ABM Strategies for 2023 with Alex Southworth, VP, and Manager for D&B Digital, Dun and Bradstreet

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:01) Today, Alex from Dun and Bradstreet is giving Joel a master class in account-based marketing. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:15) Alex.

(Alex at 00:00:15) Hey there, Joel. Nice to meet you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:17) Nice to meet you, my friend. Are you excited?

(Alex at 00:00:19) I'm ecstatic. Can you see the excitement?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:22) I can. One of the things that I was really interested to learn from you about is ABM strategy.

(Alex at 00:00:30) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:31) So our listeners are comprised largely of tech founders or people who are in technology who are looking to take the next step in their career, often lead engineers wanting to understand a little bit more about sales, things like that. And so we have never done an episode related to ABM strategy. Here's ABM strategy. Here's what it is. Here's how it's executed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:53) And I saw you have a ton of experience there, so I was hoping I could ask you questions about that.

(Alex at 00:00:57) Yeah. No, it sounds great. Well, you know, the way I was actually thinking about it was maybe we could just start off like, I'm curious to understand why you started up Modern CTO, why you named it Modern CTO, actually.

(Alex at 00:01:12) And associated with that, because it's really interesting. But your background is kind of this combination of you're a marketing channel, but you're also a practitioner as well, which I think is a really interesting combination. It actually mirrors a lot of my background as well. So, you know, maybe we can just start there, and then I think, you know, it's more about what is the modern CTO. And I personally, I mean, my opinion is it's someone who is growth-oriented.

(Alex at 00:01:39) At that point, it's all about knowing how to understand the data and how to activate it, especially if you're working for a B2B company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:47) Absolutely. I'll give you the brief overview of the show and the history. So I was a software engineer, built teams and teams of teams for 17 years or so, and my mom got sick. She passed away from cancer within like six weeks of us finding out she was sick. So it was this very abrupt thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:07) And I decided after, you know, going through that process with my siblings, I decided that I had to start, you know, trying more in life. And I was around 27 at the time. And so I had this idea to write this book about what I had learned going from individual contributing engineer to running my first team to then running teams of teams and being involved in business decisions and things like that. And so I wanted it to be very short and simple and just, here's what I've learned. You can read it on a plane ride and take it from there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:39) So I started writing the book, hired a writer to help me write it because I tried it first by myself and it didn't go very well. So I hired a writer. We worked together on the book, and then before I published the book, I wanted to talk to other CTOs outside of the network of the five or so people that I knew that were CTOs, and so I said, let's call them up and do an interview with them. That turned into the podcast. I didn't want the interviews to stop after we had already validated the book and the book got released.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:12) Since then, it's been 600 episodes in. Around episode 200 is when it went, so about two years in, 200 episodes in is when it went from hobby to I started making money at it. People started paying and sponsoring the show. Grew that to about a million dollars a year. Did that for three years, and then we started making some of our sponsors had asked us to make them podcasts, like do the whole production of it and everything.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:39) So we said, okay. And so the past year, we've been doing that. Now we're about $2 million a year in revenue, and we make about 14 shows, and then it's about a million of it comes from shows, roughly, and then another million of it comes from sponsorship. And that's where we're at, and we're about 15 people. So that's the whole story of Modern CTO.

(Alex at 00:03:58) Very cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:58) Of Modern CTO.

(Alex at 00:03:59) Very cool. Congratulations. And why the name Modern CTO?

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:05) Well, one, because it sounds cool. Yeah. But I thought when I looked up the definition of modern, modern is always modern. So it's this dynamic concept.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:17) So I figured if I named it Modern CTO, it'd always be a relevant name.

(Alex at 00:04:20) OK.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:20) Because if you named it like the Agile CTO or if you named it something related to a time-constrained concept or framework, then that becomes dated and so does the name of the show. So I figured, let's do Modern CTO. Plus, I had seen that there is a lot of, in the conversations I was having, I found that a lot of the people would say, oh, this isn't the traditional path, and then they would explain their path. And then I said, well, you know, 80% of the people I'm talking to say the exact same thing, so this is clearly like the modern version of being a CTO. Let's build this community and connect all these people so they can see that they all think that they have this, you know, very unique path, but yet they're not alone because it's often the case that this was a similar path than not.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:10) So that's how we came up with it.

(Alex at 00:05:12) Very cool. And so how would you define a modern CTO?

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:16) Oh yeah. That's a hard one. That's a whole chapter of the book. The first question I get is what is the difference between CTO and CIO?

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:24) I get that a lot. And so I'd say from there, there's going to be differences across all companies and industries, but the biggest things that I have seen are that CTO typically focuses on product and external, and CIO typically focuses on the internal technology to run the organization, payroll, servers, related to, you know, authentication and things of that nature. So that's one. What do I think a modern CTO is? One big difference from the '80s and '90s to today is the command and control person has become less popular, and the outcome-driven, let's work together to figure it out humble person has become more popular.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:10) I think there's a lot of reasons for that, but I think that there are still a small percentage of the command and control, conquer type people out there, and that might work well for them and their organization and their culture. But I believe the more modern version and where we're headed are the people who understand that they can't do everything. The idea of the hero engineer to come in and save the day is dying. The idea that you can be a complete jerk but be really good at your one narrow skill set, that's dying too. So I think those things sort of float around modern CTO.

(Alex at 00:06:48) Yeah. It was interesting. When we started, like when I saw the invite come through and I started thinking about it, but I was thinking about what my framework would be. And in my mind, I kind of segment CTOs into three buckets.

