Sangram Vajre of Terminus on Account-Based Marketing for Manufacturers

Sangram Vajre of Terminus and FlipMyFunnel breaks down what Account-Based Marketing is, and why manufacturers need to start using it.

Danny:

All right, so let’s jump in today’s episode. I’m super excited we’ve got Sangram Vajre here from Terminus. He is the co-founder and chief evangelist. Sangram, thank you so much.

Sangram:

Excited to be here, man.

Danny:

Well, we are super excited to have you here, so for those of you in the marketing space, if you haven’t heard of Sangram Vajre, FlipMyFunnel, Terminus, any of these things, then you are, well, you’re not a subscriber at all.

Sangram:

That’s a high praise, a high bar.

Danny:

It is a high bar. And anyways, we are super excited for you to be able to come on.

Sangram:

Thanks for having me.

Danny:

Yeah, I will get into this a little bit. For those who aren’t familiar with yourself and Terminus and FlipMyFunnel, all the million things you’ve got going on, can you just tell us, inform the uninformed about what you do and all that good stuff.

Sangram:

Sure. Well, I might start a little bit earlier than that so–

Danny:

Perfect. Take us back.

Sangram:

Take us back. So went out 1979, when I was born,

Danny:

Okay.

Sangram:

Nah, I’m just kidding!

Danny:

Was it cold?

Sangram:

Yeah, we won’t go that far. But prior to starting Terminus, I ran marketing at Pardot.

Danny:

Now, I’ve never heard of that company.

Sangram:

Oh yeah, that’s history, right?

Danny:

Okay, great, yeah.

Sangram:

Then we got acquired by ExactTarget, and six months later, ExactTarget got acquired by Salesforce for $2.5 billion. So I went from this hundred-people company, itty-bitty based in Atlanta, to this giant iconic brand, Salesforce, and it was a great experience.

Danny:

Six months, 12 months?

Sangram:

Yeah, in six months, right? So it was this back-to-back, double acquisition going on and I learned a lot about scale. I learned a lot about how Marc Benioff, and how do you create a movement, how you build a category, or how you think big. Really, it wasn’t about budget, it’s like, you’ve got to think big. So I learnt a lot about that, and I remember one day, we hit almost every single record of number of leads in the company,

Danny:

Wow!

Sangram:

My head of sales came to me and said, “Sangram, that’s awesome! Your team crushed it!” I’m like, “Yeah, we did! The team is amazing!” and they’re like, “Next month, can you generate another thousand more leads?” Yeah, like so I just sank in my seat because I felt like at that moment, it was like, is marketing just a coin-operated lead machine, or do we even know who our target audience is? Do we have the leads just falling off? So all those things came through and then I met two of the co-founders of Terminus at, Eric Spett and Eric Vass, who just started Terminus three or six months ago and we just restructured, co-founded Terminus, and with this problem that we wanted to solve, which is no longer focused on leads, let’s focus on accounts, revenue, and those kind of things. Really, Terminus is an account-based platform, and that helps marketers and companies get in from the right accounts they want to sell. And FlipMyFunnel is a community that we build around this problem, not talking about the product but the problem.

Danny:

I love it. So all right, for those who aren’t familiar with account-based marketing, what’s the basic tenets? What’s this all about?

Sangram:

There’s a lot of jargon out there, and there’s a lot. I wrote the very first book on account-based marketing. If somebody wants to go, they can go to Amazon and look for it. To simply define it, it is focused B2B marketing, and sales. And I say that with a lot of respect to everybody because I feel people think, okay, yeah, that’s what we do. No, people don’t do that. Most organizations have marketing and sales in siloed, and I don’t want to talk about alignment because that’s like okay, well, you’re not brothers and sisters trying to align. You need to work as one team, otherwise your company is going to just be out of the picture.

Danny:

It’s just 100% right!

