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Surround sound ABM

In this episode of Let's talk ABM, we speak to Trinity Nguyen, VP of Marketing at UserGems, about building a surround-sound approach to ABM.

Date published: Date modified: 2023-11-09 strategicabm 550 60

Trinity Nguyen
VP of Marketing | UserGems

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Trinity is a seasoned SaaS Marketer and a passionate technology advocate. Her experience spans developing and executing go-to-market strategies, Product Marketing, Demand Generation, Account-based programs, and Sales enablement. Trinity heads up Marketing at UserGems, the category leader in Champion Tracking. 
Declan heads up Marketing at strategicabm. After some 20 years working as a CMO in the Professional Services, SaaS and EdTech sectors, Declan is now Agency-side building the strategicabm brand and sharing our clients’ ABM success stories.

Watch this episode and learn:
  • What is Champion Tracking
  • Why multi-threading is key to account success
  • Trinity’s rationale for SDR reporting to Marketing
  • How to make the intangible tangible
Read the full transcript

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Surround sound ABM

The full transcript

Declan Mulkeen (strategicabm) – So today I'm joined by Trinity Nguyen, who's the VP of Marketing at UserGems. Trinity, thanks so much for joining us today.

Trinity Nguyen (UserGems) – Hi Declan. Thank you for having me.

Declan (strategicabm) – Well, listen, I mean, a little bit of background really. I kind of came across you and the company – LinkedIn, probably, like many, many things – and I was interested in learning about your story, about your company, and a little bit about you and your ABM journey.

But, I suppose what's interesting since we had our original chat, and now, is that I just keep on seeing your company everywhere! And I don't know whether that's because you're playing some, you know, with a puppet! And you're making sure that my profile on LinkedIn is 'invaded' by UserGems! But I just think, to pay credit really to you and your company, is that your brand, I just see it all over the place.

So, perhaps we could kick off with a question around that, really. Tell us or tell rather the audience, for those who don't know who UserGems are, tell us a little bit about, you know, who you are and what’s your kind of unique selling proposition in the market.

ABM Heroes: Terry Osborne

Trinity (UserGems) – Yeah, absolutely. And it's funny you mentioned that, because that exact phrase of "I keep seeing UserGems everywhere" – that's one of our company's OKR, and it's been like that for, what? Like, I don't know – over the years. 'Cause we keep hearing that in our Sales calls, people like, "Oh! I keep seeing UserGems everywhere".

So we want to make sure that, that’s part of our brand-building strategy, and we want to rally the team across, like from engineer to social, Marketing, Sales and whatnot, to make sure that everyone sees us everywhere. So, advertising is just one channel, but also like social, yeah. It's really nice, so thank you, you gave me one more point in my OKR achievement this quarter!

Declan (strategicabm) – There you go.

Trinity (UserGems) – What UserGems does: So, kind of high level, we are software for revenue teams, so Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, RevOps. And what we do is we track your key champions when they change their jobs. And there are a number of use cases. So, for the Sales and Marketing team, it's like when they change to a new organization that fits your target account to ICP, then it's an opportunity to sell to them again in the new organization. On the Customer Success side, it's a churn risk; when your champion leaves an organization, that should be a churn risk signal. So, that's what we do.

Declan (strategicabm) – So, in essence, you help companies like mine or any other company working in Sales and Marketing to track the movements and the ins and outs of people as they come into companies, as they leave companies, as they start new positions or change positions. And you then are able to benefit or help your customers rather...

Trinity (UserGems) – Yeah.

Declan (strategicabm) – ...benefit from that change...

Trinity (UserGems) – Yep.

Declan (strategicabm) – ...by presenting those individuals with information, with campaigns about products and services, is that?

Trinity (UserGems) – Yeah, that's perfect. That's perfect. That's the next step. So it's not just the movements, but also like enriching all these contacts with, like, the new contact information, and all the context around that person and their relationship with your company, and surface all of that in your CRM or any kind of like platforms that your team's using today, so that it's actionable. So that's the next part.

Declan (strategicabm) – So basically taking all that information, as you said, taking all that information and then presenting it in a consumable fashion for Marketers, Salespeople, to use it and to make good use of it really. Okay.