(Alex at 00:07:04) There's the risk and cost saving kind of CTO. There's the CTO that's focused more on driving efficiencies, and then there's the revenue CTO for the one that's kind of more focused on driving growth and building. And kind of the golden question in my head is if you're having a conversation with the CFO or a CEO, what is the question that the CEO or the CFO asks you and asks you to solve? And if it's predominantly around, you know, how can you save costs, then you fall in the former category. And it's almost like a continuum.

(Alex at 00:07:43) And actually, for me, that modern CTO is the one that's focused mostly on driving revenue. How do you drive growth? And you see that, I think, a lot more in newer, younger companies, you know, as they're growing. They have more of that focus.

(Alex at 00:08:01) But it's almost out of, you know, necessity, really. But having the ability to talk about that, especially, you know, if you're a B2B CTO, you know, understanding kind of that ABM portion of that B2B side of the go-to-market, I think is absolutely critical. It's interesting because, you know, my background is that I started off actually, I studied chemical engineering with French. And then my first job kind of coming out of university was in IT consulting. So I was a systems integrator, did a lot of coding, did that for about seven years, and then moved more into strategy consulting.

(Alex at 00:08:41) Did that for another, you know, 10, 15 years. And now I refer to myself as a recovering consultant. Then after that, I moved into a startup, worked there a bit. We grew that startup pretty much 100% over the period of two years, got bought by D&B. And now I've ended up in D&B.

(Alex at 00:09:01) But it's very interesting kind of during that career, I've worked with a lot of, you know, companies around their go-to-market strategy, right, especially around their B2B go-to-market strategy. Kind of evolved into that way of thinking. So it's very interesting that you've come at it from a very different angle to me, and we've kind of ended up in, I think, a very similar place.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:23) I agree. Also, I am a founder CTO. So I believe that the founder CTOs I have met are far more involved in the business side of things, just out of necessity. And I fully agree.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:37) I think the definition you gave of modern CTO is fantastic. Like, that you have to, it's a competitive advantage to understand the market and understand what's happening in sales. And so often, you know, I'll meet engineers or people in positions that are not entry-level positions, and I'll ask them, do you know where your paycheck comes from? Exactly. There's not a magical paycheck fairy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:59) That's not how this works. You're doing something useful to the market, and the market's responding by giving you money to do that thing and do it better. And so if you understand what that thing is, you can be more effective in your decision-making, and you can ultimately grow the company.

(Alex at 00:10:14) Absolutely. And I think there's for me, there's a few components to that. I think the first one is being able to understand how you can support the go-to-market and how you can support ultimately revenue. I think the second one I think is just, you know, building a scalable solution and driving scalability. And especially, I think increasingly now, it's how to incorporate AI into that whole process.

(Alex at 00:10:43) But then I think the third one is also, and this is like I hear this all the time, it's about how do we hire talent. You know, I think recruitment is one of the biggest challenges with the modern CTO. You know, it's how do you build an organization, but then also scale it with the company per the needs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:05) I would say starting your own business is the quickest way to figure that out because you either go broke or you make it happen. You either go broke or you make it happen. And, honestly, I believe that, so just a quick background on me. The first three projects that I did and sold off, I was simply the technical cofounder, and so I didn't understand what was happening. My other cofounder was doing the sales and all of that type of business, and they would just bring me in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:35) You know, here's the outcome we're trying to achieve. Can we do this? And this is the fourth company. And I decided on this fourth company that I'd be a solo founder, and I would have to learn all of that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:46) And I've learned a lot in the past five years, enough to, you know, get a system going. So I believe that the act of doing that and putting my life savings on the line and putting it all out there forces you to just figure it out really quickly, far more than any sort of college degree or formal education.

(Alex at 00:12:08) Absolutely. Absolutely. No. Well, congratulations.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:11) Well, it's not over yet.

(Alex at 00:12:14) Yeah, you're right. It's absolutely not. But I think having that experience is absolutely critical. I saw it when I moved from consulting into a startup, and pretty much, yeah, I was like the third or the fourth employee for the company and heading up all of the sales and go-to-market side of things.

(Alex at 00:12:34) But I can tell you, you learn quick.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:37) What did you do? So you start, you join this company. You're responsible. Do you do an ABM strategy? How do you start generating sales with them?

(Alex at 00:12:46) So, I'm a big believer in understanding the product first and talking to customers and understanding what the real value proposition is of the company. So just by way of background, the company that I joined was a company called Orb Intelligence. Just to summarize what they did, they basically built a firmographic or a company database very similar to Dun and Bradstreet that not only had what we referred to as the firmographic information associated with the company, so the name, the address, like what industry they're in, how many employees, all of that kind of thing. But it also had what we later started referring to as the digital footprint of the company. So what are the web domains of the company?

(Alex at 00:13:33) What are the IP addresses of the company? What are all the cookies associated with the company? All of those sort of things. And so the first thing that I did is we actually worked with the founders to reposition ourselves a bit and reposition ourselves in line with our value proposition, which was really around this concept of a digital footprint around the company. And then, you know, after that, it was primarily about growing the existing accounts.

(Alex at 00:14:02) That was where the first revenue kind of came from, and then identifying similar accounts, and then just targeting those. And where we basically made a lot of our money was targeting companies that were actually OEMing our data within their sales and marketing solutions. So a lot of the ABM vendors that were out there, a lot of the other data providers that were building derivative solutions or derivative data on top of our data, things like intent, for example, required our data. So we built out that strategy. Then the next thing that we did was we started looking at adjacent potential customers.

