Scaling ABM with Precision

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – So today I'm joined by Anna Tsymbalist who's the Head of ABM at Influ2. Anna, thanks so much for joining us today. 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – I'm really happy to join. Thank you for having me. 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – Well, let's kick off, obviously, let's talk ABM. We're going to talk about Account-Based Marketing for the next half an hour or so with a particular focus on scaling ABM with precision.

One thing that we find is really important with Account-Based Marketing is for the organization to define it and to make sure that everyone agrees with that definition and can actually march behind that definition of ABM in that organization. So for Influ2, how have you defined ABM there? 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – Yeah, that's, that's a very good question because I mean, I'm sure you've heard so many definitions of ABM. I've heard so many definitions of ABM myself, like once, I had this conversation where an ABM leader shared his approach and their entire ABM program was just a podcast, but they had an incredible 60% conversion rate from that. And I'm like, well, you're doing great then. I mean, but yeah, for Influ2, ABM is very outbound focused.

So we would call any activity that we do that is aimed at converting accounts from the list that we're going after and ABM, like a part of ABM. So for us, that would include advertising that we do through our own product. That would include everything our SDRs are doing. So there are sequences, there are calls and working with contact level intent. We will include events that I host as part of our ABM program because we only advertise that mostly to the accounts we're going after. And you know, events that we're going to conferences and we, you know, that we know that accounts we're interested in are going to be there. That's also a part of ABM and I really want to do some gift giving, but that's something I need more capacity for basically. So yeah, for us ABM is something that we do to convert specific accounts. 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – It's interesting; you mentioned about gift giving as well or the kind of the wider direct Marketing and there's some really interesting ways you can, you can make that work for you. So let's just talk about the program there that you're running at Influ2; just a few questions around that. Let's kick off with the first one. What was the original challenge that you faced there that you said to yourself, ABM is the right strategy to meet that challenge head on? 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – So I didn't really have that challenge that told me I have to tackle it with ABM because I actually inherited an ABM program.  I joined Influ2 as an account based Marketing manager, and then the head of ABM was our current Head of Marketing. So basically I already had an ABM program in place, but the, I actually, but I did face challenges. And the challenge is that we have a very defined ICP and we optimized our ICP around retention. So that means I work with, well, kind of a narrow pool of accounts. And usually what people do is, you know – you build an ABM program and you just pour audiences through that funnel and see who converts, right? And you just keep pouring and pouring, especially if your ICP is wide, but when your ICP isn't wide, you have to, like, they're not, they're not pouring out, they're coming back, they're coming back to the top. So, erm, I had a couple of challenges. The first challenge was how do I maintain the level of engagement with the audience for the SDRs to work with them, and how do I keep converting them? Because if you do the same thing over and over again, the conversion rates are going to plummet and you're just going to have a, you know, ABM program that isn't working. So I had to keep converting accounts from the same audience pool and yeah, I had to come up with solutions for that and I can, I can walk you through that as well. 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – So a couple of questions on that really, Anna. Yeah. So obviously you are, obviously it is ABM for customer expansion or ABM for customer growth or is it new logo when you said that your ICP is very narrow and you mentioned about retention. So is it, is it much more focused on existing customers? 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – No, we focus on new logo - well, I personally focus on new logo from time to time. I will do some ad hoc programs for existing customers when AEs and customers success comes to me and asks, “Hey, you know, we have this opportunity, they are interested in this and that, let's promote it to them”. So I'll do an ad hoc campaign for them in a program. But yeah, I think like 90% of my time I dedicate to new logo acquisition. 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – And then you also mentioned then that your ICP is quite narrow. Is that…? 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – Well, yeah, yeah. I actually, you know, so for me personally, I think selecting the right audience to go after is your number one priority. And I'm really grateful that I'm in a situation where the audience selection, it was a company level initiative where our ops did research and looked into a lot, you know, data points that we could collect to see what makes a profile of a happy Influ2 customer, and let's not go into detail, but that's basically we, we figured out that the maturity of their organization really influences how successful they are at using Influ2. And also the industry, because we sell to marketers and different industries have their different approaches to Marketing. So, well, SaaS isn't really an interesting industry, but you know, it's an approach. But SaaS companies, they really are among the, you know, trendsetters of Marketing and they are into tech a lot. So when a SaaS company, like a mature SaaS company gets Influ2, they really know what to do with it and they're very happy about it as well. 