Trinity (UserGems) – Yeah, yeah.

Declan (strategicabm) – Well, let's talk about going – you mentioned about Marketing and Sales and SDRs. Let's just, one thing when we were chatting previously, you mentioned to me, which I found fascinating, was that you said to me that you're responsible for Marketing and you're also responsible for the SDR teams, which, there's this whole debate – which you've probably seen on many LinkedIn and other places – which talk about, you know, where should SDRs report into, into Marketing or into Sales, et cetera? Pros and cons, clearly. But tell me, how did that come about? And what do you think you gain, or what does the SDR team gain from that tight integration?

Trinity (UserGems) – So there are a lot of hot takes on LinkedIn; I think the right answer is always: “It depends”. Depends on whether your Marketing leader or your Sales leader have the bandwidth and the understanding of the workflow, the SDR to fully support them and develop them. So I think it depends on your organization.

For us, from day one, so it's kind of like how UserGems came about and how we built our go-to-market – from very early on, like four years ago, we decided that the regular like lead-generation paid media wouldn't work for us, because we were bootstrapped; we didn't have the resources to do that kind of like 'spray and hope for the best'. Inbound will take a long time. And my personality is, I want something a little bit quicker, so I can iterate and improve!

So we picked from, I think exactly four years ago, to do ABM as the way to build our go-to-market. And it's just the thinking was just simply: We don't have a lot of resources; how do I identify the best-fit account, and go after those only, to optimize our spend? And because of that, it makes sense for us to have the SDR or we call it Account Development, ADR, with Marketing – because this is how we go to markets, like ABM or ABX, so that we tightly align and uphold orchestrations. So that's how we kind of evolve and that makes sense for us.

Declan (strategicabm) – And if you talk a little bit about that ABM / ABX approach that you take there about clearly knowing your ICP and clearly going after that ICP – you mentioned I think that 90% of your efforts are coming from that program. So, tell us a little bit more. I mean, why is it you think that that approach is working so well for you?

I mean, you mentioned, obviously, there was, at the beginning you were bootstrapped, you didn't have the necessary financial firepower to go down other routes, but you're saying now that obviously it seems to be leading, you know, 90% is leading your revenue charge. So, why do you think that works so well for you?

Trinity (UserGems) – Yeah. So, the 90% of our pipeline came from the ABM in the first two years. So it was the motion or the channel for us. And then, since then we added on like the regular paid media, different campaigns, and then inbounds started picking up. So now it's no longer 90%. I would be very scared if one program was responsible for 90% of our pipeline right now. For us, it was the bootstrapped part, but I think because we didn't have all the money in the world to do everything, it forces us to really think about how to cut through the noise more effectively. So yes, it's about the money part. I think money was just a forcing function. I think, be able to step back and think: How do you cut through the noise? How to get to them?

The reason why we could do it and drove so much pipeline for us is all of our campaigns were actually One-to-one. So we didn't even do One-to-many, or One-to-industry, any of that, right? So we picked 10 accounts, we identified which of their customers have changed job, individually. So if I go after like: "Hey Declan, your customer from Capgemini is now at, you know, Google, have you reached out?" It's that personalized. And then it's also orchestrated with the SDR because in the first email, they use the same language, the same graphic.

So it's very orchestrated, because we only went after 10 accounts. So in the first time we ran that campaign we got like 50% demo requests from like five accounts out of 10. And then we scaled to 30, 40, 50, and now with 200 accounts every month. So, beginning, I think it makes sense to just focus on what makes your buyers tick. How do you best communicate your value? And do it in a really small scale, and learn and scale from there.

Declan (strategicabm) – Well I think, you know, ironically I think by not having the investment from a Marketing point of view, you actually have to be more innovative. And it kind of forces you to do things that perhaps you wouldn't do, 'cause you'd probably say, "Well, you know what? We can just turn on some paid media now and we're going to have a whole bunch of leads, and that'll keep our SDRs busy." And you can...

Trinity (UserGems) – Yeah.