(Alex at 00:14:43) So this is where we started building more of a direct route to market where we were going more to, you know, enterprises and selling more there. And then also building out our partnership and our reseller channels as well. That was the strategy that we took based on, you know, ultimately where we felt we could win most easily.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:03) On your first line of business, targeting, you know, growing existing accounts and then identifying similar accounts, did those two lines get you cash flow positive?

(Alex at 00:15:13) Absolutely. So we were actually pretty much cash flow positive from the beginning. It was a bootstrap startup. So we, you know, I always credit the founder with having a very strong vision about running a business first and foremost and then running a startup. I think, you know, especially over the last few years, we've seen a lot of startups get addicted to free cash flow and going out and focusing more on, I think, raising money rather than running a business, so to speak.

(Alex at 00:15:43) So we were actually cash flow positive pretty much from the beginning, but it was just a hugely profitable business. Data in general is a hugely profitable business to be in because every new sale is pretty much, especially if you're a data generator, is pretty much 100% gross margin. And there's very few businesses or industries that are out there that have this, you know, pharmaceutical industry is I think the other example here. But to have that kind of a business, I think, gives you a huge advantage in terms of being cash flow positive.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:17) So step one was making sure that you're staying cash flow positive. Once you've got that, then it's about opening up new lines of business.

(Alex at 00:16:26) Yeah. Exactly. And really, growing I think first starting off with existing accounts and seeing what other products, what are the data products you can sell to your existing accounts, and then looking at new accounts and trying to break into those. It's always harder to go into new accounts, so focusing on your existing accounts just in general. You know, I think as a strategy is always the first port of call.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:51) So it's funny that we're talking about this. I'll be transparent with you.

(Alex at 00:16:55) Go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:55) We are trying to figure out how to do this right now. So we are trying to figure out when we started building podcasts for other companies, that's the future of the business because sponsorships are typically a one-time thing. It's very transactional. Whereas building podcasts, we're actually joining their team, and there's several team members here working with them, and it's this very involved thing, as you can imagine.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:21) And we've done a good job of building that up. How do we go to them and sell them more stuff? Like, what would that other stuff be? The main value prop for background that I see is that they want thought leadership, so they want a podcast, and it's more cost-effective to use us than to hire their own people in-house.

(Alex at 00:17:43) Yeah, good. Let's say, can I ask another question? So who do you sell to? Like, who's the person? Who is the buyer? Is it marketing?

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:50) The CMO.

(Alex at 00:17:51) The CMO that you usually buy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:52) Most often.

(Alex at 00:17:53) Yeah. Yep. So what I would do is I would go to them and basically just ask them what are the adjacent products that you see as being relevant that are the kind of the next logical solution that you could require? And, you know, it could be things like social media. And not only how do you get into the podcast, but then how do you promote it as well?

(Alex at 00:18:19) How do you create adjacent content? Because, ultimately, it's a content game that you're playing in, and you're basically providing the CMO with content. So it's all about how do you enable them to build adjacent pieces of content out and really just maximize what they've got with you into other areas. I think, intuitively, that would be one thing that I would look into.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:44) Yeah. I love what you said in relation to content because that's what we're finding. We're finding people saying things as far as new customers reaching out to, "Hey, we don't have a podcast in our content plan for 2023." And I'm thinking, well, you have a content plan and a budget. What is in that content plan? So that was the conversation this morning, is let's get these people on the phone and find out what type of content they're spending money on because at our core, that's what we do. We make content. And so that's another area.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:13) And then you nailed it with the promotion. So we started doing shows in November of last year. We picked up about fourteen, fifteen shows. Around summertime, some of our customers came to us in our review meetings and said, "Hey, we follow Modern CTO, and we see that you're using paid ads to promote the show and gain new listeners. Why don't you offer that to the shows that you make?" And I said, "Valid point." So we started offering that to the shows, our existing customers and the new customers as well. So that marketing part, you're exactly right. You nailed it with knowing so little about our business, but you're a wizard, my friend.

(Alex at 00:19:52) Oh, no. I think you're very generous. No. But it's, you know, I think the other thing that's also very unique about your podcast versus other podcasts is that it's a B2B podcast. And I think the world of B2B and how marketing works in a B2B world is actually very different from a B2C environment.

(Alex at 00:20:15) I think with a B2C environment, the nuances is it's a one-to-one relationship. When you start going B2B, you have actually two layers of data. You've got the account that you're targeting, and, ultimately, it's the account that holds the budget. But then you've got individuals that sit under the account that play different roles. Some are influencers. Some may be the budget holders. Some may be the key business decision maker, you know, and so on. And packaging all of that data and being able to, how can I put it, optimize your go-to-market within that call structure just makes the B2B go-to-market very different?

(Alex at 00:20:39) The other thing that's also very difficult is, I think in the B2B world, you know, I think if you looked at what's the difference, what's the main difference from an organization twenty years ago, for a B2C organization versus a B2B organization, you would say, you know what? A B2B organization was a sales organization. For a B2C organization, everything was through marketing and distribution. And as long as you nailed those two things, you were pretty much good. With B2B, the key difference is you had a sales organization, which actually I think creates an interesting dilemma for the CMO, which is what's the role of marketing in that organization. And so what you find is the role of marketing in a B2B organization is actually quite different from that of a B2C organization. You know, on one side, it's about driving brand and building the brand and driving awareness.

