Marketers love it when all the pieces connect nicely, kinda like a well-built lego project. But like our tech stack, marketers are realistic and realize it’s never really as simple as the directions make it out to be. Take ABM; it causes you to really take a look at how data has been adopted and creates a great deal of perspective around how it is all handled. But it can power multiple teams, which means that it better be right.

When it is, it makes powering the launch of a new product or initiative that much easier. The data all aligns, as does the messaging, thereby clearing the way for internal advocates to amplify event promotions.

Transcript:

Glenn: Welcome back to the show. Today we’re speaking to Matt Stone. Matt, welcome to the show.

Matt:  Thanks so much for having me.

Glenn: Matt, can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Matt: Absolutely. So, I’m the Senior Director of Marketing at Gainsight. I’ve been with the company for a little over four years and I manage our demand gen team. So, we’re responsible for generating all the leads, creating the pipeline for our sales team and essentially just building the brand that Gainsight has.

Glenn: Awesome! Have you seen things change over the past four years in terms of – let’s talk about technology and processes when it comes lead gen? What’s the evolution you’ve seen?

Matt: Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, over the past four years or so, probably starting about four years ago, ABM became all the rage from a technology perspective. I’m not sure that it was really a new concept. I mean, I think, you know, account-based marketing and kind of having account name, list, things like that, has been around for much longer. But the technology side was kind of really new. You know, not necessarily that specific tech stack, but I think, you know, building your and involving your tech stack around that concept has been something that’s really taken hold and something that we’ve adopted and tried to find more and more ways to really look at things from, like a holistic account perspective versus kind of like perspective, which was really more of the trend probably the past ten years or so.

Glenn: And just so people have some context, would you mind sharing what that tech stack is?

Matt: Yeah, I mean, so here at Gainsight, you know, we’re a Salesforce shop, we use Marketo for market automation. And so, really, it’s like anybody that’s ever used Salesforce before knows it’s a very kind of rigid structure where there’s this concept of this lead object and then there’s a context and accounts objects and things like that. It is really kind of built, you know, for the marketing of yesterday, kind of thing. And when you’re working purely from making account perspective and you’re wanting to align your SDR, BDR, BDA team, whatever you call them, with your accounts and your As and things like that and you’re wanting to make sure that everything is visible at just that account level, then working on leads is really not what you want to be doing. It’s very clunky, it doesn’t connect to those accounts and things. So, you have to kind of build workarounds and things, and so we use products like LeanData which helps us automatically route and convert everything and put them into the proper accounts. And then through Marketo, we’re building up notifications and things that are able to directly let the people, work in that specific account, know exactly what’s happening in real-time. Which then lets them, obviously, prospect into them more effectively, doesn’t let things slip through the cracks, stuff like that. We’re able to, obviously, pump a lot more data into those account levels and then do more segment and outrea...