Declan (strategicabm) – ...kind of almost be like a hamster in a treadmill really, going round and round...

Trinity (UserGems) – Yes.

Declan (strategicabm) – ...and round and round!

Trinity (UserGems) – Yes. And it's really hard to step off once you're on it. It's scary to turn off a channel. So, yeah.

Declan (strategicabm) – Well, you tend to fall off! When you come off the treadmill – at least I do! – but then you then find your feet. And I suppose you were fortunate that – actually that's interesting about that – so that, what you explained there, that approach about finding out who the customers were of your target companies and then talking to them about the movement of their customers and their key contacts. Are you still using that approach today or have you evolved it or... ?

DashDot

Trinity (UserGems) – Yep. Well, we definitely evolved it. We still have that component to our ABX, but we add other as well, like a broader messaging, different type of graphics. So we definitely evolved it. So that also, like, the way it looks too – back then, it's just me and PowerPoint, screenshot it, it was ridiculous, it was so bad-looking!

Declan (strategicabm) – But it worked, right?

Trinity (UserGems) – It worked. It worked, we actually got, so Gong is one of our customers and I remember they came in, they were in this first few batches of ABX we did four years ago, and the Head of Demand Gen, he said: "It was so bad, it's personal like, it was so badly designed that it got our attention!" So I guess it achieved the purpose!

Declan (strategicabm) – Well there you go. I mean that's, you should put that on your website as well, so.

Trinity (UserGems) – I know.

Declan (strategicabm) – But I think also, I mean I'm, you know, a lot of what I'm reading about and some of the experiments that we're doing here at the Agency's around creating, you know, creating creatives that are very natural. And I think there's a tendency to kind of, you know, we always want to over-polish things, don't we? And we want to make things look beautiful and whether it's a video or whatever it is. But I think, you know, I think the B2C market is leading in that kind of way, that using kind of, you know, iPhone videos...

Trinity (UserGems) – Yes.

Declan (strategicabm) – And I think I'd like to see a lot more of that in the B2B world. So I think, actually, 'downgrading' I think is, you were probably ahead of your time to be honest, Trinity, I think you were probably two or three years ahead of your time and now you're seeing that people are doing this now.

And I think Gong actually, you mentioned Gong – and I know quite a few people there as well – and they've done some interesting stuff as well in terms of their kind of, you know, GIFs and memes and that kind of stuff that they do as well.

Trinity (UserGems) – Yeah.

Declan (strategicabm) – So that's an interesting one.

Talking about evolution, when we were speaking before, you mentioned that your sweet spot of ICP was, I think you called it kind of 'mid-market low enterprise'. Is that still the case, or are you now kind of moving higher up the ladder?

Trinity (UserGems) – Yeah. We definitely have enterprise, enterprise. I think for us, just because I'm being pragmatic of the resources that the team have, right? So the use case doesn't have any limit in terms of size of the company. It's just as you target like, say, Fortune 100, there are a lot of different considerations that true, true enterprises have. So you've got to be pragmatic of what is the right sweet spot right now with the capacity that we have. So for us, it's been mid-market up to like low enterprise. So in this case we have customers in the 15,000...

Declan (strategicabm) – Yeah.

Trinity (UserGems) – ...employees, so that kind of size.

Declan (strategicabm) – Let's talk a little bit about the technology, UserGems. So you're obviously using your own technology for your own ABM programs, clearly. So in a funny kind of way that obviously is a great way for you to sell your technology into prospective customers, because you're using it in order to win them. And then they are then using that, your technology, for their own business. So that, in a funny kind of way, it's quite a novel approach really because they're able to, you know, it's like almost like, you know, making the intangible tangible. You're actually helping them to see the power of a tool before they've even purchased it.

Trinity (UserGems) – Yeah. I think like from the ad creative standpoint, us showing their customer's job change is, it's not something like rocket science, 'cause everyone can go into a website and you see all the testimonials. So it's not so much the power of the product, but how we use the UserGems software to help us is.

