During an ABM Done Right Podcast, Cassandra Jowett (PathFactory’s Senior Director of Marketing) mentioned that she compares the buyer’s journey to the “floor is lava” game that kids play, and is a Netflix game show. You have jumping points along the way to the safe harbor, and you want to make sure buyers don’t fall into the lava halfway through their journey. You want buyers to jump from one rock to the next one and so on, and you want to lay out the path to revenue in a very clear way.
The problem is….
Most GTM teams do not lay out the path. They focus on getting accounts into the pipeline and put little attention to the fundamentals of revenue: sales velocity, stage progression, sales cycle time, deal sizes, win rates, retention, and expansion. They are not optimizing their GTM across brand, demand, land, and expand motions to create a compounding revenue impact that can be 4X – 5X greater than if they focus on the pipeline alone and leave buyers hanging halfway through their journey.
Sumerian, a UK ITSM Firm, Failed to Create a Path to Revenue
Leadership at the UK ITSM Analytics SaaS firm envisioned creating a new category, “Capacity Planning as a Service (CPaaS),” and becoming an international player like VMware. But, as 451 Research indicated in their report, the ITSM firm would have to break out of its finance niche category. They needed to create demand for a new product in a new category in new markets. So, they hired a PR firm to increase awareness of the new category. They invested in intent data platforms, such as 6sense and Demandbase, for their ABM technology. The firm drove awareness and pipeline growth, but there was limited-stage progression and revenue improvement.
The ITSM firm attempted to retrofit its lead process, lead technology, and, most importantly, its lead reporting to align with what already exists for their new ABM reporting and approach. They did not make the necessary changes across Brand, Demand, Land, and Expand motions to drive the desired revenue growth. There was no strategy for how the GTM teams would use intent data and open, engage, and close in-market accounts that 6sense and other intent data platforms would identify. They had a list of activities and cadences. There was no coordination between sales and marketing teams..
Sumerian Struggled to Create a Connection with Buyers from the Start – They Had Brand Issues That Kept Buyers from Progressing
Sales and GTM teams soon discovered that 4 out of 5 targeted companies outside the financial industry lacked a senior executive’s understanding of the business issues that the ITSM firm was trying to solve with its on-demand cloud-based capacity planning subscription service. Senior executives did not see how their IT teams, the business, operations, P&L, and customers were impacted by their infrastructure visibility gaps, manual IT processes, homegrown technologies, and inadequate tooling like VMware that only looked at “current” infrastructure performance issues vs. where infrastructure challenges will lie in the months ahead.
More importantly, the buyers did not see how the business “issues” were related to them because content and messaging focused on general industry assumptions and pain points vs. their ICP. Their content, messaging, and LinkedIn profiles failed to show their relevance to their ICP and the key buying groups within their ICP. Like many teams, they created new ICPs without aligning their content and messaging across all channels with the ideal clients that wanted to attract, engage, land, and expand.
Sumerian Struggled to Drive Demand with Buying Groups – Sales and Marketing Were Single-Threaded
Most of the content and messaging were created for IT managers who were responsible for capacity management. They were users of the platforms and sometimes influencers or champions. But sales and marketing teams should not have relied on that connection.
They needed to penetrate accounts and build relationships with VPs, CTOs, and CIOs. They were not extending beyond IT managers to drive engagement with business strategy, CX, and finance teams who could provide the insights that the GTM teams needed to make a stronger case for capacity management and show how IT was misaligned with business objectives.
Buying Groups aren’t just a theory anymore. The best GTM teams are making them the foundation of their entire GTM system.. Tech platforms like Demandbase, 6sense, and Zoominfo are even focused on buyer groups. However, Sumerian was focused on one or two personas and contacts when their ICP buying groups involved 6-10+ people. You won’t see pipeline progress if you only focus on the main users versus the buying groups. You won’t create the demand you want with the buying groups if you don’t go beyond industry and persona content that you create for ICP brand awareness. You need to be situationally relevant, targeting a cluster of similar accounts with similar buying groups, priorities, and/or situations. Sumerian needed to increase their relevance as buyers moved along in their journey. They needed a personalization journey that matches the buying journey, where you start at the ICP and persona thought leadership level, then move to situational “cluster 1: few” relevance, and finally to account-level, decision-maker, and stakeholder relevance, where you tell the account story. To continue with the “Floor is Lava” analogy, the increased relevance helps buyers move from one rock to another.
