A Conversation About Expanding Business with ABM
Recently Alex Southworth, VP, and Manager for D&B Digital, Dun & Bradstreet, had the exciting opportunity to sit down with Joel Beasley, host of the Modern CTO Podcast. What started as a conversation about what a modern CTO looks like evolved into an impressive on-the-fly strategy brainstorm about how Joel could utilize data to grow his own accounts. If you can carve out an hour of your time this week, this podcast will be well worth a listen as you plan your marketing, data, and technology road maps.
There Is No One Definition of a True CTO – In Fact, There May Be 3! [4:00]
The discussion began by looking at the origin of the podcast’s namesake – how would you define a true modern CTO? Alex mentioned his intuitive categorization of today’s CTO into three key areas based on the priorities that have been handed down to them by their organization’s CEO or CFO:
- The risk-driven and cost-saving CTO: focused on security and on minimizing risk at an organization through technology
- The efficiency-driven CTO: focused on streamlining and maximizing efficiencies within products and solutions and/or the workplace technologies
- The growth-minded and building-driven CTO: focused on driving revenue for an organization through technological means
Today’s "modern" CTO often falls into the growth-and-revenue-focused bucket, especially in younger organizations. But for revenue-focused CTOs to drive success within their organizations, both Joel and Alex agreed that they need to build a deep understanding of the sales and marketing infrastructures in place.
Get To Know the Sales and Marketing Teams Goals [16:00]
Typically, leadership helps set the mission that drives sales and marketing efforts – ranging from new customer acquisition to cross-sell and/or upsell opportunities, increased renewals, or even brand awareness. As the two discussed high-level marketing/sales goals, Joel let us in on his own personal quest: to increase business within his existing accounts. What better example to use than a real-life scenario involving how he can expand business with his existing customers?
Analyze the Data Commonalities Between Your Current Accounts [26:24]
Alex shared that in order for Joel to grow current accounts, he should start by evaluating the commonalities within his current account makeup. Alex recommends mapping out as many data points as possible within the customer list and then doing a deep analysis. The range of factors incorporated into this analysis should stem from what’s most important for your organization’s goals. Alex mentioned many examples, including:
Total revenue
Industry
Company size
Number of employees
Business model
Technology utilized
With these factors in mind, you can build and refine segments within your customer base that might have a higher growth propensity.
Layer in MORE Data [32:40]
Thought you were done with your data analysis? Not so fast. Now is the time Alex recommends layering in intent data. Consider incorporating information such as whether customers have visited your website, and if so, when. What pages were they looking at? Were any of them tied to your solution offerings? That could certainly indicate an interest in additional products or services.
Alex mentioned (33:48) that accessing this depth of website data is critical to enrich your existing customer data. With D&B Rev.UpTM ABX, companies can automate the ingestion of such data into their customer data platform (CDP), CRM, and website. The convergence of these datasets into a singular platform empowers D&B Rev.UpTM ABX to match the information together and apply additional layers of intent-based data, demographic information, and more ‒ therefore decoding your previously anonymous website visitors. Beyond visitor deanonymization, the platform can also shape new segments of potential target accounts with the help of AI (34:48).
Focus Your Marketing Dollars and Time Accordingly [35:28]
The final steps Alex recommended include feeding those data and insights into your programmatic campaign targeting and closing the loop with regular reporting (35:44) ‒ and D&B Rev.UpTM ABX can automate all of that. If this process sounds familiar to you, it’s because he outlined the basic tenets of an effective ABM strategy for expanding Joel’s business with current customers. ABM does not always have to focus on acquiring net new accounts!
Alex sums up the goal of this entire strategy beautifully. “The key thing for me when you’re looking at business is figuring out how to drive revenue. It goes back to our initial thesis of what a modern CTO is. And at the end of the day, you want everyone in your organization to be pulling in the same direction. That direction needs to be focused around how to grow the business … as soon as you get that growth engine working, all the decisions that you need to make become easier. And it’s the gift that just solves so many problems.” (46:22)
We’ve Hardly Scratched the Surface
These are just a few of the golden nuggets that were revealed during Alex and Joel’s conversation, but if you give the episode a listen, you will find many, many more. From the rise of ABM to investing in your product-led growth strategy, and even a bit of compliance-related talk, there is no shortage of knowledge-sharing in this episode.
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