So we have an ICP list of roughly around 10,000 accounts right now. And we go after them, like 200 accounts every single month, like I mentioned. So it's really critical for us to identify which accounts to go after when. So initially, we just kind of like go down the list of like companies that, the logos that we know. But now what we do is, intent signals doesn't really work for us because we don't really have set keywords yet. So it's not like someone will wake up and search for something like this, it's pretty unique.

What we do is we monitor this list of 10,000 and whenever any previous customers or previous champions join these 10,000 accounts, and the quantity – like 1, 2, 3, 4 – then these accounts get prioritized. And that's when I decide to, like: "This account's warm enough, because our SDR know who to reach out to within these accounts – let's go after them." So that's how we prioritize ABM accounts.

Declan (strategicabm) – And so you're monitoring these accounts, you're monitoring the movements of people in, out, you see that a previous customer contact is moving into a target account, so you say: "Hey, we can go and talk to him or her, they know us...

Trinity (UserGems) – Yeah.

Declan (strategicabm) – ...they've experienced us."

Trinity (UserGems) – Yeah.

Declan (strategicabm) – And that they can be your entry point. And from a purchasing point of view, is it quite centralized? Or do you have to literally kind of go department to department and jump around the company?

Trinity (UserGems) – You mean like, from like, to do this play?

Declan (strategicabm) – Well, when you end up winning a customer, do you have to then kind of, winning a customer isn't enough, you have to go through the whole company? Or is it the case that once you've won a customer, then the purchase is centralized and therefore you've done your job, so to speak, from an acquisition point of view? Or, do you have to kind of penetrate that company, develop that company further and wider?

Trinity (UserGems) – Let me make sure I understand. So like when we break into one of these ABM accounts, is it just one person that makes the purchase, or like do you multi-thread to the rest?

Declan (strategicabm) – Yeah, do you have to, well, would you have to multi-thread it in the sense, not just a person, but you have to multi-thread in a sense that maybe Sales might buy your technology, then you've got to move to Marketing, and then maybe you've got to move to another... do you have to kind of move around?

Trinity (UserGems) – Yes.

Declan (strategicabm) – Move around the company?

Trinity (UserGems) – Yes. Our buying group is pretty big, because it touches on a lot of teams within the revenue org. A lot of different use cases in this data. So for us, we're kind of in this funny situation where we don't really have one target persona. My background's in Product Marketing, so it hurts me to say that I don't have one target persona. We actually have three. So the Three Musketeers, that's what we call them. So it’s Salespeople, this is the oldest Sales playbook: So when they see our ad or messaging, light bulb goes off – they know exactly what we do.

But then because it's about generating pipeline, so then they also go through their Demand Gen, Head of Marketing, to pull them in; that's the second persona. And then because it touches the CRM and all the data and helps with like CRM cleanliness, too, RevOps is the third one that usually we see in every single deal that we close. So a lot of multi-threading.

Declan (strategicabm) – Yeah, and that ties in nicely, I remember when we were talking before you said to me, which kind of made me think, you said to me you can't break into an account with one person.

Trinity (UserGems) – Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And especially during this time, this year and next year. The value group is big now, C-Suite's involved all the time, so.

Declan (strategicabm) – Well, let's touch on that for a second, Trinity. What are you seeing? I mean, we're now into October when we're talking, but we're almost the end of the year now, but what are you seeing? What are you seeing out there in the market? What are you hearing?

Trinity (UserGems) – Yeah. I mean I think everyone's kind of seeing it on their own Sales pipeline, too. So G2 did a survey and they found that 33, the buying group, the average buying group now has increased by 33%. C-Suite's involved in almost every single buying decision and we see that on our end as well. Budget is tight, so they want to make sure that this is like the safe bet. So we definitely see that.

For us, we've always known because of the nature of the product, we're intentionally trying to multi-thread, but now that is top of mind for every AE within our company to make sure that we involve the right people as soon as we can in the right stages.

Declan (strategicabm) – And just touching on that term about multi-threading, I think one thing I think you explained to me was that the way that some of your ads and how you run the campaigns...

Trinity (UserGems) – Yeah.

Declan (strategicabm) – But it made me kind of think, wow! I didn't realize! Talk me through about how you run some of these kind of multi-threading campaigns.