ABM demands absolute customer obsession, as ABM should be customer-led. This means value props should be designed based on customer needs. Value props should be custom-designed to the unique opportunity in each account, and content should be designed for that unique opportunity.
They needed to go beyond “pushing out” content based on intent data and what potential customers engaged with in their Demandbase campaigns, which are effective at the ICP brand awareness level. They needed to uncover “why” there was intention or engagement in the first place, so they could align with the target account’s strategic vision and put a plan in place to reach the C-suite, since VPs and above are not the ones showing intent within enterprise accounts. They needed to use intent data and engagement as a springboard vs. something to react to. They needed to understand:
- What’s behind the prospect’s intent, and specifically what is their million-dollar headache, on both an account and personal level?
- What’s going on within the organization and the different divisions that can impact operational excellence, customers, and P&L?
- What are the account-specific or competitor-focused gaps that are not being considered and the personal impacts, which may be under-estimated?
It’s this information that helped sales and marketing speak to the human buyers within target accounts and create a “personal” buying journey that helps target accounts move forward through the different stages.
As Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson mention in their book, “The Challenger Sale,” in most cases, buyer unresponsiveness is not because you failed to make a logical argument. It’s because you failed to make an emotional connection. It’s not that buyers didn’t believe your story. It’s because they didn’t see it as “their” story. Sumerian’s sales and marketing team did not align their content and messaging with the specific retailer, airline, and online service accounts they wanted to win and tell their story.
As Doug Landis mentioned in a recent Forbes article: “When selling to larger companies, you must come to every social, email, and live conversation with a point of view about their business.” Sumerian’s GTM team needed account intelligence to know what their target accounts focused on as those strategic initiatives for the business trickled down to every department across the organization.
Sumerian needed more than persona-based content and messaging. The airlines, retailers, and online service firms needed content and messaging to see their specific gaps and how they would impact their strategic initiatives. As you can see from the image below, IT buyers need to see that you understand their business landscape, their company, their needs, and what they will require at each stage of their buying process.
Sumerian Did Not Have the 1:1 ABM Content to Support Selling and Internal Buying Conversations to Land Accounts.
The content did not support the selling conversations that sales teams needed to have with buyers across their target organizations. They didn’t have the content and messaging to support the “why change” conversation, where the teams highlight evolving pressures, share the hard truths, show the risk of “no change”, and pinpoint the upside opportunities. They didn’t have the content that would answer “what happens if X account buys,” as all of their content focuses on why companies should buy their CPaaS solution. They didn’t have the content for the struggling moments that sit at the center of every deal – moments that need to be listened to, understood, catered to, reframed, and solved. They didn’t have the content to make buyers uncomfortable with their current situation, yet comfortable to change. They didn’t empower the buyers with the right content, information, and stories, so they were confident to get past their indecisiveness.
They were also unable to influence internal buying conversations on how last-minute reactions to threshold crossings impacted IT finance, IT security, IT operations, e-commerce, revenue, and customer satisfaction. The content did not support selling conversations. They were unable to establish a team-to-team connection that was necessary to progress accounts toward a signed deal, adoption, retention, and expansion.
You see, Sumerian needed to change sales and marketing motions across the buying journey, as it doesn’t matter how many accounts you initially engage with if they do not progress toward revenue. We need to have the right sales AND marketing conversations. We need to take the right calculated steps together.
By Optimizing Motions Across the Buyer’s Journey, Sumerian Compounded the Revenue Impact of Their Account-Based GTM
From a brand motion perspective – Sumerian increased awareness and engagement with more ICP accounts outside of their pre-established finance niche.
From a demand motion perspective – Sumerian created and captured demand at the C-level, VP, director, and manager levels across ICP target accounts.
From a land motion perspective – Sumerian not only progressed more ICP accounts to revenue, but they also accelerated accounts to revenue and shortened sales cycle time. They improved their enterprise win rates across key industries. The company gained new customer logos like GoDaddy. JCPenney, British Airways, and many others. They created partnerships with companies like ServiceNow, IBM, DXC Technology, and VMware (which recognized its own gaps). They became an international player and created the revenue growth they needed to be acquired.
Now Sumerian is part of ITRS Group, a larger firm that has:
- 800+ clients worldwide that rely on their IT estate monitoring, capacity planning, analytics, and load testing platforms.
- Offices are located throughout North America, the UK, Europe, the Nordic/Benelux regions, and the Asia Pacific region.