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – That's a fascinating point. Can, if I can ask you one question on that? You mentioned in there about your ICP and about, you've done a lot of work around that to know which accounts to go after. And you mentioned something about one of the leading indicators of whether they're going to be a client or a potential good client of yourselves, is the maturity of the organization. What. Everyone has a different definition of maturity. What do you mean in your context of maturity? 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – Yeah, so they have to have a certain level of knowledge about what they're doing already. They have to do outbound because Influ2 is a great outbound tool and they have to have resources to maintain a mature outbound program. So let's say, you know, if they're looking to just launch random ads at a bunch of audience and wait for form fills, it's not going to be a perfect use case for Influ2 because you know, that's just a bad way of doing outbound. And so we have to be on the same page in terms of, like, how they're going to use the product because we want to make sure that we deliver results and that they're happy. So yeah, making sure that they do have enough resources, they are on the same page with us in terms of what outbound, what good outbound, should look like. So that's, that that's something we really look into. 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – No, it's very good. I think, you know, it's not dissimilar to ourselves at the, at at the agency where I work that we talk about maturity a lot as well. And it's about where they are in that kind of ABM journey. And if they're relatively immature in terms of how, how they're running their ABM program, even indeed they're running one that's normally an indication that perhaps they need to look at more education first before they're ready to, to launch an ABM or to, to get deeper with an ABM. Go ahead. Sorry Anna. 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – Yeah, a new, a new term. I recently, I recently hosted this webinar about Account-Based go-to market. So that is something like, that would be a perfect customer for us because when an organization treats ABM as a cute little experiment where they select like random, you know, top 50 accounts they want to convert without giving it a lot of thought, then it's not a mature approach to ABM. But a mature approach to ABM is when you know you aligned on the audience with your sales, with your customer success, with everyone that you're bringing the right type of accounts in and that you're converting the right opportunities for sales to be happy about and then for customer success to be happy about as well. Because customer success is often in the trenches figuring out like, what did you promise? You know, so yeah. And I think when you're aligned on the audience, you get buy-in from the  entire organization on this Account-Based approach. And I think that's crucial because you will get the support, you will get the, the budget and everyone will understand how exactly you're contributing to business goals of the company rather than treat it as like a fun, cute experiment to see if you could, like, a few personalized content pieces can convert someone. 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – Yeah, no, very, very good points and I think you won't hear me arguing a against anything that you just said. So they're all really, really good points and I think that alignment that the company aligns around the kind of accounts and the customers that they want to have and keep and grow is absolutely. Talk to me there, Anna, about the, the experience. So obviously you talk about, you talk about new logos, you talk about, you know, using your own technology. You, you're very clear about your ICP, you're very clear about the maturity of those kind of organizations that you want to work with. Tell us what, what kind of experience do you take them through? I mean, paint us a picture of what kind of they, they, they – how do they see you? 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – Yeah, yeah. Okay. So as I mentioned, we keep working with the same audience, so to make sure that their experience is unique every time we have a system where we have engagement cycles. So... during your first engagement cycle, you will go through a set of ads that will be shown to the prospect while they're being outreached by the SDR team. And, like, a lot of things happen during those three months. So it's going to be just, like, value proposition, thought leadership trust, you'll get a sequence, like, the entire buying committee will get a sequence from the SDRs and cold calling. So we'll be trying to actively engage you with the content and the actions that we have – and the engagements. Like some of the cool things from the engagement cycle, let's say during the research we identified some choices of code of technology that we think works great with Influ2 or that we compete against sometimes. So, you know, our research team will mark that in the CRM and that would automatically put the prospect from that account into a pre-made set of ad campaigns where we, where we talk about that, where we address this specific point. And that's one of the levels of personalization that I have.

