33: The Nearbound ABM Play You Can Run Today - Blake Wiliams

Welcome back to Near Bound Marketing. I'm Logan Lyles with teamwork.com. I'm joined today by Blake Williams. He's the c e o of Amp Factor. Blake, welcome to the show, man.

Hey Logan. Thanks for having me on.

Absolutely. Man. This conversation has been a long time coming and it is really timely too. As we talk about what near bound marketing is, I think people are starting to understand that. But the questions now are, are around what does that mean? How do we execute it? And we're gonna get into some of those tactics. But first I've gotta ask you about this fairly hot take I've seen from you on LinkedIn, uh, that you've been starting this drumbeat of, there's actually this myth, Around, quote unquote, creating demand. What do you mean by the myth of creating demand?

right. Uh, it's a good question and yeah, it's kind of a hot take, you know, given that the, the pervasive, uh, narrative is that, uh, you have to go out and create demand so you can capture it and then you can convert it, and then you can care for it. Right. Um, in reality, and it might just be my Economics background or data science. But when I start to observe, what we, we see empirically happen is that there is some sort of pain or desire that constantly exists, uh, in the state of just being this homeostasis state of all products and all services. That are already out there where our customer base or whatever our population is, they have a need that's basically going unmet with the current solution, or they have expectations and there's a distance between the current solution and those expectations. New solutions may bring you closer to those expectations they may solve for or take you beyond it, depending on how innovative you are when you solve for the product. But we don't actually create demand. It's always there. It's latent, it's un unmet expectations. And uh, We can, we can harvest it. And that's probably about the best that we can do, um, as marketers.

So would you say what people are, uh, delineating between capturing demand and creating demand? Is it more about kind of unearthing and making, making people aware, Of that gap and giving some language to it, that sort of stuff. And it sounds like that's similar, but I think your main issue is that we're not actually creating it, but we're taking it from maybe unknown or as you said, latent to to more known. Is that fair to say?

It is, it is. Uh, the problem is that, so you're hitting on two key subjects there. One, you're not alle just'cause we changed. The way that we talk about it does not alleviate you from the responsibility of creating something innovative or different for the customer. It also doesn't alleviate you or unburden you with the, the job of Achieving distribution, right? In the right channels. You still have to do those two things no matter what, uh, to make it known, right, and to make it accessible, make it easy to understand all those things. But the problem is vastly different. If you say to a marketer, Hey, go create demand for this. It's super intangible. It's very vague. What do you even mean? Whereas if I say like, when we talk about near bound and how do we leverage what we do there, um, we're trying to sell It's all deep and widen to each other's customer populations, right? Usually we bring that all the way down to a single persona within a vertical so that we can tell our better together story in a way that resonates on a single landing page. And there's no amount of ambiguity, right? I'm already using half your solution, say it's HubSpot, and the other half might be quota path, and I'm trying to figure out how to optimize and pay my sellers on time. Right. You hit me with that ad. I already have unmet demand or expectations because I have a problem. I'm trying to pay my sellers faster, better, smarter, all those things. You hit me with that better together story. You've now harvested that demand. You've solved. You've solved the problem. You didn't create anything because you created that inter, that integration. There was no demand that you created. Right? So that's kind of the, the, the logic there.

Yeah. So tell me a little bit more about how this harvesting of demand, and as you said, closing the gap between either the, the unmet expectations and the Potential solution. It may be that there's a solution already out there, or it may be that you, you are in the process of innovating to create that solution. What, what does all this mean for a near bound marketing approach? Why, why does, why is near bound important? If this is actually the situation when we talk about, uh, creating and capturing demand.

