Navigating ABM as a Sales Manager with Elissa Nauful

In this episode, we’re diving into Account-Based Marketing (or ABM), asking questions like: Why is ABM a strategy worth the consideration of sales leaders? What are the hurdles that leaders can anticipate when acclimating to an ABM strategy? And how do you determine what accounts to target in the first place? 

Joining Dani to help break it all down is Elissa Nauful, Director of Sales at The Center for Sales Strategy.

Elissa gets into some great points from her first-hand experience, like: 

• How it provides the perfect opportunity to build beautiful relationships with prospects 
• Why a strong ABM strategy requires alignment between sales and marketing, and how do that well 
• The roll of technology in ABM 
• And, lastly, how ABM can paint such a clear picture of where people are in the buying process, making it that much easier to extend your “digital hand” and nurture them.  

Links:

Elissa Nauful:
linkedin.com/in/elissanauful/

Dani Buckley:
linkedin.com/in/daniobuckley/

LeadG2:
leadg2.thecenterforsalesstrategy.com/

TIMESTAMPS:
(02:28) Why Elissa thinks ABM is a good strategy.
(03:48) What directors of sales should be on the lookout for when embarking on their ABM journey
(06:40) Make sure your team uses your CRM
(07:57) Marketing and Sales alignment is important for a successful ABM strategy
(11:57) What are some potential hurdles that sales leaders might encounter when adopting an ABM strategy?
(14:26) It's so much cheaper to hire someone who knows what they're doing than to try and learn it yourself.
(15:27) How do you determine what accounts to target and what does that process look like?
(17:29) Tell us a little bit about your experience using RollWorks
(21:03) ABM is really helpful as you try to be as relevant as possible to prospects by category or by job detail

Transcript

Dani Buckley: (00:15)
Welcome to Sell Smarter, sell Faster, a podcast dedicated to helping sales organizations grow. Each week, we discuss proven sales enablement strategies and real life examples with experts and thought leaders from across industries. I'm your host, Dani Buckley, vice President and General Manager at LeadG2, a sales performance agency.

Dani Buckley: (00:42)
In this episode, we're diving into account-based marketing or ABM. We're asking questions like, why is ABM a strategy worth the consideration of sales leaders? What are the hurdles that leaders can anticipate when acclimating to an ABM strategy, and how do you determine what accounts to even target in the first place? Joining me to help break it all down is Elissa Nauful, director of Sales at the Center for Sales Strategy. Elissa gets into some great points from her firsthand experience, like how it provides the perfect opportunity to build beautiful relationships with prospects, why a strong ABM strategy requires alignment between sales and marketing, and how to do that well, the role of technology in ABM, and lastly, how ABM can paint such a clear picture of where people are in the buying process, making it that much easier to extend your digital hand and nurture them. All right. Yay. I am really excited to be speaking with you today, Elissa. Welcome. How are you?

Elissa Nauful: (01:38)
I'm great. Thanks for having me, Dani. Good to see you.

Dani Buckley: (01:41)
Yeah, and I'm excited that we're talking about account-based marketing ABM today. Um, you know, as we already mentioned, you're the director of sales here at LeadG2, but also our parent company, the Center for Sales Strategy, and the other division we have up your culture. So you're in charge of a lot of sales here, and I know that in recent, um, in last year, you've put a lot, um, along with our marketing team, a lot of energy. Uh, we put budget into ABM and it's something that we're, we're, we're all in on and we are really excited about and we've learned a lot. So we get to dive into your specific experience as the director of sales. Cause I think that's what's really interesting for our audience to hear, um, from the sales perspective. So that's what we're gonna talk about. Sound good?

Elissa Nauful: (02:22)
Great. Awesome. Thank you.

Dani Buckley: (02:24)
Cool. Okay, so let's jump in. Um, and just to start, tell us why you think ABM is a good strategy. Like, why were you on board for this when we talked about doing it as our approach for, for, um, you know, helping you hit your revenue goals. What do you love about it? Why do you think others should possibly consider it? Just kind of what's your initial thinking on that?

Elissa Nauful: (02:41)
I think you'll probably hear this theme across all of my answers, which is, if you can take those wonderful targets, those businesses you really want to win, that you've identified, they're the best target. We have access to the right person. We know we, we have solutions that fit what they need and nurture that relationship from the time you begin to market to them all through the sales process by almost kind of super serving them and, and really serving them information they need, want in a targeted and custom plan. It's just a beautiful way to begin a relationship for a prospect. And I, I think that's a really smart way to spend your time and money. Uh, so ABM is all about that, really focusing on a target piece of business and doing everything you can to win it.