And actually, you know, because we do contact level advertising, very often when people hear about it, they're like, oh great, this is a great tool to do one-to-one on scale. And it is, like, you have the technology to do that, but what people don't understand is the level of one-to-one that you need to have on every, on every stage of the, of your program. So it's not just like slapping a logo on the creative and serving them like a random landing page. So yeah, I like, I'm kind of, I'm kind of going away from the, from the topic, let me go back. So yeah, so you'll have a three month engagement cycle with different types of personalization, but where I actually segment audiences based on the information that we have about that segment of the audience. If that doesn't work, we will send the account to nurture and nurture with, like, low intensity brand awareness in three months time. But the, the aim there is to stay top of mind because very often, you know, your engagement might have been amazing and worked, but it's just not the right timing. They don't have the budget or something's incorrect. So staying top of mind and being just a click away from your prospect is something that I really believe in. Yeah. And then once they are ready, we, we, you know, recollect the buying group and put them through another engagement cycle and in terms of content, that engagement cycle is going to be, well, hopefully like 70% different from what we've shown to them previously because, you know, we update the content based on its performance, you know, weekly. 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – So to summarise, you, you have a kind of a, an engagement cycle as you mentioned, three months that you take them through, you monitor the level of engagement both from the SDR or from the actual paid media and the various channels that you are actually looking to target the audience with. You are also going to break down the decision making group or the buying committee and, and try to talk to them on a, on a, almost on a one-to-one level and then another Go ahead. Sorry, go ahead. 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – Yeah, Yeah. I, I just wanted to add, so another thing – I gave you the overview of the account, but actually another thing that I've done in order to keep the level of engagement, is divide our buying committee by personas. So different people in the same account will have a  different experience and there’s a couple of factors that affect that. So, what type of persona that is and also their personal, you know, online media consumption habits. So thanks to using Influ2, I don't have, I don't have to play this betting game of, you know, what channel am I going to launch ads to. I upload everything to Influ2 and the algorithm finds them where they spend time. So, you know, let's say you are a VP of Marketing who doesn't do social media and just likes reading online articles. So we'll be heading you through those websites with ads or let's say you are chronically online and you spend your time and on Facebook a lot, so that's where you're going to be having words, that's where you're going to be seeing ads. So yeah, our, it's going to be, it's going to be a different experience, it's going to be different content that we're serving and that's actually, like, dividing the audience by persona is something that helped me keep the engagement levels really high and even increase it with the old audience. Because, you know, I was expecting it was going to go down, but it actually went up since we started adjusting the content to the persona type. 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – That's fascinating. I think that, I think, did you just say they're chronically online? 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – Yeah, it's a term…