Sangram:

I’ve seen this over and over again. And marketing needs to really recognize that if you look at the sales team, the title of the sales people is what? An account executive. Not a lead executive, an account executive. So they’re always focused on accounts, so marketing needs to get behind and then say that we’re not just going to give them a lead, we’re going to give them the right leads and the accounts they care about. So really, in definition it’s really, how do I get focused on the list of accounts between marketing and sales and do everything I know to do in marketing for those accounts. Not just do a webinar a month, an e-book a month, and all those things, no, no, no. For you to do a webinar for the 10 accounts that we want to close. We will write an e-book for that industry because that industry matters to us, and it’s even though there are five, but those are million-dollar deals, we better work on those. So really look at all the different strategies that we have as marketers, and push it down and say, how can we make this available for the accounts that our sales team wants to close?

Danny:

Absolutely.

Sangram:

That’s account-based marketing.

Danny:

Yeah, that makes sense. It’s taking those personas, liking those fields, and saying, hey, instead of just kind of like, hey, we’re going to spray and pray, right?

Sangram:

Yeah.

Danny:

It’s just focused on, hey, these are the guys, these are the look and feel that we want, these types of companies, the size whatever. Here’s all the challenges, here’s all the pinpoints, and then we can work out content around that.

Sangram:

The question I feel most people miss in this whole thing, it all sounds so, “Of course, we should be working together!” When we started Terminus, I realized this one thing. There is a number called sales and marketing efficiency, and that’s what you have to report on the financial statements of a company. So when the sales number goes up, marketing typically gets more budget. When the sales number goes down, the marketing budget is cut so this is just connected to each other. So as much as ICP and target, all that sounds right, it’s the mindset for the marketing team to recognize that if we don’t make our sales team successful, we’re fired. We’re gone. It’s a mindset that it’s not like, oh no, we do brand building, and we do events and amazing stuff. Yeah, that’s all great, as long as the revenue numbers are going up. The day they go down, this doesn’t matter.

Danny:

No, you’re 100% right. We were talking about this post you put just the other day, so who knows when you’re watching this, it could be, last year. He had this great post, and I think it was hilarious, but it’s super true. It’s, well, hard truth. What was that post?

Sangram:

I was on a podcast and I just got really worked up and excited about this thing.

Danny:

You get passionate?

Sangram:

A little bit, sometimes.

Danny:

Okay, all right, all right.

Sangram:

And the conversation was like, “Well, sales need to show more respect to marketing.” And I’m a marketer, okay? So I should be like, “Yeah, yeah,” but I get upset when people say that because no! Did we know that salespeople have a quota every single month, and if they don’t meet that quota, they get fired? Do we recognize, have empathy for that? That’s why they have a sense of urgency. Marketing can go on like, “Hey, we’re going to go on an off-site for two days and come up with a campaign,” right? They don’t have the luxury to do it. So what I said in that post which seems to just go crazy was that marketers have never been punched in the face. Marketers get a budget handed to them saying that, “Here is X thousand or million dollars. Go build a brand, go drive leads for your sales team.” They don’t have to earn it. Sales have to earn their paycheck every single day. So I was like, “Guys, we’re fortunate that we have this budget. Now, let’s be super accountable and respectful to our sales team. Don’t ask why they don’t respect you. It’s not their fault, it’s your fault! You’re not doing something to earn the respect from them, who’s earning the bread every single day.” It’s something that we, as marketers, need to really recognize and empathize with.

Danny:

Yeah, no, I agree 100% with it. I think, part of it, you talked about it being one team because if you’re not connected, from a marketing standpoint, if I don’t understand sales needs, I don’t understand the voice of the customer, they’ve got their ear on the ground. They know what the real challenges are and the pains. Go into your sales team being like, what’s the number one question you get asked every single day? No matter what it is, start there. That’s going to really help them versus, okay, well, let’s do this other really cool campaign that’s going to be whatever and it looks awesome.

Sangram:

Totally, totally. One of the things that if somebody is thinking, well, how do I get started with this thing?

Danny:

Great.