Right. Um, I, it's a, it's a, it's a perfect scenario and this is kind of why we run a b m solely in, uh, between partners on better together stories is because, um, a B M is really, really effective at doing acceleration. I. Uh, movements, um, mid funnel to lower funnel, um, beyond awareness and engagement for cold, cold outbound. Um, if we think about what happens between two partners, again, that same scenario where I've already got HubSpot and I'm looking for a solution to pay, uh, my sellers better or faster, pay out those commissions. Um, when we think about all the things that are possible in the realm of how do I go create demand, Your mind could go everywhere with that. When we think about, okay, this customer population that my partner has, there's 50 accounts in there. There's, you know, 50 general people who fit that persona, who have an unmet need that's way easier to solve for. The realm of things that you're gonna come up with are gonna be way tighter, way more focused, and way more, probably way more effective than trying to go create demand out in this cloud of an audience that Hypothetically exists, right? So that's what starts to change, is the, the, the tactics and the behavior, the way you think, the way you orchestrate data and the way you bring in other functional elements becomes very, very different.

Yeah, so let's dive in there. What have been some of the plays that either you guys at Amp Factor or some of the folks in your network or some of your customers, as you're talking to marketers, what are some of these plays where they're recognizing, okay, if we're going to take a near bound marketing approach, rather than just going out to the market more broadly, let's specifically focus on a list of Of target accounts, which makes sense, right? Because a lot of, uh, partnerships, a lot of the near bound movement has been focused on that co-selling motion. So let's not go from co-selling to marketing far and wide. Right. Let's just go one layer from, I don't care what anybody says, sales and marketing are different, but let's just go to the, that those A B M plays. What are some of those tactics? What are some of those plays that you see folks running that are effective given what we're talking about?

Yeah. I love that you said that. Uh, I made a, a post, probably another hot take that, you know, focusing on co-selling is like, uh, focusing on touchdowns and instead of focusing on how to train like a winner, um,.Eat right train, right practice, right Think, you know, drill on the right things and constantly drive towards perfection in that practice over the long term. That to me is good marketing and good marketing ends up Driving that co-sell flywheel all day long. That's how you sustainably live off that thing and feed those sellers. And that's your true, uh, like two partner play is to do really, really, really focused and strategic disciplined marketing. Um, some of the tactics that we see play, one that I often recommend is like if you're, if this is your first time out there as a marketer and you're trying to figure out, I've got this near bound data, let's, that's kind of nebulous too. Let's just say we have 50 overlapping accounts. What we want to do is ask our partner to go out and ask a couple questions that will, you know, unveil some first party intent, right? So in the HubSpot situation, quota path could ask HubSpot to go to the top 50 customers that they want to make an introduction to or. Wanna see if they can do an intro too, and just ask them either in a survey or some way, pay'em for, you know, uh, earbuds or whatever it might be. Find a way to extract the information of, are you struggling with paying your sellers on time? Um, or do you do it too slow? Would you rather do it faster? Any of those things, that's first party intent. Way better than anything you're gonna get from Bambora. I love them. It takes first party, second party, third party data all the time. But if you can take that And go manufacture first party intent. It becomes second party intent when you share it with your partners, and then the list of 50 is now down to 12. Those 12, you can take that budget that you were gonna use on all 50 and just fold it in on creating something very, very unique for those 12. And maybe it's only 12. 12 people, right? We talk about account 12 accounts. It's really just 12 people. So why don't we get you as a marketer to talk to the marketer at that. That other company and just record 12 videos. Let's stretch it out over a six week period. You do two videos, uh, a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays as a C M O or a VP of Demand Gen. And then when we get that video, that's what we orchestrate and mobilize in our outbound, right? It's that personal message from me. To Logan to say, Hey, look, you know, I'd love to invite you to come consider this with us. If nothing else, it would just be a good buying experience. Um, you can stop sorting through, you know, all the mess. But we feel like if you're, if you're shooting for this, we've got the best solution for it. Um, It's a way better deal. Plus, if they're strategic accounts, the A O V should make sense if they made it into that batch anyway. Now, your r o i on mobilizing that cross-functional execution is significantly higher, and that's true. A B M had nothing to do with display ads. It was just about intention. It was about consideration and trying to actually, you know, care for that buyer's journey.