Trinity (UserGems) – Yeah. Yeah, this one's a little bit crazy! So – but it is really fun to run – so what we do is, in the, most Marketers, once you kind of create a Sales-accepted offer, it's kind of like the baton is passed to AE. But we know from our data that when a deal is multi-threaded, we have 5x win rate. So since early last year, we started running multi-threading ads.

So, when an open opportunity is created, we don't stop running ads, we actually start running ads to all these accounts and tell them, like: "Hey, Sales! Someone in your team's talking to us, Hey, Marketing! Someone's... " – you know. And the rest of the persona we usually see, and nurturing them all the way into this closed one, that's when the ads stop.

So the reason we did so through the ads is it's very soft touch. It's kind of something that people don't really mind, but it helps stay top of mind. It's not emails, so it doesn't cross, you know, paths with AE's emails, so I think it's great. But then we also measure; we did AB testing Q4 last year. So all the opportunity we split in half – half got served with these multi-threading ads, and the other half didn't. And we saw that the ones that got served with the ads had, I think, 33% higher win rates. Obviously more stakeholders involved and shorter sales cycle.

Bigger deal size, too, because now you bring in more people, so it's a company-wide initiative instead of one team. So since then, like right now, since January this year is a hundred percent of our open ops get served these multi-threading ads.

Declan (strategicabm) – So, in effect what you're saying is that you've got an open op, you start with the Sales department, VP of Sales, you then start running ads into Marketing and into RevOps.

Trinity (UserGems) – RevOps, yeah.

Declan (strategicabm) – Saying, "Hey, we're talking to your Sales team." And that's what the ad says or something similar?

Trinity (UserGems) – Yeah, yeah, it just say like, "Hey" – they're very soft, it's not even that specifically – "Hey, Sales" – or like the title, right? Persona – "Someone in your team's talking to us." So.

Declan (strategicabm) – Well, that definitely piques somebody's interest, right? People think, "Hey, what's going on here?" And so what happened? Talk us through that for the audience, 'cause this is really, these people might want to try this, but when they see the ad, if they click on it, what happens?

Trinity (UserGems) – We, so the funny thing is, for our ads, most of our ads we don't optimize for clicks. We want impression, we want people to see. And we also know that we sell to a lot of Marketers and Sales, people are smart, they don't want to be cookied, nobody clicks. So we just want them to see, and then when they request, say if they request demo or not, actually it doesn't really matter. So this campaign, I don't measure with pipeline or clicks or demo requests, because that's not the point.

Declan (strategicabm) – Yeah.

Trinity (UserGems) – The point is they talk to each other within their organization when we're not there, and get pulled into the Sales conversation. On the Sales side, our Sales team is trained to say like, after the first few calls, like, "Hey, this is great. Sounds like UserGems would be a good fit for your organization. Typically we also talk to this persona and this persona because of X, Y, Z." So from both ends, we're kind of nudging our champion to pull in other personae as well. So it kind of goes hand in hand.

Declan (strategicabm) – So you're basically running the ads for the other persona...

Trinity (UserGems) – Yeah.

Declan (strategicabm) – ...to see the relationship is taking place. And at the same time, your SDRs are talking to the...

Trinity (UserGems) – AEs, yeah.

Declan (strategicabm) – ... AEs, rather – excuse me – are talking to the team saying: "Hey! It'd be good if you bring these guys into the conversation, as well".

Trinity (UserGems) – Yeah.

Declan (strategicabm) – But have you got any evidence? I.e. have you then, once you've won a customer, have you sat down with them and spoken to them and said, "Hey, talk us through what happened." Have like a fly on the wall?

Trinity (UserGems) – Yeah.

Declan (strategicabm) – Do you have like that kind of thing?

Trinity (UserGems) – So we don't ask, but that's, we don't ask customers for the journey. But that's why we did the A/B testing in Q4. And you can see how the ops progress, and they compare with ads / without ads. How did that perform in terms of closed won?

And that second funny thing is I told you like most of ads for us, we don't optimize for clicks. The multi-threaded ads are the ones that have so many clicks because people just love it! And then they start tagging their peers to those ads, too. So that's enough for me to kind of like support this campaign.