(Alex at 00:21:57) Then the other side of it is supporting your sales organization, driving leads, doing sales enablement. And that means that, you know, B2B CMO is different, and it also means that what a B2B CMO needs is also different, be it from the, you know, the services or even the data that they require. Obviously, Dun and Bradstreet is all about the data side of the equation. But you've got to think about that in the context of, I think, the bigger picture of what the CMO or the CMO organization is looking to solve.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:29) I agree. And one of the things that we were seeing was that to your point of driving leads with their podcast, we know how to do this, right? Because we've been doing our show for so long, and there's something that's not so clear when you first look at it. A lot of people believe that, "I'll have a podcast, and my audience will be monetized. My audience will become leads." Now that's true. But after two-plus years, you just have to grow it to a point where it's going to start naturally bringing you new leads and new business. So what do you do in that first two years to justify the entire project? Well, I'd love to say we came up with this idea, but we didn't.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:08) We found one of our customers was doing it, and we started sharing with our other customers. But what they would do is they would take people that are late-stage in their sales pipeline and then have some sort of C-level executive be the host of the show, and then they would invite them on the show, not necessarily to talk about the fact that they're going to do business. In fact, that's not even mentioned in the conversation or any of the notes that we put together at all. We just put together an interesting conversation based off of who that person is, who that guest is, and what they're good at talking about. And then we put those conversations together, and what we found is that it helps them close more deals because they're just building stronger relationships with people who are already late-stage in their pipeline.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:48) We tried it the other way where we just have new people on that could potentially do business. And it kind of worked. Like, it works a little bit, but it's a really fine line between you're coming on my podcast because you're interested to hear what I have to say versus you want to sell me on something.

(Alex at 00:24:07) So what you've described there is actually the essence of ABM. Um, you know, I know some folks out there talk about flipping the funnel, and what you've described there is exactly that. So, you know, as I think about account-based marketing, the starting point is list the 100 or 200 or however many accounts that you've got that are low down in your funnel that are at an opportunity stage and then figure out how you can better engage with them. And how you engage with them, I think, can be, you know, a number of different things. You can drive ads to them through programmatic advertising, you know, the banner ads, or you can target them on social media via LinkedIn or even Google Ads or something like that.

(Alex at 00:24:56) Or you can do podcasts with, you can have personal roundtables with. It's all about driving a better experience or a more focused experience and, ultimately, just targeting your marketing dollars at those 100 or 200 or however many accounts it is that you target in order to drive them through to the end of the funnel. And what's different is that I think, traditionally, marketing, or call it lead generation marketing or demand generation marketing, has actually started at the opposite side of the funnel. So it's right at the top of the funnel, which is what's your ideal customer profile? And you come up with a list of, I don't know, 10,000 accounts. And then you peanut butter spread your marketing dollars across all of those.

(Alex at 00:25:42) And then you see what drops out at the bottom. You qualify that, and you pass it over to sales as a lead. Now I'm not saying that one is better than the other, but it's easier to attribute revenue to account-based marketing when it's done the way you described, which is basically flipping the funnel versus kind of peanut butter spreading the demand at the top of the funnel. And, you know, both require, I think, a lot of expertise in terms of driving efficiency. But you basically nailed, you know, the whole concept behind account-based marketing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:19) Our customers did, and then they told me. And I, no. But alright. So I want to dig a little deeper into what you said. So your explanation said you start with your 200 accounts and you do more of those things, whether it's ads or roundtables or podcast. In an ABM strategy, how do you get your first 100 accounts?

(Alex at 00:26:39) Yeah. That's a good question. And I think lots of companies come at it from different ways. And I always start my conversations with clients around, well, what's the objective that you're looking to drive? You know, are you looking to close more leads? Are you looking to drive more renewals? Are you looking to drive upsell or cross-sell? Are you, you know, maybe you've got some leads and you're looking to just qualify them and engage with them a bit more until they're qualified, or even you're just looking to drive awareness. I think all of those things are valid account-based activities. But depending on what your objective is, the next stage is actually to get that list of accounts that meet that criteria.

(Alex at 00:27:26) So, you know, if it is more around cross-sell, upsell, you look at your existing accounts, and you maybe do some basic propensity analysis to cross-sell, upsell to those accounts. So it could be based on how big they are versus how much money or how much revenue you're currently getting from them. It could be as simple as that. Or it could be, you know, if you're selling tech, it could be, we know that we can upsell to clients that use G Suite or that use, you know, Microsoft operating system or Outlook or that use AWS, whatever that is. That's a key criteria.

(Alex at 00:28:03) So that allows you to better refine and segment the target that you're targeting in that list of customers. And then you come up with that list of customers. On the flip side, it could be your sales leaders have built out a plan to get to, you know, to maybe drive revenue and increase revenue by 20% or something like that. For them to get that revenue, they've identified 20 or 100 accounts that they need to sell to, and so that becomes your list. And that's really driven from your CRM system, from your, you know, your Salesforce or your Microsoft Dynamics list of opportunities.

(Alex at 00:28:41) And that's the starting point. So depending on what your objective is, that defines, kind of, where you source the data, and then you refine that data and you build out more nuanced segments to ultimately identify the highest propensity or even highest importance accounts. And then you can layer in other data, things like intent. You know, are they coming to our website, for example, a lot? Are they visiting pages that refer to a specific offering?

(Alex at 00:29:10) So we have a product at Dun and Bradstreet which allows you to de-anonymize your website traffic and identify the accounts, not the individuals, but the accounts that are visiting your web page. That's another way of prioritizing. So, end of the objective first, then you identify your dataset, and then you do the refinement and the segmentation. And then the final stage of that, which is the next thing, is you then need to activate that data. You then need to figure out what's the best mechanism to then engage with those customers.