Oh, I love so much about what you just said there. I mean, super tactical, uh, extracting that first party intent, like you said, the, the demand is there. It might not be known. It's about, you know, harvesting it, uh, before you can, you can capture it. Um, it's about. Unearthing it and making it visible. So it's a great way to do that. For a couple clarifying questions, Blake,'cause I think this is something that our listeners could take and, and run with tomorrow. Tell me a little bit about that scenario. Are you talking about, hey, there's these 50 overlapping accounts that are, let's say we're talking about our two companies, we're talking about teamwork.com and, and Amp Factor 50 accounts that are maybe our target accounts. That are already your customers, you're going to them to, to really define out of that. Where is the intent within those, and then we're doing some content together. And then what are your thoughts on maybe the structure of those videos, how to get them, it sounds like I'm on the right path with who the target overlap is that we're talking about. Talk to me a little bit more about the execution there.

Yeah. Yeah. If you, uh, so I, I love peer-to-peer because it just doesn't get done enough. Um, it's like principle led sales. That's how a lot of, uh, startups get off the ground to 10 million even. So why not use it on a routine practice? Right? And you can do that from multiple C-suites instead of just burdening one. But the, the, the, the motion, the tactical motion there is that the, uh, the partnership leader ends up You know, contacting the head of marketing or whoever their, their counterpart is there and they, once we have these overlaps, they say, look, let's, let's create some exclusion here. We're going to, we're gonna find out if we can create some first party intent here. If we can create some first party intent, I want you to suppress these accounts from any of your, your target lists. So one, we can get attribution, but we're running this together. So, you know, we we're both gonna get credit for that. Um, and then really just Marketing somebody on the marketing team. Our job would be, I would write, our team would write the script for you. We would tell you how long it should be, about what it should sound like. We'd read it out loud with you a couple times. We'd, we'd modify it a little bit and then you just get on Zoom and record it. It doesn't have to be super high def none of that high production value stuff. People just want real people reaching out, and if you're trying to solve my problem, then I'll give you 15, 20 minutes to tell me about how you think you can do it. Um, the real, the real easy way to orchestrate that is on behalf of, if you're gonna do it in SalesLoft or something like that, you want to take that, take that email or put it in outreach as a snippet, upload it, find the right sdr r to do that, or, uh, again, do it on behalf of, you could do it all. You could also do it in follows on behalf of. So any of that on behalf of play is the easiest way to, Set that C-suite person up. So they give you the content. You can go over refine it, you can strap an intro and outro to it if you want to. Um, but give them, give'em a way to, to have a c t A on it. The c t a could either be just to reply back or it could be with an admin CC'd there, you know, Jenny's here to start, to start to schedule with you if you can do this in the next two weeks or whatever that might be. So tactically that's how you would, you could, you could orchestrate that if you wanted to go a little wider. Um, and I'll, I'll shorten the answer here. You could do some dimensional mailing, right? And so if you have 10 accounts or 12 accounts, let's use 10. You grab three personas at each company, and in that video you tee the marketing person up to say, Hey, Logan, Blake and Isaac, uh, I'd love, you know, we love what you guys are doing. We, we found out that you guys might be searching for a solution here, and we'd love to invite you in. So you could send three different dimensional mailers, a 10 by 10 perforated seal to each of the C-suite and super tactical, but it stands out and nobody else, or not very many folks are, are doing that to try to solve a problem. Right? So that's another tactical way to start it.