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – I'd never heard of that term before, but…

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – Yeah, it's a term when you're chronically online and you know, the online, I think I'm chronically online. 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – I was going to say, am I, am I, am I a chronic online now? I mean, how would I define myself as being chronic?

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – And just, you have to, you have to look at the screen time on your phone and if it's…

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – I, I don't want to do that, my wife will complain. Otherwise…

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – If it's, if it's more than 15 hours per week, you are chronically online. I think I like detail…

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – I'm going to blame my kids, I'm going to blame my kids for grabbing my phone. In that case.

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – I am, yeah, I'm an iPad, I'm an iPad person, I can't do anything unless I'm watching something. 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – Good. Good. Okay. And well, let's just dig into another, I've got another question about that actually, actually before we do, just one second. So talk about the campaign and the experience and everything you take your, your target accounts through... a question around attribution measurement. What are you using your own platform to measure, or are you using a bit more of a kind of a manual approach? Everyone has their own approach to measurement? What are, what are you doing there? 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – Yeah, everyone does. So on a strategic level we measure ABM influence on pipeline and revenue. So basically the goals that I have, they are all tied around pipeline and revenue, just like the salesperson. Tactically, I will look at a lot more things. So I'll try to figure out at what stage of the engagement cycle the account is converting, like, you know, the person is converting. I'll look at, like, how many engagement cycles does it take? And of course I'm going to look at the CTR, I mean the CTR isn't, like, it helps me measure the room temperature, right? To see whether the audience overall is, like, liking their, liking their experience. But one thing that I found fascinating was we have this one type of advertising, it's called high impact. Like, we made it up; basically that's a type of ad – when I put the face of the SDR that's reaching out to the prospect and we automatically show that ad with the SDR, like, introducing themselves while the person is in the outreach sequence. And that ad had like, you know, an average, like, really low CTR, I was like, let's kill it and it's useless, let's kill it. But then I was like, okay, but do people convert after clicking on this ad? And what we found was that actually this is when most of them convert like this, like the message there and like the, the approach there is what works. Maybe we just need to improve the visual of the ad and just increase the CTR. So that is, that was an interesting finding. And another thing that I like is that I actually get to see the engagement, like the real engagement, of the audience that I care about, because when I'm launching for usual channels, I'll be seeing like they're going, they're going to optimise around clickers, they're going to optimise around, like, to give you like a higher result to make you more eager to launch. And with Influ2, I actually see the actual reality. I mean sometimes it's harsh, you know, but you actually, like, I actually see and I can measure how my actual audience is reacting, is reacting to the messaging and to, to the creatives that, that I show. So yeah, and just to sum up, we look at, like, we are aligned with the company's business goals and we, we have the Marketing influence approach.   We see of, like, how like I think last year about 86% of all outbound opportunities were ABM influenced. So there was a level of engagement with the ads from, from those people who then converted.

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – Well hopefully somebody didn't criticize you for the missing 14%. 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – No thank God they didn't. Thank God.

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – Talking about, well that's, that leads in nicely actually to the next question I wanted to ask you, which, which was results. So I think you've answered the question basically by saying 80%, 86% is coming through your, your ABM efforts. 

