On every episode of the Rebel Instinct, our team sits down with rebels from across the marketing landscape to share stories about bold moves they’ve taken as marketers. Subscribe for more.
Galen Ettlin:
You are listening to the Rebel Instinct Podcast by Acton Software for all the marketing innovators living outside the box.
Hey everybody, good to have you here. We are excited to elevate our rebel instincts today. I’m Galen Ettlin with Act-On Software, joined by my VP of Marketing, Casey Munck and our very special guest, Jon Miller, co-founder of Marketo and Engagio and current CMO of Demand Base and an OG Marketing Rebel in the House. Jon, thank you so much for being here.
Jon Miller:
Yeah, thanks very much. It’s great to be friends and hanging out with Act-On.
Galen Ettlin:
Excellent. Well, we appreciate hearing it. Now, you came up with a completely new marketing tech category with Engagio for account-based marketing or ABM. What led you to create that? Tell us about that journey.
Jon Miller:
Sure. Well, I will say I don’t feel like I came up with account-based marketing. The term had been around for a little while, but I certainly helped I think pour a lot of fuel on the fire from some sparks that were already there. So I was at Marketo, I was doing drinking our own champagne, we were doing demand generation and to drive up to 80% of all of our pipeline and as Act-On listeners will know, marketing automation’s really useful for this stuff. We were generating leads and then we would nurture the ones that weren’t ready for sales and score them and only pass them to sales when they were really ready. And it was nice because salespeople weren’t talking to buyers who weren’t interested and buyers didn’t have to talk to salespeople before they were ready. But it wasn’t sufficient for driving our growth engine.
As we got bigger and we were trying to move up market, we needed new engines of growth. And so we started at Marketo doing more of an outbound strategy to identify some accounts and try to really reach out to them proactively, kind of what became known as account-based marketing. But what inspired me to start Engagio was the fact that this strategy worked, but it was really hard to do with this tech stack that I had of a sort of person-based marketing automation plus a CRM. We sort of needed a third pillar of that stool, which is something that would be more account-based. So that that’s what led to Engagio. And I used an analogy at the time that traditional demand gens like fishing with a net, you run your campaign, you don’t care which fish you catch, you just care did you catch enough fish? Whereas account-based marketing is fishing with a spear where you identify those big fish and kind of go after them.
Galen Ettlin:
Now taking kind of a step back here for both of you, my marketing experts here, I know it’s a pretty technical skill, lots of numbers, lots of critical thinking. It’s complicated enough probably in some people’s view. What about MarTech speaks to you? Why approach that space?
Jon Miller:
Well, so I graduated with a degree in physics in 1994 and I think there’s two relevant pieces of that. The first is that a book came out in 1992 called The One-to-One Future by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers that described a vision of a future world. That’s where we could be as personalized as a corner store, an 1800s corner store that really knows you. But we could do that at industrial era scale. And the way that would happen was through better use of data and analytics to really understand the customer. And that really was pretty inspiring to me back the very beginning of my career. And the physics component was it turns out that the more that that’s it drive towards the one future is a drive that makes marketing more analytical and more quantitative. And I found that it was just really kind of cool that I was able to use my quantitative skills in the practice of marketing.
Casey Munck:
So Jon, ABM has moved from a buzz term to core philosophy of really just good prospecting. What do we need to know about how ABM has evolved over the years, where we are today and where we’re headed?
Jon Miller:
Yeah, I mean ABM has definitely evolved and I think the biggest thing that’s driven that change is a recognition that the way the early practitioners were doing, it was also flawed. And the flaw is really built in the analogy I talked about a couple minutes ago, which is it doesn’t feel very good to get poked by a spear. And the problem with early ABM was that we were reaching out to accounts regardless of whether they were actually interested in hearing from us
Casey Munck:
Or that they were warm, right?
Jon Miller:
And so we sort of had lost that respect for the buyer that demand generation had. And so I actually started using a new term called account based experience or ABX, which tries to take the precision and targeting of traditional ABM, but combine it with that respect for the buyer experience that kind of demand generation had. And the unlock that makes that possible is the rise of things like intent data that lets us really start to see when an account might be in a buying cycle or showing interest that was otherwise previously hidden. With tools like Act-On, we can score when people based behaviors based on what people are doing on our own website, but we’re losing what’s happening or we don’t see what’s happening out on the open web. And when we can start having access to that kind of data, it lets us understand which account is in its journey and then adjust our go-to-market accordingly. So I think that’s really kind of the biggest evolution of this move from ABM to ABX. And by the way, it’s also just a better name because it takes marketing out of the name.
Casey Munck:
That’s so true. I like that a lot. Well, ABM software definitely more than ever before I think is emerging as the necessary go between the marketing automation and the CRM platforms. What are you seeing? What are you thinking are the latest elements of ABM software that are bridging that gap between the those two core systems that are really helping make sales and marketing’s lives easier and more effective?