(Alex at 00:29:42) Is it a podcast? Is it digital advertising? Is it LinkedIn? And then what you do is you do all of those things or just some of them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:52) Okay. I'm taking lots of notes. I don't know if you can tell. Alright. So you have the objective. I'm going to walk it through a little bit with our ongoing example for the conversation. So let's say that the objective is to get new customers. So you do a dataset, then you refine the dataset, then you activate the data. I have a pretty good idea on the activation part. I don't have, like, we're, I'll tell you what we're doing right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:20) Right now, we just looked at our best top 20% of our customers. We just put them in a spreadsheet, sorted them by money and how much we like working with them. We figured out what industries they're in and, you know, about them and what size company they are, how much revenue they have. So then I put the filters in, and it spits out a list of people that look like my other customer. Is that a valid way of getting that first list?

(Alex at 00:30:41) Yeah. You know? And I think there's lots of different ways of doing it if I'm honest, but let me kind of talk about a few other variables that you may also want to put in there. Now I think the first thing is identifying the accounts that you want to target. Bought all that source list. What we have seen some clients do is they then map those clients, and they basically do a segmentation analysis. And we have an ability to do that within our product, which is, you know, leveraging AI. So it basically says, these are your existing customers. Let's take your funnel.

(Alex at 00:31:20) So you take your funnel, for example. You've got maybe a thousand opportunities that are in your funnel for sake of argument. You then got, like, 100 customers. Okay? And you know that those 100 customers converted and became good customers. On the flip side, you also know that you lost a bunch of deals as well. Okay? So then what you do is you basically take those two different sets and you match them against the total universe of companies that you believe, you know, you should be targeting. But first, what you've done is you've basically augmented that data with other potential indicators. So, you know, it could be, like you said, how much you like working with the company, how much revenue, but also things like how big is the company, how many employees, how much revenue do they drive as a business, what industry are they in, what type of business model do they have?

(Alex at 00:32:17) Also things like, did they, are they visiting your website? For example, have they visited your website in the past? But also, potentially, what kind of technology do they run? How big is their CTO organization? These are all things that could be indicators. And then what you do is you basically say, well, for the customers that we've got, these are the criteria, these are the attributes that they have versus the, you know, the other ones. And then you take those attributes and you layer those attributes on, you know, the broader universe of accounts that you're targeting. Off the back of that, you can then say, okay. So there's maybe 10,000 customers that we need to be prospecting, for example. And then you identify the personas that are inside there.

(Alex at 00:33:02) So, you know, in your case, you're targeting the CMO organization. So then you identify, you know, it's maybe not just the CMO. It may be the CMO for smaller organizations. But for larger organizations, it may be the director of marketing or the director of social media or maybe the content. There may be different titles associated with that. So once you first got your account, then what you do is you then go to the next level and you define, you know, who are the personas that fit into that, these titles, that ideal customer profile that you've got.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:36) So ZoomInfo doesn't do this. Your product does this. What do you call it? Is it a feature inside that you've branded and it's named well? Or

(Alex at 00:33:46) Yeah, absolutely. So we've got this product called RevUp, which is, you know, I often tell, I'd say that it does four different things. You know, the first thing, or maybe five different things. The first thing that it does is it automates the ingestion of the data into a customer data platform, a CDP, from your CRM system, from your marketing automation platform, and then also your website as well.

(Alex at 00:34:14) So it understands all your website traffic as well. It brings it all into this platform, and then this is the first bit of the secret sauce. It then de-anonymizes, it basically matches all of that data together, so you just have a single view of customer, and then it enriches it with all of the data that D&B has about those customers.

(Alex at 00:34:32) So things like how big are those customers, what size they are, what industries they're in. You know, it layers in intent data as well from other partners that we have such as Bombora or G2 Crowd or TrustRadius. And then the second piece of that process is then the segmentation side of it. So you can either build out what we call kind of more static segments, which are literally you feeding in the criteria and always doing a no-code, low-code based SQL statement on your customers. So you can say, I want to target all customers that are maybe stage three or four in our CRM system and are in this specific industry and maybe, you know, have more than 10,000 employees or something like that.

(Alex at 00:35:23) Off the back of that, you can then, you know, build that segment. Or alternatively, you can do the AI model. And then the third thing is all about the activation. It's about pushing those segments through to, you know, maybe a LinkedIn campaign that you're doing, maybe a marketing automation campaign, or maybe a sales campaign that you're running and pushing it through to your Salesforce, through your Dynamics instance. And then the fourth thing that people often forget with all of this is kind of closing the loop and adding in the layer of reporting.

(Alex at 00:35:50) You know, so the product's called RevUp, and it does all of those things for all of our clients, which is, it's a really exciting product.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:59) That's brilliant. And nothing that you said sounds strange at all. I mean, for me, as you're describing this, I'm thinking to myself, wow. We have people that are doing outreach. We don't check who's opening the email necessarily.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:17) You know, I mean, the systems all kind of categorize it, and we see this data here and there, but there's no intelligence that's looking at who's opening, who's visiting, you know, how long they're visiting, where they're, how do they look in your platform, third-party data like G2 and Bombora, TrustRadius. You know, are they searching for this? Do they have an intent for it? You're basically filtering out where we need to focus our time.

(Alex at 00:36:43) Exactly. And dollars. And that's ultimately, you know, what's important. And then the final thing, like I said, doing the reporting on it.

(Alex at 00:36:51) So, you know, you've got your list of a hundred accounts. The CMO needs to be able to report and say, you know what? We pushed those thousand accounts. Of those thousand accounts, we pushed maybe 20 of them through to deals. Maybe 10 of them didn't convert, but the rest of them, we moved from a stage three and four in our CRM system to maybe a stage five and six.