CUT [So I think we've, we've we've we've nicely tied the tied The] 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – Yeah, we actually, we didn't measure 2024, it's not over yet, but when we compared 2022 to 2023, we've seen, like with this approach of, you know, the one that I explained, we've seen 123% growth in generated revenue when compared to, you know, ABM results. So we're comparing the growth of ABM performance. 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – Well, and that's an excellent, an excellent advertisement for, for the power of, of good good targeting, good account selection, good ICP, the use of your technology and, and a little bit of creativity I'm, I'm guessing as well, right? 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – Yeah, I was, I was thrilled. I was Thrilled. 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – So the point you were talking before about these kind of personalized ads, I just want to ask you a question about that actually, maybe the audience might be surprised to hear about this, but whether the, the issue around you could target individuals perhaps without going too much into the weeds. Tell us briefly how does that work? 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – Ah, good question. So basically Influ2 partners with first party ad platforms. So whenever you sign up to like, you know, meta service, whenever you sign up to Google, whenever you sign up to all of those places where ads are served, you give your consent to the ads being served to you, you, you know, agree to their terms. So, and the ad platforms, when they serve ads to you, they use that consent that you've given to them to figure out who to serve what. So the ad platform actually knows exactly who they're serving their ads to and we just have an algorithm to, oh that's, that's going into, into the weeds. But we have an algorithm to make sure that the right ad goes to the right person according to the consent that they've given to the ad platform. So that means we don't have a hundred percent match rate, but that means we have like almost a hundred percent match rate with the audience that we could actually serve ads to. And then there is another level of control that we have is, you know, reporting back to you. So not only we get information from the ad platform about, you know, the person they've served at too… 

CUT [we also then have an, wait, I think I have, I have a note about it. What's, what type of algorithm that is] 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – An ML based algorithm. I'm not an expert, but yeah, it's an ML based algorithm that actually figures, like decodes, the information to report on that engagement. On that impression back to you. 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – Yeah, well I'm sure somebody will know what that means. 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – Hopefully, I mean, yeah, our developers will definitely know.