Dani Buckley: (03:32)
Yeah. Love it. Great. Um, so let's talk about what you've learned so far. Um, and I know we're still learning a lot, but, um, what do you think will be helpful to pass along to other sales leaders that are thinking about ABM or embarking on it? What are some of the key things that you've learned so far?

Elissa Nauful: (03:48)
We have learned a lot. I, I think that we've made some mistakes, which is wonderful because you only learn through kind of constantly evaluating. So I actually made some notes on some steps that if I was telling a director of sales, you know, if you're gonna embark on this adventure or some things to look at, here's some things that I'd look at. So here, here are my thoughts. First of all, the first step is you really do need to evaluate your sales process first. How, um, how are you handling every step in this sales process? Uh, that really starts with marketing. What is marketing doing at the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel to start to attract those potential buyers? What does the handoff look like between marketing and sales? How are you defining what a qualified lead is in marketing and in sales?

Elissa Nauful: (04:32)
And then when that salesperson gets that warm marketing qualified lead, what's the expectation for them to take them through to the close? And I think a lot of organizations think I'm gonna sell or I'm gonna market, but they don't step by step, put a plan together for each step from the very beginning. And the very beginning isn't the minute they call you. The very beginning is the minute they're aware of you as a company or they think about you. So I think that's really important. What does that outreach look like at every step? What's the expectation? And also, how are you gonna hold your salespeople from a sales side accountable to those steps to make sure they're following the process? Because how many times do you see a marketing, um, a marketing director say, well, I give sales qualified leads and they never anything. And then on the other side, you see salespeople, sales managers say, we never get qualified leads.

Elissa Nauful: (05:25)
So I think defining that process really reduces a lot of that friction. Um, the second step is making sure your salespeople are using a crm, they're documenting their process. So as a sales manager, you can go in and see what the steps are that they're taking. If they got a prospect or a lead, how are they following? How are they communicating? Are they communicating in the cadence that you have the expectation for, for that sales process? Uh, so I think that's important. The other opportunity is really to identify bottlenecks, right? So if you have a salesperson that is great, getting a, a first appointment, but they can't seem to move to a close, that will give you a lot of intelligence around it. Um, the other big thing I've learned is you need to make sure you have a really good target account list. I know we'll probably get into this later, but having a good target account list is crucial. And a target account list doesn't mean every person you ever wanted to do business with, which is one of the mistakes we made. You know, we want all the business. Right. Well, you really need to be more focused and targeted in

Dani Buckley: (06:24)
Your list. Yeah. Yep.

Elissa Nauful: (06:25)
Um, and then knowing how to communicate, you know, what are you gonna say? How are you gonna say it? And make sure that the experience for the prospect is seamless and clean from the minute they get a marketing message all the way through to closing a piece of business.

Dani Buckley: (06:40)
I love it. Those are some really good takeaways. You have learned a lot , um, and I love  to making sure your sales team is using your C R m. I mean, all everything you mentioned makes sense and is important, but I feel like we always come back to that and almost any sales strategy marketing strategy is only going to work if you really are tracking these things and you're not letting a lack of technology or the lack of use of technology get in your way of like slowing things down. So I really like that you emphasize that for sure.

Elissa Nauful: (07:11)
Yeah, it's so important. I think that, I think at old thinking for salespeople as if I use a C crm, then my manager is micromanaging me. I think it's the opposite, frankly. If you use a CRM effectively, your manager doesn't have to ask you, when was the last time you spoke with XYZ prospect? Because they can see it. Yeah. You have so much more intelligence. It also gives you a tremendous amount of inte on the other side. What's the prospect doing if they're not engaged, if they're not converting, if they're not reading your messages, if they're not visiting your site, if the information you're sharing with them isn't valuable to them, that's really important information to have. It keeps you from wasting time on prospects that aren't really, you're, you're not hitting them where they need to be hit.

Dani Buckley: (07:55)
Yep. Yep. Love it. Great. So you touched on marketing, the sales alignment a little bit in some of your, um, tips just now, but we know that it's, it's always important, right? We're big believers of it. We teach it here at Legi two, but what we've seen is that with ab b m it's incredibly pertinent. And um, so tell us a little bit about your experience with kind of the marketing and sales alignment. What does that meant to you? What does that look like? Um, and and what do you just feel like has to kind of be in alignment to get this right?