One caveat, if any Marketers want to run this, you need to carve out an experiment budget. We don't spend that much on this one, less than 5K. It's really not a lot, but you need to put it as under brand, or like experiment, because you should not expect to have, like, demo requests or clicks...

Declan (strategicabm) – Yeah.

Trinity (UserGems) – ... anything as an ROI.

Declan (strategicabm) – Sure, and also you need to leave the time to run for your opportunities to close. And then, as you said, then do the A/B to see – and you said – was it 33% increase in... ?

Trinity (UserGems) – 33% higher win rate.

Declan (strategicabm) – Well, I think most people listening to this would like to take that!

Trinity (UserGems) – Yeah.

Declan (strategicabm) – And put that in the bank! Right?

So, and I think that just, it's fascinating. I think, you know, a lot of talk about Dark Social, Dark Funnel, and in a funny kind of way, you're almost, provoking Dark Social. You're almost inviting people, as you said, to do a screenshot and to send it via Slack or whatever to their colleagues, and saying: "Hey! I've just seen this – are you guys talking to UserGems?" You're almost kind of provoking people, which I think not many people have actually thought about, kind of, for want of a better expression, artificially stimulating the Dark Funnel.

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Trinity (UserGems) – Yeah. Manufacture.

Declan (strategicabm) – Manufactured, yeah.

Trinity (UserGems) – Dark-first funnel. Yeah, that was... it's funny, I guess, I hope not too many people listen to this! Because I feel like I share a lot of how we think about it! But when the term 'Dark Funnel' came out, when we all see it in communities and whatnot, always my number one question is: How do I manufacture Dark Funnel or Dark Social?

Declan (strategicabm) – Yeah.

Trinity (UserGems) – 'Cause we're a new company, right? Like, how do we get people to talk about us? Hence that "We see UserGems everywhere", hence this whole multi-threading, et cetera. I think a lot of Marketers actually know the answer and they intuitively think the same way as well.

It's just sometimes when you're on that hamster wheel of, and it leads and leads now, it's really hard to step off and be able to execute some of these campaigns. Or if someone's like, "Every dollar you spend, I need to see an ROI immediately" makes it hard. So I think a lot of Marketers know it's just the circumstances could be a little bit more challenging for some.

Declan (strategicabm) – Yeah, I think, you know, a lot of the ABMers that I talk to, I suppose one thing that separates them somewhat from Demand Gen and other types of Marketing is that they do a lot more experimenting, and they do have the kind of sense that they can do a bit more experimenting.

And I think that example, Trinity, that you shared is a great example of doing an experiment that you guys had a gut feeling it might work, you knew from your data it could possibly work and you've proven it. So, I think a lot of people might want to mimic it and see – you might get a lot of LinkedIn DMs from people asking for more advice after this, so.

Trinity (UserGems) – Oh, happy to! I love talking to Sales, Marketers.

Declan (strategicabm) – You might need to clean out your LinkedIn inbox for, make sure it's nice and clean! So listen, just a few rapid-fire questions just to finish off with, see.

Trinity (UserGems) – Yeah.

Declan (strategicabm) – Let's talk specifically around ABM and ABX as you said, but what do you think from your experience of working in Account-based Marketing over the course of the last few years, what do you think is the one lesson that you would share with other people?

Trinity (UserGems) – Mm. Think about your SDRs workflow, or AEs if they full cycle. ABM, people keep saying that ABM because they think it's a Marketing thing and we know that it's not, but easier said than done.

I think the hardest part even for Marketers who run ABM is like, you really need to know your SDR workflow and then how do you bring that together? If you don't know how the SDR workflows look like, how they spend their days and how you could build an ABX program that compliments that, it wouldn't work. The rubber meets the road when the SDR actually reach out to the accounts, and work them thoroughly.

Declan (strategicabm) – That's, I think is very, very sage advice. And tell me, what would you say is the hardest thing that you found from wearing any kind of ABM or ABX motion? What do you think the hardest thing is?