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – But your team a hundred percent – and okay, I mean that's fascinating thatyou can reach that level of granularity. But linked to that, you mentioned something before, which I thought was interesting around the word ‘interest’ and you talked about these three month sales, three month cycles that you basically put target accounts and the different persona within those target accounts through. And you mentioned about maintaining interest just out of curiosity – 'cause three months is a long time, right? You know, they say a week is a long time in politics, so three weeks, three months is a long time. 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – Yeah. 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – How do you, and obviously if I'm sitting here and I'm, you know, one of your, what did you call them, chronic onliners, and I'm online all time, which means I'm basically seeing you everywhere. Whether it's I'm reading the Guardian or whatever, BBC or whatever I'm seeing how, how do you maintain that interest? 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – You have to have a lot of creatives. Well what I do is, I, so Influ2 lets you build ads journeys, buyer journeys. So you could change ads based on the amount of imppressions that you served. You can change ads based on the time the person has, like, been seeing this ad based on the number of clicks they did on the creative. And basically what I do right now is I change the creative every two weeks. So you see different content constantly. And why two weeks is because, based on my personal findings, basically creatives usually work for three weeks. So when they're going into their third week, the engagement usually goes down because the person has been, you know, saturated enough with us. So yes, regular change of creatives. And then another thing that you can do is let's say, you know, if you have a situation where you have different offerings, right? You're selling apples, you're selling pears and you're selling cherries. If the person engages with creatives about apples, that means they're interested in that. So to keep a level of engagement, you can continue serving them information about apples, right? So that's the topic they're interested in. And basically if I have a creative that talks about Influ2 in terms of ABM and the person engages with that, I'm like, okay, so they're in the mindset of, you know, ABM and they like, they like the context that I'm using here, so I'm going to be sending them more into the direction of that context. So that helps me really route the audience between the creatives that they will care, like hopefully will care about and engage with. 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – Well I think that's something we might need to dig into a bit more on a, on a, on a part two of this 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – Okay. 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – Podcast with you. But one, one thing that just struck me when you were talking there with regards to obviously a lot of talk about ABM clearly is about getting personal, right? And obviously there's a lot of negative noise out there in the market talking about technology and the ABM is not technology, et cetera. Where, where do you stand on that in terms of how the, the the kind of the balance between the use of technology and the use of personalization, which actually talks to individuals or the, the individual accounts or the individuals within those accounts that they say, actually you know what, Influ2 actually understands me and they're, they're showing, they understand me because of the way they're talking to me. Where do you see the balance? 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – So very often what I hear is when people talk about personalization, they go on a personal level of the individual and, and you know, some, you end up in a creepy situation, you know, like I was once researching, I, I fall into that trap too. I was once researching a prospect and I ended up finding – it's a funny story. I ended up finding, lik,e a whole photo album of the prospect with his wife in 2002 in Thailand. And I was like, now I've seen like why, you know, I just, I was digging up information like how do I personalize, how do I personalize? And, that's a creepy, that's a creepy situation. I was like, this is not going to help me. So when we're talking about personalization... you can go the creepy way, which I don't recommend. You can go the, you can go the AI way. Another story I'm really eager to shar;, I was at a, I had a demo of a product and they suggested that they can do AI level personalization, which I just think was like chatGPT in a, in a wrapper. But basically I was like, could you please like demonstrate to me some sort of personalization that you offer and AI suggested, ‘Hi John’ (whoever) taking your, (I'll never forget this), ‘taking your experience in Marketing and brewing with brewing’, (he probably was a marketer, like a beer company or something and brewing), ‘we, we think our solution can help you with your unique challenges’, and you know, what kind of personalization is that? So that's another route that people sometimes like taking when they're trying to scale. Personally I think that personalization in B2B is about understanding your audience and catering to their business needs, right? It can, it's also on a personal level, you know, hitting your goals quota, stuff like that. But basically understanding the use case and understanding how your product can help them achieve their, their needs. So figuring out what their needs are and building, like a playbook, around their needs with their product is something where, what I think personalization is, that's why we do technographics campaigns. That's why we do persona campaigns. That's why, you know, I'll, I'll look at the closed/lost reasons and you know, maybe sometimes I'll be able to segment accounts based on, you know, on the input from the sales context that we already have with them and have a campaign for them because the context is very similar and I think that's the personalization that people are expecting. They don't want you to know the name of their dog and your email outreach. They, you know, they want to know, they want to know how your product is going to make their life easier at work. 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – Yeah, I mean it's fair, fair point. I mean the, I think the world creepy there is interesting because I think I have to, the thing you need to avoid, and you and I, we both get bombarded with a whole bunch of creepy messages all the time. At least I do in my inbox, people purporting to, to know me and they don't know me and you know, they've just seen three things, three things about me online and they've, they've, they've, they've pulled those three together. But it's an interesting idea. 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – Yeah, I, I don't really get a lot of, like, nice personalization for some reason. I usually get, you know, hey bracket's name comma, Anna, you know, some like stuff like that, like botched email outreach. But yeah, I don't think people don't really personalize their outreach for me unfortunately. 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – No, I think you're right. I think personalization that really works is, A: are you actually talking to me if you think, you mentioned before about value proposition. So you know, the value proposition in ABM is, you know, what is it that's different about me when I want to talk to my customers? You know, it's not what you're talking, it's not what you're telling the market, it's what you're telling me. And then secondly is then do you actually understand what we're trying to do, what our challenges are, where we're trying to head, what's our agenda? What keeps us awake at night? Can you actually show that you understand that and therefore is, is your solution, is your products aligned to that? Can you show me how it is aligned to that? Is it answering some of the questions that we've got open at the moment? And obviously from an individual point of view, the personalization that comes is much more from an individual, individual point of view as well. What's my role in this whole thing? Going back to your point around the buying committee, you know, I may well be the CFO in that buying committee. So clearly I've got some issues and objectives and concerns about how we go about because maybe I was burnt on a previous buying decision, and we made a wrong decision, and then we got financially burnt. So therefore I'm a little bit kind of wary. So how do you make sure that you address my concern? So each individual, as you talked about in the buying committee, you can personalize to them as long as you have the information that you can find about them or you've done some research or some insights and then, and then tick those off basically. One thing else. Go ahead. Sorry Anna, go ahead. 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – No, no, no, I was just agreeing with you. 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – Well that's an unusual thing but thank you. So one thing I, I was going to ask you, I know when we were talking before this, this recording, you mentioned to me that you also run pipeline progression programs, which I think is really interesting. Can you, because obviously you know you've got something in the pipe, it's actually working through, so it's not a fresh opportunity, it's not, it's actually at some stage and you and you basically help the Sales teams to kind of close those deals. So could you share an example of how you do that? 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – Sure. So the product lets me build a journey around the stage of the stage of the opportunity. So we have like, let's say, I don't remember eight stages. Let's say you have an opportunity with Influ2, once it's in a scheduled stage, I'll start showing you the face of the AE that you're going to have a call with, thanking you for finding the time to actually meet with them. Then once the opportunity changes, like the call takes place, the opportunity changes the stage, I'll be showing you another content that automatically, 'cause I have this like preset in the product, like you will move to a different set of creatives alongside  the buying committee that we have identified. And you'll be seeing different ads there too. And I have like a few ads in there just in case, you know, like I don't know exactly how much time this stage is going to take.

