is good. Certainly we've got a lot of sales promotions, right? SDRs constantly getting promoted to commercial sellers, that type of stuff. So there's a lot of turnover we need to constantly keep re-enabling. And so templatizing and making sure we've got the right folks in the room to keep that drumbeat going has been important.
But, you know, I have a PowerPoint deck that is like 20 slides long of just thank yous and stories from sellers who've talked about how it's helped them break in and improve their PG. And ultimately, if we can get those outbound rates, the response rates, the open rates up by two, three, four or five percent, those can have massive downstream impacts with the number of meetings that sellers are booking and SDRs are booking, the number of opportunities that get opened. So that's the way we look at it: that initial kernel. Very small changes to those response rates and PG efficacy will impact the bottom line tremendously.
Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – So in terms of, if you can make it a little bit more tangible in terms of a salesperson or an SDR, what is it that they're able to do or see that is actually making the impact that you just said?
Kevin Driscoll (Datadog) – Yeah, I mean, one of the most important things, you know, and this is not necessarily an ABM problem, but it's something that I think we can solve because most of my team is pretty well versed on Salesforce dashboard building and just understands data maybe a little bit better than the average marketer is: give them access to all of the leads that are out there. As a PLG company, we produce a ton of leads, trial leads, demo leads.
A lot of times we accept personal emails. So data cleanliness and data hygiene is a challenge for us. And so surfacing all of that information, even if it's 95% accurate instead of 100%, to salespeople and having them, in one place, figure out where are their leads and where are their contacts living so we can show the full impact of marketing touches. They can start to consume that information quicker. That's been a huge driver of what we've been trying to do and the success that we have produced. In addition, we can also show them what is intent and who is surging in their account patch.
Some of our commercial sellers manage hundreds of accounts at once, so prioritization week to week can be tremendous. And then lastly, we show intent and website engagement data directly so that they can see what topics these accounts are interested in. And then we link them to product-based outbound flows and templates that they're able to just quickly add accounts into. And hopefully it's kind of one journey of managing leads and then managing accounts and getting them into to help out.
Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – So it's probably accurate to say that you've got a good reputation within the sales organization.
Kevin Driscoll (Datadog) – It's something that we have to cultivate every single day, but I'm happy to say that our sales folks—if we look at our NPS surveys—are pretty happy with ABM today.
Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – Good to hear. So one thing you mentioned there earlier, Kevin, you said around the whole idea about personalization, and I think it's a very strong topic for you—how you feel that you should go to market with a kind of almost like, I think you said to me, almost like a B2C-style creativity. Can you share a case study or an example of how you guys have been doing that?
Kevin Driscoll (Datadog) – Yeah.
Kevin Driscoll (Datadog) – Yeah, I mean, look, here's the story, right? We ran a multivariate test, admittedly, but nonetheless, we changed up our headlines on LinkedIn ads, keeping the same banner, same imagery, etc. Five different times, all of them performed within 10%, let's call it, on a click-through rate and CPL basis. We changed up the color scheme and the imagery in our ads. We saw variations of about 25% between the top and bottom performers, right?
Now what that tells me is that it goes against everything that I've been taught growing up in B2B marketing, which is messaging, messaging, messaging, messaging. In this world where B2B ads are being commoditized, we are seeing that people are consuming more of B2B advertising on their phone, on mobile devices, etc. You have to stand out. And I think that's a learning that we are constantly trying to take from our B2C brethren, if you will, which is: their advertising is incredible in terms of the imagery, in terms of the focus they put on the brand, in terms of the ability they have to link to trending topics on social, etc.
We are attempting to mimic as much of that strategy because ultimately what we are seeing is that being right and on time is a lot more important than having the exact message that you need to convince people to click and engage and everything else. And ultimately, I think that is the learning we've tried to take in—how can we start to vary our creative strategy? How can we start to vary our trend strategy rather than constantly working with PMM to refine the messaging and everything else?
Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – It's fascinating, isn't it, to think that. And does that mean that you're breaking away from your brand colours because of what you're seeing?
Kevin Driscoll (Datadog) – No, not necessarily. We have a very strong brand design team that is very protective of our brand, and rightly so. You know, they give us a lot of license to kind of play around with different variations of imagery and etc. And it's really just—we can stick within our brand guidelines and still be eye-catching. And that's what we try and do.
Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – Yeah, no, that's a great point. And I think you were saying that it's better to be right and on time than actually to be in line with all the different messaging. And I think it's a great message for the audience to hear—that you very often think, oh, the message is wrong, the value prop is wrong. And it may well be something as you said: change the colours and you might have a better impact. Right. So let's talk about scaling.
Kevin Driscoll (Datadog) – Yeah.
Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – How are you going—because you mentioned there that you're running bespoke, tailored ABM to your top accounts. Would you call that a one-to-one approach or a one-to-few?
Kevin Driscoll (Datadog) – I think it's one-to-one for our top account.
Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – But then you're also scaling out to a much wider audience as well, right? So how are you managing that on the one hand—trying to do your best to get deep into those accounts—and at the same time trying to run ABM, which some people say, well, you can't really run ABM into a wider group; but that's an argument for another day.
Kevin Driscoll (Datadog) – Yeah.
Kevin Driscoll (Datadog) – You know, again, I kind of like to pull myself out of ABM and just call it account-based growth because I think that helps kind of assuage some of that definitional pain, let's say. But really, I again come back to our North Star of pipeline, right? Personalization—you can spend hours and days on each account building the perfect landing page and the perfect advertising set and all those things. The question I have is: if you test it, what is the excess incremental result going to be from all that personalization? And I think in general, what I've found when I test it is, you know, there is kind of a curve of diminishing returns, right? A little bit of personalization gets you a lot of results; a ton of personalization—that starts to tail off, right?
So a lot of what I do is really just focused on: can we call out the company name on a landing page or in an advertisement? And typically we'll see 2x engagement, 1.5x engagement with ads or landing pages that call out company names, even if the content is pretty static with our normal flow. So that's really how I think about it. And certainly with technology, right? You can start to scale the ability of advertising customization. You can certainly scale the ability of landing page customization. You know, I'm hesitant to start using AI for individual landing pages, but we're starting to use that to discover pain—what's in the news?
What is the CIO of this particular organization saying in the news that we can tap into and start to up-level our value prop? So we don't use it necessarily to customize our messaging. But if we can bring in some of that external pain, that is huge for us in terms of creating engagement and creating connection with the audience through personalization.
Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – Yeah. And you mentioned AI there. I think we'll touch on that a little bit later and just dig into a little bit more about what you're doing in that area. One of the things that we were talking about was obviously about running different ABM motions. I think you were talking to me about into different sectors. And I think one of the ones that you kind of raved about with me was the campaign—I think it was into the retail sector. How does that play out? Tell me what was the thinking? Was retail new to you? Was it a new approach? Then how did you approach that?
Kevin Driscoll (Datadog) – Yeah, so retail is not a new industry to us. It's an industry that's very important to our business. You know, frankly, we offer a lot of front-end products that link to our back-end products that are really important for retailers that need to optimize every individual visit and click that happens on their website because that translates directly into profit, right? Unlike websites that are more informational for products and services that are purchased or executed offline. So especially in e-commerce or retailers that are aspiring to go more e-commerce, we have had good success.
But really, you know, we had to figure out: how do we tell a story that's retail-specific around Black Friday, Cyber Monday? How do we tell a story that's specific around the pain of modernizing your retail environment to help support e-commerce? All of those things are areas where our solution plays a really big impact. And again, my goal was not to be writing novels that were well written and thoughtful and everything else. My goal was to convince people that we were the right solution. So, you know, with that, we took an approach of modernizing older assets as opposed to saying everything needs to be net new to help support this new theme, and then combining that with newer advertising—reskinning a lot of what we were doing specific to retail.
And what we saw was, you know, doing that, which is sort of in between full-scale personalization and nothing, we were able to drive excess results—20 or 30% over what we'd expect coming out of our paid strategy from that. So, you know, it's definitely an area that's new to Datadog. I don't think we've done a ton of industry marketing, but I expect we'll do more of it as we continue to scale.
Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – Yeah, particularly as different industries kind of surface and other ones become more important. For example, the AI industry—a couple of years ago nobody was really thinking about it; and obviously now everybody's kind of after that industry. Right. You've talked several times about North Star, which is really encouraging to hear that kind of focus on pipeline.
I think you said to me that the one question—when you bump into another ABMer—I think the one question you said you ask them is: how do you go about measuring ABM? And I think that was kind of like a hot topic for you whenever you're talking to your peers. So obviously, going back to the fact that pipeline is so important for you, what other metrics matter for you?