Trinity (UserGems) – That part, the same one I just said. It's really, really hard because especially if the SDR org has different plays that they're running – or if they report to another team where they have different priorities – this orchestrating, the herding cats orchestration, is the hardest part. So it sounds simple, but it's where you're going to see the ROI for media.

Declan (strategicabm) – What, the particular focus around orchestrating your SDRs and your AEs?

Trinity (UserGems) – Yes, yes.

Like for us, when we start running an ABM campaign, targeting, say Gong, then our SDR outreach sequence for that account also start on the same day. It's really orchestrated. So how do you keep that, like, the two teams moving lockstep as you scale?

Declan (strategicabm) – Well, it's funny, it reminds me of a conversation with Hillary Carpio who's over at Snowflake and..

Trinity (UserGems) – Breaking Silos!

Declan (strategicabm) – Yeah, yeah!

Trinity (UserGems) – I love that book.

Declan (strategicabm) – You've got the book?

Trinity (UserGems) – Yes.

Declan (strategicabm) – I've got, I've got the book here as well. So Hillary was very, very gracious and she sent me a copy all the way from the States and yeah, that whole kind of SDR, the Sales, the way that they've managed to do that is a great, I mean it's a great book, so...

Trinity (UserGems) – Yes.

Declan (strategicabm) – We'd recommend it to anyone.

Listen, last question for you, obviously you're there in Miami and it's nice and sunny behind you. Tell me, imagine it's a Friday evening, you're about to close down your laptop, you've had a hard week, and you get a phone call from an old friend who says: "Hey, I've got to go and present my ABM strategy on Monday morning to the C-Suite." And they're going to say to you, "What kind of advice would you give me?" What's that one piece of advice you'd give them before you wind down and have a glass of wine or whatever, whatever your favorite tipple is?

Trinity (UserGems) – I think I will steal from Hillary and the Breaking Silos book. It's not a campaign, it's not a program; it's a mindset. It really is. If you don't have that mindset from the leadership standpoint, it's impossible to be able to orchestrate teams together moving in lockstep when everyone has their own priorities and agenda, so...

Declan (strategicabm) – So, and just on that point then, how would you, what advice would you give about getting that mindset, or helping people to get that mindset?

Trinity (UserGems) – Start small, especially in larger organizations.

Like, Marketers, they've seen our ABM ads and they always ask how I do it, and I share the entire playbook from beginning to end. They always ask: "How can I automate this so we can scale?" Like, no! You don't – start very small first. Learn from it before you scale. It's not going to be a quick win.

Declan (strategicabm) – Yeah, I think that's the problem a lot of people is they try to run before they can walk, or even before they can crawl.

Trinity (UserGems) – Yeah.

Declan (strategicabm) – And I think that's that urgency that we all have as Marketers, right? We're always under that pressure for more, more, more, and...

Trinity (UserGems) – Yeah, the pipeline anxiety, I mean, I feel it, everyone feels it, so...

Declan (strategicabm) – But you're in a better place now, Trinity, 'cause you've been given that time to breathe and you've been given that time to experiment and obviously the results are there for everyone to see now.

So I think on that note, congratulations on your program, and wish you and the whole team there at UserGems all the best for the future, and thanks for your time today.

Trinity (UserGems) – Thank you so much. And just a little asterisk, we just share, like, the ones that work – but there are a lot, there have been a lot of experiments that did not work, so.

Declan (strategicabm) – Maybe that could be another episode then maybe we could do, let's...

Trinity (UserGems) – What I mean, it's just like, don't be too hard on yourself! Experiments are meant to fail. If you don't fail, you don't really learn anything, so.

Declan (strategicabm) – Okay, well yeah, I mean that's a key learning about ABM, right? Is you've just got to, you know.

Trinity (UserGems) – Yeah.

Declan (strategicabm) – Fail fast, learn fast, and apply the learning. But maybe that's an idea for another podcast I could do called, "Let's not talk ABM", or whatever we could call it, right?

Trinity (UserGems) – Yeah!

Declan (strategicabm) – Well, thank you Trinity. Thank you for your time today.

Trinity (UserGems) – Thank you so much.