(Alex at 00:37:12) And, you know, they're going to potentially be sales opportunities next quarter or whatever it may be. That reporting is absolutely critical in terms of, you know, helping the CMO with their role.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:26) That is brilliant. So you can take a thousand accounts and then run all of the strategy on them and then get a report on what happened in that batch, and then you can learn to make your next batch?

(Alex at 00:37:36) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:38) Is this a self-serve product or do I have to contact sales?

(Alex at 00:37:40) So we're working on the self-serve piece of it, but it, I mean, it's actually, it's simple once you've got it running. It's actually relatively involved doing things like putting a pixel on your website or, you know, setting up the integration with Salesforce. But once you've got all of those things all nailed, it runs great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:00) And so this specific RevUp product wouldn't be a replacement for our ZoomInfo data. It would be an engine that sits on top of it, like an intelligence that sits on top of it?

(Alex at 00:38:10) It can be. We have another product called Hoovers as well, which is more the replacement for ZoomInfo. And, you know, as you're going through that process, one of the conclusions that you may come out with is, you know what? We want to target these specific accounts. And, again, this is the key thing about account-based marketing.

(Alex at 00:38:29) The orientation is all around the accounts that you want to target, but it may be that you don't have the contacts in those organizations that you want to target. So what you would do is you would use another platform like Dun & Bradstreet's Hoovers platform to identify who those contacts are, bring them out of that platform, pull them into the CDP, and then activate them through the account-based marketing activities that you're doing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:57) So RevUp is news to me. Like, I didn't know there were tools that could do this. If RevUp is a separate product that can just plug into my existing ecosystem that can give me all of this insight, that is something I'm highly interested in because we are doing, at best it's overstating it to say we do a scotch tape and bubblegum version of this.

(Alex at 00:39:17) No, I mean, the, you know, it's interesting. You know, I think the most popular marketing tech, MarTech platform that's out there is Excel or now Google Sheets. And really, you know, I think with things like GDPR and all the privacy regulations, dealing with first-party data and actually keeping it in a spreadsheet is just a really bad practice. So automating a lot of it and keeping it in the platforms that treat all of the regulatory compliance issues correctly, I think, is absolutely critical as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:55) Yes. You definitely have to figure things out at the beginning. I mean, it is tough. You know, I'd say every couple months, I find out there's some new thing that they want you to adhere to, whether it's accessibility of websites or new types of data laws. I think I talked about this with Michael or Anthony.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:16) They were discussing, I was really interested in understanding you operate globally, which means you're in hundreds of countries, and every single day, those countries could just make a new law, and you would have to adhere to it because you're a huge target. Right? You're Dun & Bradstreet. If you're smaller, you can kind of fly under the radar, but you're DNB. So, and then he explained to me how they're separated into regions, and there's people that understand policy in each region, and then they run it up the chain and interact with it accordingly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:44) So I thought that that was actually pretty fascinating because I had never had to experience something like that before.

(Alex at 00:40:50) You know, the data industry in the B2B world is absolutely fascinating. And just in general, you know, the way companies have to think about that whole data supply chain, you know, how you bring in the data and then how you process it. And on the way, how you layer in all of the regulatory compliance issues so that ultimately coming out the end, you've got a compliant product, ultimately is absolutely key, but it is by no means trivial.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:23) Where do I sign up for RevUp, or where do I learn more about that?

(Alex at 00:41:27) So if you go onto the Dun & Bradstreet website, within our marketing solutions, within our sales and marketing solutions, there's a web page around Dun & Bradstreet's RevUp solutions. So on the Dun & Bradstreet website underneath sales and marketing solutions, there's a product in there called RevUp, which is well hidden within the website. But yeah, if you go there, we can sign up. Alternatively, I think if someone is interested, they can just reach out to me directly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:57) I'm actually really excited about this. It's so fascinating. You know, I told Josh when we were starting, I said, did you read the full profile on Alex? He's like, yeah. I was like, this is exactly what we've been talking about for our 2023 because it's the end of the year right now.

(Alex at 00:42:11) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:12) You know, we've been planning. Where are we going to spend our dollars? How are we going to allocate our time? You know, this is the first year where we're out of survival mode. You know, it only took us five years to get here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:21) Right? But we're able to actually execute a quarterly plan. Right? Which is amazing for us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:27) And so I've been talking to a lot of people from DNB and other executives, and we've been trying to figure out, we made some new hires, and we are trying to figure out, do we spend our time trying to understand ABM better or account expansion better?

(Alex at 00:42:45) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:45) And so what we've ultimately done is we didn't want to mess with our core infrastructure. So we left our entire sales team the same because they're generating revenue, and we're cash flow positive, and things are going. Then we hired someone new to run a series of experiments.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:02) We know what our response ratio to emails are as far as emails to meetings, meetings to deals, deals closed. So we're looking for a similar way, like, how do we do an ABM strategy, and then what's the ratios that we need to monitor to know if that's financially worth it? And what I think is going to happen is at first, it's going to not be, and then I'm going to talk to smart people like you and figure out how to make it so hiring that person makes me more money than just the expense that they incur.

(Alex at 00:43:31) Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I think for me, the starting point always has to be the data. It's understand who your existing customers are, and I'm going to sound like a broken record by the end of this podcast. But it's understanding who your customers are and also who the personas are within those target organizations that are interested in your product and investing more money in targeting those people.