Yeah, man. I love that Ev. Anyone who follows any of my content knows, I'm a big believer in video. I love what you were saying there. If you're gonna incorporate someone from the C-suite, from one side, or both sides of the partnership before you execute this a b M play, make it super easy for them to just record the content. Do it on Zoom. You could do it on Riverside fm, the platform that we use to record this podcast, if you already have that. For other content that you're doing could help you get just a little bit higher quality, but it's super easy. Um, and you could just join in with the, the C-Suite member and give'em a little coaching. They have that outline, something like that. As far as the, the c t A on some of those campaigns, Blake, what are you seeing as more effective or maybe something that, that you guys have tried? Is it, um, are you bringing in those C-Suite members for an executive level conversation or is it still to a demo? Or is it Kind of a two step process. What are you guys testing with or what are you seeing work or not work? Really

Yeah, yeah. We've seen like leave the, leave the setup time kind of stuff. The basic, everything that you see on every other landing page alone and use a c t a that is like something in the direction that they wanna do. Like we've, we've put skip the s d r get to our value team, right? Um, and or talk to our solutions team. Um, we've used, you know, uh, start paying your sellers faster. You know, something that's directly tied to the intent that you uncovered, right? Because that's a button I want to click. I do want to click a button that solves my pain point, right? Um, rather than one that's set up a time that serves you, not, not me. So I would say stay focused on what the customer actually wants to achieve and they'll be closer or more likely to click that C t a.

I love it, man. Let's talk a little bit about, um, how you You think about measuring results with, uh, this sort of play, uh, obviously with marketing and especially near bound marketing attribution is fuzzy, it's tough. Um, with this sort of very targeted play, it gets a little bit easier, but what are maybe some of the dos and don'ts operationally that you would recommend to folks to assess at the end of this sort of a b m campaign in a near bound motion to tell what's working, what's not? Do we want to do more of this or not?

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would say, uh, key things that we wanna look out for is one, uh, was there a clear, clear line to attribution? Meaning did we get suppression from the sales team? We were able to get them to not go outbound to them. Uh, same thing with the marketing team. Um, were we obviously able to come back with those meetings? Uh, were we able to generate a meeting without Aggressively begging for or just running, uh, display ads or something like that. So if, if those two are, yes, um, what was the quality of our first party intent or second party intent that we were able to get? Um, could we have involved, if it's a big enough deal, could we have involved a third partner to try to get multi-threaded into three different personas that we perceived to be in the buying group? There's no reason it has to be one-to-one. Right. You can easily have two and orchestrate that movement into those same, same accounts. The the beauty that that actually happens, what happens is you end up with three different Venn diagrams, right? Um, and it makes your population smaller, which, you know, aim small, Ms. Small, you can be very, very intentional. You can be very, very creative and stand out with those plays, um, which gives you a higher hit rate. So, Two, obviously you wanna make sure that you, if there is intent, what, what happened in terms of a, you know, sales cycle length? Um, what was the close one ratio out of all the accounts that were, you know, opportunities were created in? And then what's the, what was the deal size? Did adding a partner or two partners in, take your your deal size up? Did it take your annual, your, your a o V up? Uh, those would be the things I would look for.

I love it. Now, I, we kind of went from, you know, what's the situation, what do we do about it, and then how do we measure it? Uh, we talked a little bit about the tactics of running the, the marketing side. Anything different, Blake, in this sort of play that you would recommend, uh, to the, the marketing teams on how they're maybe gonna give their salespeople some coaching on how to handle, uh, these meetings any differently versus, you know, a typical one that gets booked on their calendar, stuff like that.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, so generally if you're gonna run the type of play that I just talked about, which is peer-to-peer, where we're trying to get, uh, a higher level person, not an individual contributor down, uh, for a, for a meeting. Um, the last thing, the Just like you would want if you were an executive in a company, you would not wanna be drugged through three different levels of qualification after a personal invite. It's like you kind of wasted your clout on, on this whole process. So make sure you treat it with, uh, not kids gloves, but create a different process for it. Create one that you would want to be in. Just like when you welcome somebody else into your house, how do you want that to look, feel? How do you want, how do you want them to think, feel, or do, um, when, when they go through that process? Um, But what I would say between marketers right now is that, you know, it's okay to not know your rules or expectations, um, in how you're supposed to participate in this whole, uh, orchestration. It's okay.'cause if you, you don't have a clear process. There's no rev ops that underlie this probably at your company today. So that means that you don't really know how you're gonna measure it. And it's okay to be like, Hey, partnership leader, I'd help me figure this out. What I know that there's value here. I can probably solve for some of my KPIs here. I don't know how, I don't wanna swing in the wind. So count on your partnership leader to set your expectations and roles so that you can get really, really crystal clear. We want you thinking from a first order perspective about how you can orchestrate all the resources and, and, and allocations and time and budget that you can have, uh, around these things for your own benefit. So I would say get educated first, or asked to.