Sangram:

How do I deal with account-based marketing? I’ll say find you a couple of sales reps that are always on and about and they’re always working with you, have good relationships with them. Don’t say, hey, we’re going to do account-based marketing, and we’re going to take over, no, no, no. Just start with those couple of people and say hey, you know what? Tell me who are your top 10 accounts that you’re trying to close this month or this quarter. That’s it. Tell me the top 10 accounts, do what you are doing, I’m going to give you air cover through either advertising, through direct mail, through events in those locations or maybe create content really just for those 10 accounts. Just tell me who they are, see what happens, and as soon as they see engagement and interest in it, they’re going to tell every single person on the sales team, these guys are awesome. We need everyone’s account on it. So I think people can start with account-based marketing at a much one-to-one level with the reps that they have good relationships with, and then expand it to everybody else as opposed to, I think that’s the biggest mistake I’ve seen. It sounds so good to do, people are just like, yeah, let’s just throw away leads and we’re just going to do ABM all day long. No, you can’t really change the entire organization overnight. You have to show success, you’re going to learn, you’re going to make mistakes. You’re not going to have the results you want as quickly as you want, so you need to hinge all of your bets around that. So start with the best sales reps that you have a relationship with, and then you can show success with them, and they will be the people who will be sharing with everybody else.

Danny:

Yeah, absolutely, then you scale it.

Sangram:

Right, you’re right.

Danny:

“All right, hey, well, this worked over here, and let’s go.” I love the analogy, you’ve got air cover. Think of maybe military terms or whatever and you’ve got a team. You’ve got teams that have all the different specialties on them. It’s no different. Yeah, maybe you’ve got a sales team but you’ve got sales, then you’ve got marketing there, you’ve got a product team, you’ve got all these–

Sangram:

Yeah, customer success.

Danny:

Exactly! All right. That all needs to be aligned, like hey, together, as a whole, this where we’re going to go, or a chunk of it and focus on it. I think another big challenge is that, hey, you have a budget and it’s never what you wanted. I don’t know. I haven’t talked to one marketer that’s like, “I got everything I wanted! This is amazing!” Never, never happens. So it’s a big challenge. How do you focus? Where do you put the dollars to get that? And here’s the other thing. How do you unlock more revenues or more budget? You talked about that a little before.

Sangram:

100%. I think, most marketers or most organizations put marketing in a demand gen box And the reason they put it in a demand gen box is because marketers, they just feel like that’s what they can do. Generate more leads, build more brand, newsletter, email, whatever, demand gen. But what I’ve noticed quite honestly in the last four years of just being and working on ABM as a strategy is actually the money is, no matter what, the color of money is still green, right? So if you can work on pipeline velocity, which means when a deal says, hey, I’m ready to buy from you or your competitor, right? At that time, if marketing can provide that air cover to them, sales is going to be all over it. Your CFO, CEO, everybody is already looking at those deals, so imagine as marketing is saying, “Hey, we’re going to give air cover to the accounts that are in our pipeline.” Or let’s say–

Danny:

Accelerate it, yeah.

Sangram:

Accelerate those, right? Even if you accelerate by a month, or a week, that’s like millions at the end of the day. And the second strategy is customer marketing. A lot of companies have more than one product to sell. You already know the customer, you already have built trust, they already have a relationship there, you already understand their pinpoints, now, let’s just start doing more upsell and cross-sell. I like to call it up-serving them because you know so much more about them. That’s ABM. So ABM helps marketers to really go beyond the demand generation box and get into more of the business outcomes. And again, that helps, from a career perspective, I think that’s just good.

Danny:

Absolutely! No, it makes a lot of sense. How do I put this? It’s more of having that real business discussion.

Sangram:

Yes.

Danny:

Or providing real value of, look, brand is super important. It’s very important. Got to have it, right? But at the end of the day, these are businesses and its all about the P and L. What we’re doing, we have to show what we’re getting out of that.

Sangram:

Totally.

Danny:

And then it–

Sangram:

Yeah. I interviewed somebody on FlipMyFunnel podcast, Tim Kopp, who was the CMO of ExactTarget when they went public and then got acquired by Salesforce. And Tim shared something that I’ll never forget. He said that, “Look, brand drives demand.” 100%. If you have great branding, you think about Salesforce, you think about all these big companies that have great brand, but don’t confuse that with the fact that if you’re starting off and you have no credibility internally, you can’t build a brand.

Danny:

Yeah, that’s true.

Sangram:

You need to build the basic blocking and tackling around things, and the ABM allows you to do that and once you get to a point that you actually are able to create trust with your sales counterparts, then you start building brand because that’s when you can charge premium for it. You can get and do these bigger deals and things like that. So that is to your point, I love that you brought that up. It’s super important. You can’t do that without having sales marketing working as one team as you said.