Elissa Nauful: (08:22)
So I feel really lucky, you know, our director of marketing, we have the same goal. We really do want the same thing, which is she wants marketing to provide qualified leads to sales so we can win business. We're on the same page. Uh, we're also very transparent with each other. So we have a lot of calls and had a lot of calls from the beginning about what was working, what wasn't working, what our frustrations were. And we've had frustrations in this process. It hasn't been one where everything's great. And we did that wonderful. We've really had some frustrations along the way with how does this work? Or are we, we defining this the right way? So I really have appreciated the, the communication, the constant communication, but also how critical, critical is maybe not the right word, but how much we've critiqued each other on, you know, how, how are you looking at this?

Elissa Nauful: (09:11)
How am I looking at this? So we really do push each other, I think, to get better in a really positive environment. So I, I think it's important that there's a mutual respect from sales and market. You have to make sure you're defining, defining the important things. So don't look at vanity metrics. Yeah. Sometimes you don't really know what you wanna measure, but let's be really clear, you don't have to measure everything, but it does matter how many qualified leads come in and it does matter how many appointments you get and it does matter how much business is sold. Like that's why we're all here. Right? Right. Um, so I really appreciate the fact that we're on the same page about that and that we're very good about talking a lot about what's working and what's not. Uh, so alignment is really frankly about respect and communication and having a goal and then holding yourself accountable to it.

Dani Buckley: (10:00)
Yes, yes. And you know, I think an important thing for folks listening to think about is o often, um, we go into some big new strategy or plan or campaign or whatever it might be, and it's like, okay, we we're gonna get a line, we're gonna align marketing and sales for this. And what I think, um, you're speaking to what I've seen as being someone part of this process, obviously with you, is that we already had that alignment and that's what's really allowed us to be successful. So if you're not already working on your mark, you know, your head of marketing, your head of sales, having a good working transparent, like healthy, uh, relationship, if that doesn't already exist, then you're gonna be, it's gonna be a little bit of uphill battle. So I really recommend to folks get on that, make that part of your, your culture  and your process. Um, cuz it, it, it's only going to benefit you when you're doing new things like this.

Elissa Nauful: (10:53)
I think it is part of our culture too. I I think that because he, uh, Shay and I report to the same person. Yep. You know, his goal is for us to be successful and it's never a situation of you are sales or marketing, we're never pitted against each other. We really do work as a team. We really do want the same thing. We really do wanna work hard. Um, and we, and I really do appreciate the fact that we can share our, you know, when something great happens, we're excited, but we can also share our frustrations. And that really didn't work out how we thought or Yeah. Are we looking at the right thing? So, uh, so spot on. You just have to have a good working relationship, but also push each other push back. Right. Yeah. Having a good working relationship doesn't mean you always agree. It just means that you, um, work around the challenges.

Dani Buckley: (11:40)
Yep. Love it. Great. So speaking of challenges, um, you know, there, there's a lot that we've learned and, and some of that is like overcoming hurdles and, and different challenges, um, with ABM and with, with doing something new that's a little different than how we've done done things before. So tell the sales leaders and business leaders who are listening, what are some potential hurdles they might encounter when adopting an ABM strategy? What have you come across and, and what do you think they should maybe plan for or anticipate?

Elissa Nauful: (12:06)
Takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of time to understand what technology you wanna use, how it's gonna work with your c r m. What are you gonna measure? Who's gonna be responsible for what? So almost an order of operations. And if you're trying to learn it and do it at the same time, we talk about this a lot, if you're trying to build the plane when you're flying it, it's gonna take you twice as long. So having good advisors, asking the right questions, having a process and plan in place is critical. Making sure that there's someone that's holding you accountable every week. So where are we this week? What are we looking at? Because it's easy to get overwhelmed and the data and the information or to ch go down a rabbit hole and chase the wrong thing. So I, I really encourage everyone before they start to be real realistic about what their team's capabilities are.

Elissa Nauful: (13:00)
Yeah, a lot of, a lot of leaders think we can do it all, or we don't need to pay the money to hire a company to do X, y, Z because we can do it. And what happens is you fast forward six months and the teams burned out. They still aren't experts in it. They haven't really accomplished the goal they wanted to, and they've spent more money than they would've spent if they had hired an advisor or counselor or someone to do it. So, so that's the key. Um, the other thing, Matt, um, Matt Sunshine, who I report to, my boss, and I guess all of our bosses always says is, you need to know your numbers As a sales leader, you've gotta know your numbers. You need to know, um, what your average ca account is. You need to know, um, what your business goal is, a financial goal for the accounts that you're gonna go after. So that when you're trying to budget for ab m how much money do we wanna spend in ab m you really know what the return on that is gonna be. And he talks to me all the time about, you gotta know your numbers. No sales leader that's effective Yeah. Is effective If you don't know your numbers and, and that to all of you sales leaders out there, you've gotta know what those numbers are so you can truly measure if it's working or not.