Kevin Driscoll (Datadog) – Yeah. You know, one that's always been important for me is sales meetings, right? A lot of times pipeline is a pretty lagging indicator. It can be difficult to optimize against. It can be difficult to measure appropriately, right? There's always questions about, you know, is this sourced? Is this influenced? How are you defining pipeline attached? And it can be very frustrating unless, you know, however you define pipeline, I would figure out a way and just get sales and leadership buy-in on that because it's so important to be able to put pipeline numbers down on the table and say: this is what was driven.
As opposed to when you start to talk about SQLs and influence and a bunch of stuff as your North Star metric, I think those get very confusing for salespeople that only care about pipeline and sales meetings all day long. With that said, meetings I think are really important because again, it's something that's pretty immediate—usually a week or two after a lead comes in. Or, you know, you can start to see some of the influence on meetings from your awareness advertising and your plays to help support outbound.
So I think that can be really helpful as a leading indicator towards pipeline. The one thing that I get very nervous about within ABM especially is optimizing exclusively on leads because a lot of times I've seen when we are solely focused on cost per lead or trying to optimize the lead funnel, we lose a lot of meetings and pipeline down the line because these people are either low level, right? And they're cheap, and that's why we're getting them in the door. Or a lot of times they're just interested in whatever your offer was, but they're not necessarily interested in the solution, and you're not driving that kind of additional value for them—convincing them that you are the product and that they need to buy you. So that's the one thing I'd caution marketers on: getting too obsessed with the leads because those can often damage your downstream impacts.
Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – Yeah, it's interesting that you say interest because one of your peers who was over at Microsoft, he talked to me a lot about the difference between interest and intent. And so you could be interested, but it doesn't mean you have any intent. You know, I would tell people I'm really interested in Volvos, but I haven't got the budget to pay for a Volvo. So if Volvo were looking at my website visits of their website, they would see that I'm very interested—but I drive a Toyota. So that's the difference there.
Let's talk about AI because you mentioned it a little bit earlier there. Obviously, hot topic for everybody in every walk of life—whether it's, you know, in people's personal lives or whether it's in their professional lives. Talk to me a little bit about AI, talk to me a little bit about what you're doing there, and perhaps maybe shine a light on anything interesting coming down the road as well.
Kevin Driscoll (Datadog) – You know, there's a phrase that I grew up hearing a lot in finance, which was "talking your book." And it essentially means that you are talking up the stocks that you have a vested interest in seeing go up. You know, I'm a little nervous that I'm seeing some of that in the ABM world and in the marketing world as it relates to AI, right? There's a lot of practitioners, consultants, AI companies that are saying: hey, you know, AI is the hottest topic, you need to get on this, don't miss it, blah blah blah. And I think there's elements of that that are true, but we need to be kind of careful about where we are in the hype cycle with AI and what's realistic, I think, for the returns. Right?
Some of that MIT study that said 95% of enterprise installs of ABM have not shown meaningful impact. I think there's elements of a lot of hype and how do you actually seek value out of it? Like I mentioned before, one of the greatest things that AI can do for ABMers is translate the news and all the stuff that would take a bunch of time to go research into pain just from publicly available sources. You don't need AI on your messaging and your brand voice, all these things, to go figure out: okay, Wells Fargo this year is concerned with margin impact and modernizing digital infrastructure or whatever. Whatever those areas of interest are from 10-Ks, from earnings releases, all those types of things in public companies. So that I think is an area where we're seeing AI have a huge impact for us today in terms of personalization and customization.
You know, the other areas I think are once you've got something written that you're happy with—email copy, ad copy, subject lines, etc.—having AI run a couple of variations to speed up A/B testing can be really helpful because again, like we talked about with the creative stuff, you don't always know, right? The perfect message that you've coordinated with your PMM or whatever might not land with the audience. So having AI just extend your impact to test more and let the audience tell you where their interest lies or how they're best going to engage with your messaging can be helpful. Those are the two ways.
And scaling the creative—we are using software today to automatically import company names into our advertising creatives, so scaling that personalization. That can be huge too. But really the most important ones I'm seeing are: scaling the impact of A/B testing, gathering research information for pain customization on landing pages and then ad copy for our customers.
Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – Yeah, I think there are some really, really good examples there as well. In the agency we talk about "human first, AI fast." So it has to be led by ABM. If there's one thing that defines ABM, it's the human element of getting under the skin of your customers and really knowing them. And you can only do that really through what you were saying before—your sales, your SDRs, the marketers who are on the telephone listening to calls or talking to customers, etc. So I think if it's human first and AI fast, that's the right way to approach it as opposed to the other way around. And I think that whole concept of ABM as well, which I think is all about failing fast, learning fast. And you just don't know—you think you've got the most marvellous messaging campaign ad, etc., and you put it in market and it fails.
And so there's a lot of humility in that as well, because you just need to test it and be very quick to test. So if AI can help you to do that, then that's marvellous. One thing you said, and I just wrote it down before when we were talking before this recording, you said that there's a certain flavour—an ABM flavour—at Datadog. I just wrote that down because I thought it was a really interesting way of putting things. What is the flavour of ABM at Datadog? How would you define that flavour?
Kevin Driscoll (Datadog) – I think it comes back to this concept and mindset of account-based growth, right? Like we are really interested in growing the pipeline for our target accounts. And ultimately that could look like expansion, but a lot of it is new business that we're trying to drive against our core products.
And a lot of times what that means is taking things from other teams and kind of putting a slight personalization spin on it and getting it out the door fast. You know, collecting old assets that might be kind of a little bit long in the tooth, but if you can make some quick tweaks and get it out there, it helps. So I really do think it's a pragmatic approach that is not trying to break the existing cycles but really just augment them in slight ways and put it out there.
You know, and then ultimately also one of the most important things I think is: we don't have today a very large campaigns function. So there are a lot of ABMers that I talk to—they're pulling from campaigns, customizing them quickly and getting them out the door. Really, we have a content generation motion and an ads generation motion that puts leads and trials on the table. And that's been how we've generated growth.
But there's not a lot of existing messaging that's been built for large-scale campaigns that I think ABM typically benefits from. And what we've been doing is sort of making micro-campaigns that can work across both paid and outbound on the marketing side, but also outbound on the sales side via email and PG, and doing that to kind of grow the business and grow our numbers. So, you know, it's a unique strategy, but I think it's one that has forced me to adapt my thinking about what ABM must be and what it can be. And it's one that I've been really impressed to see—just how quickly we can show results and how agile we can be there.
Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – Well, I think pragmatic—I think that's a great way to define it really. And I think a pragmatic approach to ABM is a good one. I think ABG—new acronym—account-based growth. I like that as well. So that's another one we can add to the table. Just Kevin, just to finish off, I ask all guests four very quick questions. So quick questions, quick answers. What's been your greatest ABM learning?
Kevin Driscoll (Datadog) – If you don't have a connection with sales to run ABM campaigns, you're going to struggle from day one.
Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – Great answer. The hardest part of ABM?
Kevin Driscoll (Datadog) – Getting buy-in, keeping people connected throughout the life cycle of the campaign.
Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – Fantastic. And misconception—what would you say is the greatest misconception about ABM?
Kevin Driscoll (Datadog) – It's expensive. I hear that a lot from demand gen colleagues or growth colleagues. I think there's ways to do ABM pretty inexpensively—even for free. So it's all about tailoring your tactics.
Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – Yeah, that's a good one. And finally, we're recording this on a Monday—Monday morning for you, Monday afternoon for me. But let's fast-forward to Friday. It's been a tough week there. You've been doing a lot of pragmatic ABM and you're just about to shut down that laptop. You get a call from an old colleague saying: “Hey, Kevin, I need to present a strategy on Monday morning of ABM to my CEO.” And they ask you: what's that one thing I must include? What would be that one thing you'd say—make sure you include this or say this?
Kevin Driscoll (Datadog) – I think your menu of activations by segment—or if it's just one segment, like exactly what it is that's going into the accounts. We can get hung up on strategy and multi-touch and all these types of words. But a lot of times I don't see people lay out: we're doing LinkedIn, we're doing direct mail, we're doing email. You need to tell them what your strategy is tactically in addition to all of the big themes. So that I think has been really helpful in making ABM tangible for my stakeholders and certainly leadership.
Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – So making the intangible tangible. Great answer, great way to finish off as well, Kevin. Kevin, thank you so much for sharing your ABM journey with us today, and I wish you and the team there at Datadog every success for the future.
Kevin Driscoll (Datadog) – Thanks, Declan.