(Alex at 00:43:56) So there's the cross-sell, upsell piece of it, but then also going into your opportunities and even website visitors. You know, I think having a de-anonymization tool on your website, which allows you to identify companies that are coming to your website that are maybe looking at a specific page on your website before they've even filled out the forms is absolutely key. Because that enables you to, A, gauge interest. We refer to it as sometimes first-party intent, but it also enables you to just reach out to people in those organizations straight away.

(Alex at 00:44:35) So for me, you know, we often talk about the crawl, walk, run process of ABM. For us, the first step is really starting off with de-anonymizing your website, enriching your data, and packaging it all together, and understanding your customers and your pipeline. Then it's really a question of then starting to think about, okay. So how do we activate that data and start off with one channel? So it could be if your size, it may be, let's just activate it through our sales organization and give those insights to our sales organization to see if we can improve the conversion rates of the existing pipeline and then maybe provide more pipeline for them as well, you know, up at the front.

(Alex at 00:45:19) And then slowly as you've got that nailed, you start scaling to different other engagement platforms. So it may be LinkedIn. So then you start layering in those accounts that you're targeting onto LinkedIn or social media activation. And then you just slowly build up the sophistication of what it is that you're looking to drive. And then, you know, the other side of it is you maybe have different sales motions as well.

(Alex at 00:45:46) So it may be, you know, your initial drive is around more podcasts and building podcasts and recording podcasts on behalf of your clients. But it may be that you're then looking at diversifying and moving into other adjacent solutions, be it reselling your data, be it reselling, you know, content strategy, for example. That may be a second sales motion that you want to, you know, basically build out as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:18) Yeah. You're smart, man.

(Alex at 00:46:20) You're flattering. No. Look. I think it's interesting for me, like, my whole kind of career journey and how I've kind of gone from, you know, studying chemical engineering with French into this role. And it's very different.

(Alex at 00:46:36) But the key thing for me, when you're looking at business, is all figuring out how to drive revenue. It goes back to our initial thesis of what is a modern CTO. And at the end of the day, I think you want everyone in your organization to be pulling in the same direction, and that direction needs to be focused around how do you grow the business. You know, having someone who just knows how to do cost cutting or risk mitigation actually just isn't helpful. As soon as you start getting that growth engine working, all your challenges become a lot more easy.

(Alex at 00:47:09) All the decisions that you need to make become easier. And it's the gift that just solves so many problems. And so, you know, as you're running a business and you're smack bang in the firing line, taking all the risks, doing all of that, you know, putting your money on the line, it's not easy. But if you can solve how to do that sales and marketing side of things, that's really what just makes everything a lot easier.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:38) A hundred percent. Yeah. As far as me and my family go, just, you know, my wife, I've got three kids, two dogs. We live out on a farm outside of Nashville, Tennessee. One of the things that has alleviated the stress of a startup over the past five years is knowing the skills that I have developed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:59) Now that I know sales, because as I said for the first 17 years it's just engineering. Now that I know sales, I know how to pick up the phone and make money.

(Alex at 00:48:07) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:07) So I'll sometimes have a lot and sometimes have a little, but I have this skill that gives me this confidence that, like, I know how to do it now, and it's not so mysterious, and that allows me to take different risks. It allows me to understand, you know, there's no one who can tell me how to spend my time.

(Alex at 00:48:25) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:26) You know, I'm the founder and the owner itself.

(Alex at 00:48:28) Gives you so much flexibility and freedom. You know, I think the other thing that's absolutely critical with sales in general is, you know, what you're saying. It's just, it's having the confidence to pick up the phone, have those conversations, make mistakes. You know, what's the worst that can happen if someone either doesn't answer the phone or says no, and you've wasted a bit of time? But, ultimately, if they say yes, the ROI on that conversation is huge.

(Alex at 00:48:56) So, you know, I just think people often need to just get over that initial barrier of not being scared to make a mistake, have the conversation with someone that potentially has a problem and that you can solve. And if you can solve it, there's always a financial equation that's a benefit to you and a benefit to them. And that's the beauty of doing business. It's all about just driving that. If you can do that, credit to you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:28) I love it. I love it. Yeah. You've really helped me understand. You know, you're always trying to wonder as a founder or startup how to spend your time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:36) And so I always say I want to sound smart if I fail. So I spent all my time on sales, and I failed. I'm okay with that. Right? So I'm always trying to figure it out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:48) And some of your insights directly impacted the direction of our business for 2023. Obviously, no liability to you. But you get what I'm saying. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:59) Like, this is very valuable conversation.

(Alex at 00:50:02) I'm happy to chat more with you. Honestly, it's something that I'm passionate about and always excited to also understand new businesses and new problems because no one's the same. It's always when you start getting into the details that the nuances start popping out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:20) Yes. Well, I'll go put this plan to work and come back to you and say, hey, here's all the ways we screwed up and all the things we're trying, and you can sort of help me as if I'm a small child and just point me in the right direction.

(Alex at 00:50:32) We'd love to. We'd love to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:34) There's so many founders and engineers that are trying to understand the business side of things, and everyone's been saying ABM, but you've really dove deep into how it operates.

(Alex at 00:50:44) Yeah. You know, the other thing that I think is also interesting is that as we talk about marketing, especially in the B2B context, you have categories and trends that go through different hype cycles. And I think ABM as a category has certainly peaked, and now it's kind of going through—it's come through it for initial adopters now. It's in the early majority probably and kind of growing at more of a steady pace. But ultimately, I think ABM as a concept, not as a category, is something that I think is just doing good B2B marketing. I think having that account-based focus with your marketing is ultimately the essence of B2B marketing. You know, I think just from your business's perspective, what's also something that I hear a lot of people talking about is something that's referred to as product-led growth, PLG. It's kind of another—it's the next trendy TLA, a three-letter acronym that's coming into the marketing world.