So I make sure that you have enough content to consume that you know, it's not haunting you with the same thing. Then, and just think about it, you know what Sales people usually send to their prospects on different stages of the Sales cycle. Like what are they going to sell them during procurement? It's going to be, you know, GDPR compliant, associate two licence and stuff like that. So when you're a salesperson, you can only send that piece of content to them. You can only, once or twic,e send them the case study.You don't know whether they've consumed it, you don't know whether they've read it, you don't know if it's helping you and you only have one channel to deliver that. So when I have the AD channel, I can actually make sure that they read, you know, if they, if they don't take the time to read the case study, I'm going to show it to them in bits and make sure that they understand what we're talking about. And you know, it's just giving me and the Sales a new channel to interact with their audience. And it's also a very nice way to communicate with the people. You know, sometimes you have people who are on the call and they're just mute, and no camera. They're just there, you don't know who they are, they never talk to you, but you want them to consume some sort of content. So I'll, you know, I'll be doing that through ads and yeah, our sales people are actually very keen on that. Be like, they will hunt me down if I'm not serving ads to some people, they're like, you have to, you have to, like, what can we do to make it, to make them see it? So yeah, and that's, that's an experience for every opportunity that we have, not just outbound, but everyone who comes in through any channel will, will give them that sort of experience. And again, for me it's extra valuable because I'm demoing the product to them through their experience. So that's that, that's why I put a lot of effort into this. 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – Yeah, yeah. So perhaps link to that actually, when you talk about, you know, the different people on the call and that you can target them, etc. You, one thing that you said that kind of, I made, I made a note of it when we were talking prior to this call, was that you talked about, that your ABM program is kind of used for the word was aggressive, aggressive targeting, which I thought was a really interesting term, really. And I think what you, well you explain what you mean by that because I think it's, it's, it's an interesting concept. 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – Well I think what I meant by aggressive is more precise because I use targeting for going after specific people. You know, I'm not, I'm not using targeting to boil the ocean and see who, what comes up, you know, see what comes up. I'm not using, I'm not using targeting to do random brand awareness. I'm using targeting to do brand awareness, value proposition, like any, any sort of, any sort of thing you can do with targeting for specific people. And like, I'm not in a situation where I can just be like, oh, it's a 95 to 5% ratio of who's in the market. I have to go after those people and I have to convince them that hey, like if you're not in the market, you're missing out, you know, you have to be in the market for us. And that's outbound, you know, that's like outbound, it's kind of aggressive, right? And ads are usually just there, they're like, you know, and somewhere in the background and it's really hard to measure their influence. So what I mean is I can always measure my influence and I always go after the specific, specific people. 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – I love that quote. You can always measure your influence. I think that if you're looking for a T-shirt for Christmas, maybe we should send you one with those, with that on it. 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – Yes, please do. Please do. 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – Okay, so talking about that actually, MQL when we were chatting before, one thing that I wrote down as well was that you were, you are, you are not a fan of MQLs and they, they still, they're still alive, they're still out there. Many companies still use them. Tell us why you're not a fan of Marketing qualified leads. 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – Well, I know why they exist, right? I've used, I've used that approach myself and I kind of had my burns with that approach I think like everyone else did. Like, I mean, you need them, what are you going to do? Like you're, you're going to look at the conversion rates, see from MQL to SQL, SCL, blah blah, blah. And you'll have, you'll be able to do some predictions for your budgeting and for your goals. But MQL like the issue that I see with MQL is first you don't always know the quality of the MQLs that you're going to get. And it changes. Like something that happened to me in the past, at a previous organization, we're like, okay, we have this MQL goal, right? And we figured out that our, that an amazing channel for MQLs that convert at a great, like at a great level is Capterra paid search. And we're like, okay, let's put more money into Capterra paid search. And it didn't work, you know, that we didn't get any more leads. The paid search became extremely expensive and it's just like we exhausted the channel. So we're like, okay, let's do content syndication because we have the same QL goal, right? And we did constant syndication and it brought us like more leads than we could ever hope for, but they were all disqualified by the Sales team. And we ended up in a situation where we didn't have, like, the conversion rate that we expected and also the Sales hated us because, you know, they had to spend two months disqualifying 300 people. So when you are optimizing, like when you're looking at MQLs as your main, like one of your main targets, you are optimizing for something so early in the funnel and something really unpredictable sometimes that you could be setting yourself up for failure. And another issue that I have with it, okay, let's, let's say you bring the right MQLs, let's say you, you know, they're converting at the rate you're expecting. What happens to them after they're a customer? Like are they, are they opting out? Are they churning? Like are they a happy customer? Are they your advocates? Like how is it affecting the company in the long run? And if you don't see this, like if you are like, if you are not optimizing for the long run results, you might as well be creating a bucket with holes in it, right? You're just, you know, you'll end up in a situation where the amount of MQLs that you need to generate to hit your growth targets becomes, you know, crazy. Like it becomes impossible. So that's, that's the issue that I have with  with MQLs. I think it could be, it could be your hidden enemy when it comes to planning. 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – No, I think your point there, Anna, that we've all been burnt. We've, we have all been burnt by MQLs and we've, we've also burnt a lot of people along the way, right? In terms of, you know, throwing, throwing hundreds of MQLs over the fence to our Sales colleagues and, and then, you know, wondering why on earth they're not dealing with them. And you know, they were, I mean basically the Sales teams were right and we were wrong basically in that, in those previous lives that we lived in the MQL world. And it's interesting actually one of the recent guests on let talk ABM Nora Conklin, who's Principal Analyst at Forrester, she says that a lot of the talk that she's seeing now from the market from their customers and the, and the kind of the research they carry out is that LTV - Lifetime Value is, is turning into kind of the North Star  for many ABM programs. 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – Yes. 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – And it goes to your point about, well what happens after you win? You know, do they turn into a great customer or they’re a lousy customer? Do they disappear after six months, 12 months? You know, are they more hassle than they're worth? And I think Lifetime Value actually, if we could all kind of move the ABM ship somewhat towards that as a North Star, that that wouldn't be a bad thing. 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – I mean that's how you get buy-in. That's how you get support from everyone because when, like, when the entire organization knows that your effort, like that's account based when, when they know that you are going after the accounts and that are going to bring success in the long run that are actually, you know, there is data to prove that they are going to be a success in the long run. 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – Yeah. 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – That's when you get, that's when Sales get excited to, to get the call. That's when CSMs get excited to onboard them because you know, they're going to get, they're going to be getting commissioned for that. So that's that, that's a win-win situation for everyone. And I mean, selecting the audience and making sure that you are going after that type of account is like the hardest task for an organization sometimes. 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – Yeah. And it's also it, right? And this, let me ask you a question now. This question wasn't on my, wasn't on my list four years ago, or three years ago, or two years ago, even a year ago, and now obviously it's on my list now for all let's talk ABM guests. And that question really is the question of Artificial Intelligence because obviously it's everywhere and it's going to be the present and the future of, of everything we do. I think you've got some thinking about this that you were sharing with me before, but tell us a little bit about your use of AI in ABM, your thinking around it and perhaps anything that you can share with the audience about where you are heading with AI. 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – Yeah, I, oh, don't get me wrong. I like AI, I use ChatGPT all the time, but that's not the final product that I then put out into the world. And the moment when I have a problem with AI, when it's replacing humans completely, you know, right now you could have an AI tool take your homepage and the homepage of your prospect and generate a landing page, you know, that's, that's personalized. Okay. But I mean, have you seen, like, completely raw AI generated content? Like, there is research that I can't reason at the moment. So I mean, I would be, I wouldn't be happy if someone sent me a completely AI generated page that they never, they never actually read through.