Danny:

Yeah, no, exactly. 100%. All right, I’ve got a quick question for you. So in previous interviews we had Shonodeep Modak. He’s the chief marketing officer for North America for Schneider Electric. He was in the previous episode, or one of the previous episodes. Not exactly sure when these are going to release so probably, right.

Sangram:

Yeah, its awesome. You’re like, I’m just talking to people, I don’t know when they’re going to go live.

Danny:

I don’t know.

Sangram:

You’re just–

Danny:

Yeah, exactly. We were talking about one of the top challenges for chief marketing officers specifically in the industrial manufacturing space. What are you seeing?

Sangram:

Oh, the top challenges for CMOs, I feel it really goes back to just trust. When I think, the organizations have more budget, the CMOs have more budget than they ever dreamt of, right?

Danny:

Yeah.

Sangram:

That’s just the reality of it. At the same time, if you look at Scott Brinker’s technology landscape, there are more technology tools out there than ever before.

Danny:

Ooh, squirrel!

Sangram:

Yeah! 8,000 of them, right?

Danny:

Right, yeah.

Sangram:

And then on top of all that, marketing is a specific organization within all different business units where it’s very specialized. Every single person for the most part is very specialized. If you’re a CTO you say, “Oh, I like that engineering, that skillset, hire 10 of them.” Or customer success: “Oh, I love the way this person, let’s just hire more of the people from the same industry.” You can’t do that in marketing. Graphics person, a content person, a product marketing person, a videographer. These skill sets are very, very siloed, so it’s different and difficult to scale that as a business unit.

So the biggest thing a marketing organization or CMO needs to do is build trust and build trust with not only the sales team, but also the product team, and make sure that that’s happening. Your CEO, there’s always something going on that everybody points to the CMO to go fix. “Hey, a brand is not good enough, CMO, fix it.” “Oh, our sales numbers are down. CMO, where are the leads?” “Oh, people don’t know what a rebound positioning is. Maybe we need to go and do something else.” “CMO, what’s going on with the press releases?” So you are under fire all the time on all different things so the most, the best thing you can do is build trust and I think the best way to build trust is to over communicate on here are the things we’re doing, but more importantly, here are the things we’re not doing. And I think I have learned that being at Pardot, Salesforce, Terminus, all these things. By sharing openly, transparently what am I doing and what I’m not doing because of these reasons is so important. It’s so important.

Danny:

Yeah, makes a lot of sense. No, that’s great. So to kind of ping pong a little bit, and you kind of talked about a little bit before how to get started with ABM? With manufacturing, a lot of challenges they have is that, well, a couple of different things. A real big thing is there’s a lot of fear about kind of making shifts, getting into digitals, the whole I don’t know. And then the other piece is really, sometimes you have multiple audiences. So for example, a lot of these guys are selling through channel partners or distributors or something, so you’re not necessarily selling directly to the end user. We’ve got to sell the channel partner on working with us, and then we’ve got to sell the end user, but through or over or all that stuff. Bearing that in mind, what are some quick steps in terms of being able to roll this out?

Sangram:

I hear that all the time, man. We were talking to our common friend Vance, he’s in healthcare, so I feel like similar challenges they have over there too. I think for the most part, the sales team in your organization is already doing account-based because that’s the title that they know, these are my big deals, and if your organization has big deals, a complex sales cycle, multiple decision makers, ABM is something that’s already happening. You want it or not, you like it or not, it doesn’t really matter, that’s already happening in your organization. As a marketing team, you’re probably just figuring out, okay, how do I get myself into this process so I can help them. But one of the easiest things I feel most organizations can do, especially in the manufacturing world is to identify your total addressable market, my top five, 10, 50 accounts, and get alignment with the entire organization that if you win these top 50 accounts, would we have a better brand? Would we have more revenue? Would we have more ability to do whatever we want to do?

Danny:

What would that look like, yeah.