(Alex at 00:51:57) But I think from my perspective, people talk about it in a very idealistic way in terms of, you know, you basically put your product out there and then you do social media and things like that, and then everyone starts adopting it, and then it just drives its own growth within the product. But I think what's absolutely critical to a PLG strategy is also content as well. And it's something that I think a lot of tech founders that are going down the path of building out a PLG or putting a lot of their mindshare into what is being referred to as kind of the PLG strategy—what they're actually missing out is actually underpinning that PLG strategy is a lot of marketing as well. And ultimately, it's content marketing. And so again, this is actually another place that you could potentially focus on and drive, I think, more impact.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:53) If you're spending all that time making an amazing product and you're not sharing how you're working hard or the problems you solved or the customers that you've helped, then nobody knows. I get it. You hear Musk out there, and "I don't spend money on advertising." Well, it's like, oh yeah, you're the richest man in the world, and everybody knows your name.

(Alex at 00:53:13) Also, he's got awareness. Also, he's got awareness through his Twitter. You know, every time he says something, the media picks up. He gets free PR. He's invested in building out his audience over time, and that's the primary marketing challenge. And he builds great products as well. But it's that awareness step that I think a lot of startups still need to, you know, make sure that they are driving, and that's absolutely critical for a PLG strategy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:43) So help me understand or help explain. Do you see startups really focused on cost per conversion and ignoring awareness?

(Alex at 00:53:56) So I think it depends on the startup and what they're focused on and how and where they are in their growth phase. So if they are maybe a new B2B solution startup, I think the focus is really on just having a sales organization and focusing on the marketing, especially if you're focusing on the enterprise customer, probably just isn't where your focus is. But if you are putting your money more on, let's say, a PLG strategy, then absolutely, you need to be investing more on content marketing and driving awareness because I think that's the pipe that starts driving ultimately the top of the funnel. And then you need to just constantly look at what are the conversion rates, why are people converting, why are they not converting, and then just optimizing that funnel. That process is really critical.

(Alex at 00:55:01) So it kind of depends on what type of a product that you're selling in terms of where your initial focus is and also where you are in terms of your growth cycle of your startup. If you are a very mature startup and maybe you're targeting SMB organizations, then you probably need to invest more in demand generation and driving leads and maybe more of an ABM strategy as well, for example. But your point is, do companies, do startups invest enough in marketing? I think it really depends on the startup and where they are on their journey and what's the best ROI that they can drive for driving demand. I think if you, when you get to the point where you need to start being scalable, you absolutely need to invest in the marketing side of things.

(Alex at 00:55:50) But if you're just kind of trying to get cash flow positive, close a few deals at the beginning, and just prove that product-market fit, that's probably not the time to invest in marketing. So it really depends. There's no one-size-fits-all answer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:05) Yeah. I fully agree. We got our first six shows just by calling up past customers and saying, hey, we've heard that other people are interested in making shows. We didn't even have a website. It actually became such a problem because they started to refer their friends, and it would just go to Modern CTO, and they're like, they don't make podcasts. This is a tech leadership podcast. And then we had to come up with a distinctive, you know, URL and brand that. I've never done it like that before, but yeah, it works.

(Alex at 00:56:29) That's cool. Yeah. That's awesome. You know, everyone's got a slightly different way of doing it. But, you know, for me, it's all about sales. It's all about kind of getting in front of the customers, solving their problems. And if you solve the problems, then you'll start scaling. And then how do you scale? You know, a key part of that is the tech side of things. But then the other piece of it is your go-to-market. Be it your sales organization, you know, you can maybe expand into inside sales, e-commerce, but then also investing in the marketing side of it in parallel based on your go-to-market is absolutely key.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:04) All right. I want to wrap up. This is amazing. I like to wrap up with a leadership question. Is that okay?

(Alex at 00:57:09) Yeah. Sure. Go for it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:11) Okay. What is the best piece of leadership advice that you ever received and then put into action and it stuck with you?

(Alex at 00:57:19) That's a really good question. This isn't necessarily a leadership answer, but it's more of a career answer. It's actually more about being opportunity-focused. And so keeping your eyes open to opportunities and trying to understand how you can help your friends, colleagues, you know, anyone solve those problems and all those opportunities. And that just has a natural halo effect in terms of progressing your career, making you better to work with, a better mentor, a better leader, a better manager, but also, I think, working with your bosses as well and helping them out.

(Alex at 00:58:07) So for me, it's all about being opportunity-focused. That's something that I think has stuck with me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:14) And then how do you thread the needle between opportunity-focused and getting distracted by a new shiny object, new shiny opportunity?

(Alex at 00:58:25) Again, really good question. I think it really depends, but it's all about prioritization. And it's all about, you know, ultimately figuring out what the best distribution of opportunities is for you to work on at that one point in time. So figuring out what's important to you. You know, it could be, you know, let's say if you're working in a startup, it could be actually the first thing that you need to get out the door is your product. So it's kind of like, you know, just focus on how do you drive that? But, you know, certainly, if you are a leader, you're managing a team, and you're looking to grow a business, keeping your eyes open and, you know, taking the blinkers off and just making sure that you're out there listening for opportunities all the time, I think, is absolutely critical. Then selecting which ones you focus on, I think that's the next skill down the line.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:22) I love it. That's a tough question because it's definitely more of an art than it is a science.

(Alex at 00:59:25) 100%. 100%.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:27) We did it. Alex, we made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Alex at 00:59:31) Fantastic. Thank you very much, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:33) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email: [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.