Dani Buckley: (14:09)
Yeah. Great. Love it. And, and I think what that all ties back to what you're saying is like having a, a expert either in-house or externally that is able to know the numbers, is able to, um, expedite this process and ensure that you're not, um, spending too much time trying to learn, like you said, while you're, you know, uh, building the plane while you're flying it. So I love that really kind of, yeah, just like not making this harder than it needs to be.  there are experts

Elissa Nauful: (14:36)
To hire someone who knows what they're doing than to try and learn it yourself. If you can hire a partner, you know, we always talk about sort of, you know, do it with me or do it for me. And, and I think that if you can have a partner that can really focus on the things they're good at so that your sales team can focus on selling and your marketing team can focus on attracting it, it just makes it so much easier.

Dani Buckley: (14:59)
Yeah. So we know that that account based marketing is all about, you know, those target accounts, right? It's about, um, account based, it's in the name . Um, and I think some people forget that, right? That it, it, it's not a mass media marketing, it's not casting the widest net advertising. Um, there's a time and a place for that kind of stuff. This is more about, um, choosing high quality accounts and targeting those folks in a very strategic way. So tell us, how do you determine what accounts to target and what does that process look like for you?

Elissa Nauful: (15:32)
Uh, so I always have a list of 25 dream companies to work with, right? And I determine those companies personally, and then I ask our team to do the same. They have to have the dollar fit, they have to be able to invest the amount of money that it costs for the solution that we're looking for. We have to have access to that person. We have to have done our research, we have to have a valid business proposition. So we go through a good bit of criteria to determine initially who our target list is gonna be, are they a good fit for our business? And so based on all of that criteria, we narrow down a list. But the important thing with target lists is you can't have a huge list because your salespeople can't work 250 target accounts. Yeah, it's a nice idea. But if you want to really do a beautiful job of creating an experience for a prospect, which is what account-based marketing is to really kind of sur I like to call it surprise and delight them, we wanna create an experience in ab b m where the prospect co turns around and constantly sees a value in communication and the connection that we're making with them to help them solve their biggest business challenges.

Elissa Nauful: (16:41)
That's our, that's our responsibility, or that's at least what we see our responsibility at CSS and lead you to and up your culture is we wanna solve your, we wanna solve that challenge. And that's not always a one size fits all. And so customizing your approach based on the target and your solution makes the most sense. Um, so we take a lot of time now to look and say, who are the biggest opportunities for us? And who do we wanna? Wow.

Dani Buckley: (17:06)
Yeah. Great. Very important. Such an important step. , we

Elissa Nauful: (17:10)
Didn't do that at first. Mind

Dani Buckley: (17:12)
You. Yeah. Yeah. First and we

Elissa Nauful: (17:13)
Learned quickly said, you know, let's have everyone. But I think that was a wonderful lesson for us.

Dani Buckley: (17:18)
Yeah. Agreed. Agreed. So let's shift to talking about technology because, um, we believe in technology and we are a RollWorks partner. Um, we use RollWorks. So tell us a little bit about your experience using RollWorks and, and what you just feel like technology has the role it has played in ABM, um, especially for you. On the sales side of things,

Elissa Nauful: (17:39)
I love RollWorks because of the HubSpot integration. And I think that there is a learning curve for sure. You know, if you haven't used that integration before, you need to figure out, um, what you're looking at, how often you're gonna look at the information. You can get a lot of vanity information where you notice that there's a company that's huge that's come to your website once, and the natural salesperson and all of us wants to immediately call on that call on every person in the organization because they came to your website. And that's not realistic, right? But the amount of intelligence that you can get from using a tool like RollWorks and really rolling it up effectively into HubSpot, I absolutely love you can't do ABM without technology. You just can't, or you can, but it's a, it's a long, it's a long play.