Yeah. Yeah. Ask for that help and, and just admit where you're at.'cause I think we all realize it, right? That we understand the changes in the buyer behavior that we need to optimize the buyer journey as you were just talking about there. But we need to start it from a place of trust, which is what Near Bound is all about. But at the same time, we're still trying to Figure out the how, right? The, the folks at Reveal and near bound.com, we've, they've released the, um, the near bound sales blueprint. Some of that, how and tactics is starting to be documented, starting to be circulated. You and I are both gonna be speaking at the, the Near Bound Summit, checkout that in the description if you wanna get even more how to and tactical tips. But at the same time, we're still Early in this new era, and we're trying to figure things out. So lean on your sales counterparts, lean on your partnership counterparts, um, and figure it out together. Blake from here. Um, one other thing that was coming to mind for me, this specific play, are there certain criteria, uh, obviously there are other plays that you could run, but this one that we're talking about, peer-to-peer leveraging some video, very targeted A B M. Would you say there are certain scenarios where this works better than others? Certain a cvs, certain maturity of the partnership. What are some of those things you would call out here on the folks that would really be primed to take what we're talking about today and go execute it tomorrow?

Yeah, so if I describe the perfect scenario for who's who, this is primed for, I like this play as one of the earlier plays in a partnership where you've kind of felt each other out, you're already aligned on What the, how each other make money and how you can bring value to each other. And this is kind of the one of the first orchestrations in which you can bring sales onboard and marketing onboard in a very, very small, confined way that's not very ambiguous for both sides because, uh, what I find to be the, the. The biggest, the most challenging thing in orchestration is that we've got sales leaders on both sides, customer success on both sides, and marketers on both sides. No one knows their roles or expectations. So if we create a very, very tight shot group that allows us all to kind of learn together, um, and we create wins, we create wins for marketing, we create wins for sales. So some of that is that we've already got a partnership. We're already contracted. We maybe we, maybe we've done a couple events or a conference together or something like that, and now we're trying to get to activation. Right. We've already got a couple landing pages. Um, if. The nature of those accounts, they definitely need to be, uh, on the higher end of whatever your A O V is so that you know, rich people have friends. I always say that it's, uh, if you want to create an iterative loop of value that builds on itself, where you continuously get more budget to go after these accounts, um, either from marketing or from the C-suite, wherever it's gonna come from, it's going to come from results. And so if you aim small, Ms. Small, start with accounts that If you're just 10 to 20% successful, you're still gonna meet your three to one L t V to CAC ratio here. Uh, if you can do that, then that's something finance can fund all day long, right? They'll, they'll keep doing that and that's a motion that you do with one partner and then you can do it with 10 partners before you start to go further with it, uh, and build out the scalable model. But

And to your point, right, solve rich people problems. And rich people have rich, rich people, friends, right? Um, you can incorporate that in that next round, right? Of, okay, now that C-Suite video also has, Hey, we see that you also know so-and-so over at this account we actually just solved for them. And so you even have more direct, uh, close what I would call near bound social proof there, right? Because it is from As Isaac always says, one of those nodes of trust That's closer to them. It's not just kind of lookalike social proof, it's actually lookalike social proof from someone who they know. Right. And that fits into exactly what we've been talking about here on this show. The transition from the how economy to the WHO economy. It's not about just this one thing that you can do. It snowballs on itself. Right.