Sangram:

What would that look like? You’ll be surprised how few organizations know what their total investment market looks like. Everyone feels like, yeah, the whole world is my customer. No, you’re not selling a Nike shoe, you’re selling a very specific, high-value, mega deal size that are probably 100, 200, 300, 400 companies but that’s it. You’ll be surprised when you ask your internal organization. That’s a challenge for everybody is that go and find out what your total addressable market really looks like and once you know that, figure out who you want to go after.

Danny:

I see.

Sangram:

Tier them up, tier one, tier two, tier three, who you want to go after. I think all those strategies come out later, but, what are you going after, really? That’s a big part.

Danny:

That makes sense. Well, listen, I really appreciate this. This has been awesome. I feel like we can probably go for hours.

Sangram:

Yeah! We can just talk about this forever.

Danny:

As we’re kind of wrapping up, is there anything else you’d like to leave with our audience? Any little tips or anything that’s on your heart?

Sangram:

Yeah, on my heart like the punch-in-the-face thing.

Danny:

The punch-in-the-face thing, right.

Sangram:

I feel that marketing is a discipline where you get to change the emotions of people, right? So we have been given this responsibility to do that and really matters how seriously we take that. As much as we talked about accounts and leads, and all these different things, it’s all going to fall flat if you don’t have a good story to tell. So I think the number one thing that I pride ourselves on, or what we’ve tried to do at Terminus and FlipMyFunnel, and all those things and the companies that I look up to, if you’d really think about it, they’re amazing storytellers. So my challenge to everybody is that, what’s your story? Come up with a story that makes sense to you, that makes sense to your customers and tell that story in a way that’s going to make them emotionally charged up for you. Otherwise, you’ll always be in the feature function war and all going to be in the product war as opposed to be someone who’s building a category, leading a movement, or at least focus on the problems of your customer but you can’t do that if you don’t have a good narrative, a good story, so that’s my big challenge for everybody.

Danny:

Love it! Storytelling, we’re really big on that. So, thank you so much. This is awesome. I love it.

Sangram:

Thank you for having me.

Danny:

If anyone has any questions they’d love to ask, I’m sure you’re probably very hard to get ahold of.

Sangram:

Not really! Not really! Nah, I’m on LinkedIn, I love LinkedIn. I feel it’s a great, great channel, so you can just look my name up on LinkedIn, Sangram Vajre.

Danny:

Perfect. All right, thanks again. I really appreciate it.

Sangram:

Thank you so much, man.

Danny:

It’s awesome. Okay, well, there you go. We had the awesome Sangram Vajre on. And man, there’s a lot of great insights so if it’s something you’re thinking about, from ABM, account-based marketing, hopefully you kind of were able to unpack that a little bit. Essentially, really it’s just distilling and really focusing, if anything else. Here are our top accounts we want to get into. And where do we get that information? We’re going to get that aligning with sales, and looking at from a company as a whole, I love how Sangram talked about. You’d be really surprised by how many organizations haven’t done that. They don’t really understand or really know what that addressable market is. Maybe that would be a great exercise to be able to do that and be able to say, hey, for a marketing organization, how can we support you in that maybe we’ve got some of the really close to making that decision from a marketing standpoint, what are we able to do to be able to help reduce that life cycle, that sales cycle and shorten it?

So a lot of things to unpack here, a couple quick steps is sit down with your sales team, find out what they’re doing, find out the accounts they’re trying to get into, and then see how you can sort of reverse engineer that. So we’re all about engineering here and manufacturing. And figure out what can we do to be able to help that and really make that impact on that P and L? All right, so okay.

So that’s all I’ve got for you today. Thanks so much for watching. If you have any questions, we’d love to answer ’em for you at IndustrialSage.com/questions. If you’re listening on any of the iTunes or Stitcher, or any other podcasting tools we’ve got out there, we’d love a review. On social media, post, share, like, tweet, all that good stuff would be awesome. And last but not least, if you’re not on our subscriber list, you need to go to IndustrialSage.com right now, get on there because we have all kinds of great tools like the insights that we did. If you haven’t done this, talk to 150 manufacturers and learn about all their sales and marketing trends. Do it. There’s a lot of other valuable resources we have there that you can check out. So, I’m done, phew! Flapping my gums and I will catch you next week. I’m Danny with IndustrialSage. Thanks for watching.

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