Elissa Nauful: (18:21)
Yeah. Um, we had some challenges in just some kinks in how to set things up and how to approach, um, targeting and focusing and what keywords we wanted. So there is a, there's a ramp up with everything else. It's almost like whenever you're taking a trip and you're sitting at the gate in the airplane, and then you get taxi and then you get to the runway, there, there is a process to really learn it. But now that we're getting it under our belt, the amount of intelligence that we have to follow, uh, the prospects, the best prospects that we have, I think is compelling. I love the idea that we can market to them the way they need to be marketed to in, in a way that hopefully isn't creepy, but is, um, value based on, on what they're looking for. Uh, the other thing is that there's data out there, right? So it's just another reminder, no matter what tool you use, you have to have a clean crm, you need to get all the junk out of it. You need to make sure you're really paying attention to the data that you're putting in and that you're getting out. And just like everything else, you've gotta look at the right things. But technology's important. We've learned a lot from RollWorks. I think we have a lot more to learn on the sales side. Um, and

Dani Buckley: (19:34)
Listening, I wanna be clear, the, the one of the key pieces of data that we really are, are accessing is intent, right? Like, well,

Elissa Nauful: (19:42)
There's intent, but there's also the following of the journey stages, right? Yeah. So yeah, a journey stage in RollWorks would be, um, what we call in the deal stages, how an account is progressing through the sales process. And so accounts progress through a marketing process, but also a sales process. So if you've targeted, well, then the hope is that the marketing efforts are moving you closer to a sale. And the intent data is incredible too. You can get so much intelligence from that. Uh, there's a lot of data. And so the challenge sometimes can be there's a lot of data, what do you look at? Um, yep.

Dani Buckley: (20:21)
Yeah, exactly. Great. I just wanna make sure everyone listening kind of knew what we were, some of the key pieces of the technology and what it does. So yeah, it's, yeah, it's excellent. There's a lot of data, a lot of intelligence on, intent on where to find people, but then also, like you said, tracking the, the impact of marketing on the sales process. That's great. So speaking of those are some benefits, right? The data, um, what are some additional benefits? What have you, you seen that maybe is maybe that you didn't even expect with a B m with the technology, with whatever it might be? What are, what have you seen that you've been kind of excited about?

Elissa Nauful: (20:56)
I love seeing how, what people are consuming, right? So it's really helpful to me as we try and be as relevant as pos possible to prospects by category or by job detail. What information are people really gravitating towards? So that's incredibly helpful to me. You know, we get a lot of insight into that. Yeah, I'm also really interested in what people are searching for, and sometimes you think you're being very specific and you find you're not. And so sometimes just the terminology or the way people are searching for information is helpful. Um, I also feel like you get a lot of information about what's happening within the organization if they, you know, you get information on if there's a new spike or what they're reading or what earnings data is happening so that you can begin to understand an organization more. So I, I think that's, I think that's important. Um, there's just a lot of really great information and it syncs so nicely with HubSpot and the reports are lovely. Um, yeah, a gazillion reports of which some of them I'm like, why do I have this report? But it's, you know, you can build a lot of reports,

Dani Buckley: (22:07)
. Yeah. Great. So lots of benefits with, um, getting new data that's helping you in the sales process, even broader understanding of your prospects of the buying process. Um, yeah, so just a lot of that, and I, I could send talk about this all day as with many of these topics, but we're gonna wrap up. So I just wanna ask you, Ali, is there anything else that you wanna share that you think would be valuable to those listening that we maybe haven't covered yet?

Elissa Nauful: (22:31)
I I think that one of the really important things with ABM is it really does give you a broader understanding of where prospects are in the buying process. Yeah. So everyone's not ready to buy today. There is a reason why people don't call salespeople right away. They're doing all their homework online, right? And they're researching it. So I think it gives us a much better understanding of how prospects are buying, um, and what they're looking for and how to speak to them. So I, I think that's important, but I also think it's really important to make sure that you're, you're meeting buyers where they are and kind of taking them, um, one of our, my colleagues says taking them what they're through the de putting your digital handout and taking them through the process, right? So kind of nurturing them through the process. So I think that's really important. Um, but how also can you add value to a prospect so they become a customer?

Dani Buckley: (23:21)
Yeah. Great. Well, thank you Elissa, for joining me today and for sharing your experience. And, um, yeah, maybe we'll get together and talk again in a year and see what else you've learned about this. You know, I feel like there's a lot that comes along the way and, um, yeah. So I just appreciate your time and for those listening, you can connect with me or Lisa, um, our contact info, the show notes, and, um, yeah. So thanks for joining and looking forward to seeing all of you again on the next episode of Sell Smarter, sell Faster. Until then, happy selling everybody. Thanks for joining us on Sell Smarter, sell Faster. If you like what you've heard, like that subscribe button so you never miss an episode, be sure to visit our website. Sell Smarter, sell faster.com where you can find even more helpful sales enablement resources.