So my concerns are is that people are going to think that AI is great for everything and that it's, it could at this point, that it can easily replace and do like one-to-one at scale and you know, take away that burden and it can help you, but it shouldn't be the, you know, it shouldn't be creating the final product that you're putting out there. And my favourite, my favourite story about AI, I mean, it's tragic, but, but it's my favorite story about a family in the UK that actually went mushroom picking, using a guide to do that. A book that they purchased off a famous retailer website and they ended up in a hospital. They all survived, but they ended up in a hospital with severe poisoning. And after investigation, turns out that book was completely AI generated. All of the mushroom pictures were AI generated and some of the, you know, some of the book parts, which they didn't get to before, before eating the poisonous mushrooms, they suggested trying the mushrooms to make sure that they're okay to consume. So, and I think, and I think that if you are, you know, risking to generate something like this for your prospects that could really, you know, shoot back at you. So yeah, that's, that's I think, I think it's, it's not ready to replace humans in, in this term. 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – Yeah, I mean I think it's an interesting point you made there and I think obviously ABM is not normally life or death, but you could get yourself into some hot water about it if you…

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – I mean, imagine you imagine you do so well and you show, you know, you get a person to read a landing page and it's crap. Like imagine doing that. 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – No. Or even the, the information is erroneous and you know, there's that, there's that famous book, I don't know if you ever read it 'cause obviously you're a bit of a linguist and a scholar. Did you ever read that famous book "Eats, Shoots and Leaves"? 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – No. 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – And obviously the title, if you understand that if shoots and leaves shoots are like little stems of plants. And so depending where you put, where you put the punctuation, it can mean one thing or another thing completely different. So you can say eats, shoots and leaves or eats shoots as in plants and leaves as in leaves from a plant. So there's the danger in the, in the, in the syntax, in the grammar, in the, in the, in the context is everything. And I think AI, I think I was reading something interesting the other day and I thought, I thought that's probably where we are today. Who knows where we're going to be in a year or 10 years. But a lot of people may well have filters that they actually start to filter a filter out rather AI because you, you, you don't want see it and you may be, 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – Yeah. 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – maybe work. We're, we're going to, we're going to be able to actually look at two things and say, actually you know what, that's much more human generated and that's much more AI generated and I'm able to decipher which one is which. Right? 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – I mean what LinkedIn is doing right now, I post on LinkedIn occasionally, and they've recently introduced this feature that, you know, that suggests AI to help you improve your grammar, change it a little bit or maybe help you brainstorm a topic that you want to post about. And I mean, AI is great to help you brainstorm even though there's now research that people who use AI to brainstorm are less creative. But when you are just, you know, pressing, you are just generating and using AI to, to change everything you're writing, it kind of feels like bots are talking to each other on LinkedIn because like, I don't know, like whether there's been, whether there's been generated by a human and I kind of end up in a situation, you know, those AI voice assistants that you call and they sound like a human, you start talking to them like a human, they don't understand you. Then you start talking like, you know, when keywords and stuff they don't understand you, then you're like, I feel like a complete idiot right now. It's just humiliating. It's just humiliating. And that's, and that's the experience that I could be, that I could start getting on LinkedIn because like, am I talking to, I don't know, like who am I talking to? Like, it's embarrassing when you can't tell apart those things. And I think people are going to get more, like I get aggressive with those AI assistants. And I think people will start getting aggressive with AI online assistants too. 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – Possibly. Possibly. So let's just finish off, let's just finish off Anna with some rapid fire questions about ABM. Just very quick answers from you. What's been your greatest ABM learning? 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – Audience. I mean, I think I used to be like, what kind of content can I produce to, to convert that account? And now I'm like, what account do I select to produce content for? So I think making sure you're going after the right, after the right people is, is my biggest learning. 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – I love that. I love that. Hardest part. What do you think the hardest part of ABM is? 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – It's audience. I'm sorry, I'm just going to repeat myself. It's audience selection. Yeah, I think, I think that's, that's the biggest part. And then having the entire organization on board and you know, making sure they understand what you're trying to do and support you rather than, you know, just, you know, not to be along the way with you. 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – But going back to what you said earlier in the show, learning about the ICP, the maturity, which potential accounts would become great customers. You've done a lot of that hard work, haven't you? So you've kind of been able to navigate that difficulty of audience, right? 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – Yes. And that is really thanks to a lot of people in the organization - our CRO, who oversees Sales and Customer Success. So he is able to see that correlation and, you know, realize that there are some things that we could look into to improve our ICP. And then we have an amazing, you know, Ops department that actually did the research for us. So I was really picking the fruit of their labor, to be honest. But you 
know, they have the overview, they have tools to do that and I'm really happy that they did. 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – Yeah, misconception. What would you say is the greatest misconception about ABM? 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – That it's just a tactic, I think, and that that's something I mentioned that when you think ABM can just be like a silly little project to see if you are like, if, if you could bring along those, those customers. So yeah, I think this is how you get disappointed in this. This is how you get disappointed. This is how you say, "Well, it doesn't work." 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – Yeah. Okay. Well let me ask you the, the Friday evening question. Okay, so you had a...today's Tuesday we're recording, so I think on Tuesday and, but let's fast forward to Friday. You've had a really tough week and you just want to close that laptop down and have a coke, a drink, a glass of wine, whatever your tipple is. And an old colleague of yours from a previous company calls and says, "Hey Anna, you've got to help me. I'm presenting to the CEO on Friday morning. On Monday morning, rather, what's that one thing that you, I must include in my presentation that will make my presentation land with impact?" What would you say to them is that one thing that you should include? 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – Are they making a presentation about their ABM strategy? 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – About their strategy Yeah. To their CEO. 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – How is that...how does that correlate with business goals? I mean, if they're presenting to the CEO, obviously, how, how does that align with the CEO's goals with the strategy? How is it going to make them look like a better leader? And yeah, yeah, that's, that, that's my answer. Like you have to be very strategic about what you're doing and how that, like what results are you going to be expecting? 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – Yeah. Well, Anna, thank you for sharing your ABM journey with us today. And I wish you and the whole team there at Influ2 every success for the future. 

Anna Tsymbalist (Head of ABM at Influ2) – Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure reflecting back on everything I've done in the past two years. It's really helpful, especially in the time of 2025 planning. 

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – Good stuff. Well, thank you. Yeah.