That's it. I mean, the beautiful thing about what you just said is that if you did start small, you have those 10, 12 individual videos. You should, you know, 80, 82% of customers will give you a referral. 3% of people ask, ask every single one of those accounts if they close for, for, some type of video, and stitch all six of those things together. And that's what you use programmatically to, to send out to that longer list of lower value accounts to say, Hey, look, these guys just solved for this problem. Now we packaged it up. We can scale it, we can push it out on LinkedIn in different channels. And uh, that dog haunts all day long.

Absolutely man. Alright, well as we round out the conversation today, Blake, I always like to ask this, this question. You did a great job of explaining you know, why this is important, how to execute a very Specific play here. How do you think a marketing leader could listen to this? They could walk away and say what Logan and Blake were just talking about, I need to go and get budget for, or try to execute this. How could they try to follow all the advice that you've shared today and still get it wrong? Where, what are some of the pitfalls? What are some of the potholes that they might not be aware of that you want to call out for them so that hopefully they kind of scoot right around those to some of the results we're talking about.

Yeah. Um, I think one of the biggest for, for partnerships to monetize a lot of things has have to come together from a relationship standpoint. The moon and stars and sun all have to be aligned.

A few planets in there, maybe Pluto as well.

Right, right. Uh, one of the things, if I'm a marketing leader, the one thing I'm looking for in that partnership that I want to go and try to activate and monetize on is how I'm gonna ask that partnership leader. How many calories do you feel like you have to burn to manage this relationship and get things done? Because what I want is something that we can execute on. Let's lay out a plan and have somebody who's willing to meet me. And carry the, you know, the laboring ore with me. So we're rowing together instead of us trying to drag the partner along. It's very hard to get to results that way. So if I'm a marketing leader, that's the first thing I'm looking for. You follow all of our, all of our instructions today, and if you have that scenario where the, the partner's really not carrying their weight, you're not gonna go anywhere quick and you'll get fed up and you'll lose buy-in.

Yeah, exactly. But we, what we want is what you said. Probably two, three minutes. Go hit that back button a few times. If you didn't hear it from Blake, that's something that finance will fund all day long. That is music to every marketer's ears right now. So I appreciate you walking through this. We got super tactical today in a very specific near bound motion. Um, and I would suggest everybody, if you're not Already following Blake, go follow him on LinkedIn. Blake, how else can people reach out, connect with you. Anything else you want to mention here between yourself and the team at Amp Factor of where people can take next steps as they've obviously got a ton of value from you already today?

Yeah, yeah. One of the, uh, you know, connect with me on LinkedIn, um, connect with me and partnership leaders. Um, you know, I'm a solutions partner for, or services partner for, uh, crossbeam and Reveal, uh, one big party, all, all the overlap data. Um, the other thing that we're doing is, uh, we're launching, we're in beta right now with a solution called Partner Go to Market ai. That helps produce, uh, content in its finished form. So if you're out there and you're a partnership leader doing partner marketing things and you wanna be able to do that on brand for the exact purpose that you need it to do, recruit partners tell the better together story, activate, set up those emails, those agendas, um, visit me, just message me on LinkedIn. We're gonna be releasing the beta signup and we already have a couple big companies in there testing it out and running it. So, uh, we're happy to introduce it to you and give you a demo.

Oh man. Well, you just laid that out and you didn't know. I'm going, that's what we're talking about after we end the recording right now. Uh, for folks listening to this, know that I'm moving, uh, currently@teamwork.com from our head of partnerships role into a marketing role that is focused on evangelism, near bound and co-marketing. So that really Peaked my, my ears just then. So if you haven't already connected with Blake, ask him about that. Really cool to hear about the beta. I know. I'm excited about it, so I bet you are as well. Um, as always, thank you so much for listening and we'll see you next week on Near Bound Marketing.