Jon Miller:
I’d sort of like to answer that by talking about the use cases or the things that you do with this technology. So the first one is building just an account based foundation, and that starts with that challenge I was having back at Marketo. If all your other systems are primarily lead based, you need things like lead to account matching to take all those disparate signals, what’s happening with your website and your marketing automation and your Salesforce, even your Gmail or your exchange servers where the emails are sitting. You know, got to combine all that together, match it, clean it, keep it up to date, and then ideally augment it with quality third party data. So that’s the step one is just getting that account foundation data foundation in place. The second one is then finding the accounts that matter. How do you use your account intelligence to identify which accounts you should be focusing on?
Who’s in your ICP? How do you help tier them into tier one, tier two, tier threes based on their potential value? How do you know where are they in their journey? So you know, this one is just aware of you but not really engaging, but this one is hot and ready to go now and use all that intelligence to prioritize your time and efforts once you have that in place. Now the third main use case is engage, and now you want to engage with the accounts and the people at those accounts in a really coordinated orchestrated way. So that can mean things like pushing those insights into your marketing automation. So your nurture tracks dynamically adjust based on where that account is in the journey, but it can also mean things like advertising to those accounts or personalizing the website when people from those accounts visit to you or launching outreach or sales loft cadences when accounts hit kind of that magic and market moment.
It’s all about orchestration, and I love the word orchestration because it implies you have these different instruments, these different channels, but you want to make them all kind of work in harmony. The fourth use case is all about closing these accounts or aligning and aligning with sales. So it’s taking all this information you have about what’s going on and making sure that the sales team has acts to that inside their CRM when they’re working with the accounts. And then the last use case is measurement. As you move into an ABM world, your metrics are going to be a little bit more, or definitely going to be focused more on quality and less on quantity. It’s not about how many MQLs anymore, it’s about either did you get MQLs at the right accounts? Did you get MQAs marketing qualified accounts? And so there’s new metrics that you’re going to want to use to measure this world also.
Galen Ettlin:
I think it’s easy for a lot of us to get kind of stuck in a rut. So what advice do you have for those marketers out there to be a little bit more, say, rebellious or innovative in their jobs?
Jon Miller:
Yeah, there’s an acronym that I really like here, which is that I would encourage marketers to be NICE marketers. So this acronym NICE. The N stands for you should be numerical numeric. And this goes back to what we said earlier, marketing is getting pretty technical. So you know, should have a proficiency with numbers, with an spreadsheets at a minimum. You don’t have to be a physics major, but you know, shouldn’t be scared of a spreadsheet. At the same time, I think you should be intuitive. Marketing is art, not just science. Both, you know, need to be able to understand what is your target audience care about, what’s going to resonate with them, how are you going to create marketing that has a little bit of a wow factor for your target audience? C stands for being a content creator. I think marketers, everybody in marketing should be a content creator, not just the content team. So whether that’s writing blog posts or putting your opinions out on LinkedIn and building your own personal brand accordingly or hosting a podcast or you name it, just producing content is so core to what marketing is doing. Every marketer should be a content creator and then the E is execution. And what a execution of A grade B plan will pretty much always beat the grade B execution of the grade A plan. So just big part of being a rebellious market or just getting out there and just getting stuff done.
Casey Munck:
That I’d never heard the NICE. That’s awesome. I’m going to be using that. Thanks Jon. What does it feel like to take a chance in not knowing the outcomes? How do you make a rebellious move at work knowing there may be consequences?
Jon Miller:
I think every time I’ve taken a risk, there’s always been some mitigation, if you will, or something that kind of protected my downside. And so put another way, it’s smart risks.
Casey Munck:
Right.
Jon Miller:
For example, not career oriented. When I graduated from college, I set out to ride my bike across the country along with a friend of mine and we camping the whole way, bringing our own gear. This is road bicycling, not a motorcycle.
Casey Munck:
A big trip.
Jon Miller:
Yeah, so we made it to somewhere in the middle of the Nevada desert, at which point we kind of had a crash and my friends fell down and actually cracked his helmet, at which point he was obviously a little injured and we were both shaken up. And so fortunately we were able to get some help to take us to the closest airport. So rather than giving up from on this whole bike trip, we were just able to change directions and we ended up biking down the Pacific coast instead from Canada to Mexico and had a great trip. So risky thing, but backup plan. Similarly, when I started Marketo, at the time my wife was pregnant with our first kid, we had just bought a house and we had our first mortgage. It wasn’t exactly when you think, hey, it’s time to go start a company and be super entrepreneurial, but I was able to do it with Phil Fernandez as my co-founder. And so, cause I wasn’t the CEO of Marketo and so the fact I could hook up with somebody else who frankly was going to be the lead and be the driver more than anything else who had experience and also was going to help be the one raising the money dramatically reduce the risk there as well. So maybe I’m just fortunate, but I think smart risks where you have some downside protection is what works for me.
Casey Munck:
I like it.
Galen Ettlin:
And being flexible and knowing how to pivot.
Jon Miller:
Yeah, good point.
Casey Munck:
Absolutely, Galen.
I’m curious, do you often seek a lot of counsel when you’re going to make a risky decision or do you keep your cards close to your vest and only run it by a couple of trusted folks? How much opinion do you get when you’re about to make a possibly risky move or decision?
Jon Miller:
Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, as analytical as I am and as quantitative as I am, I think most of the major decisions in my life I’ve sort of made by gut or intuitively. I think talking about it sometimes is useful, not because I am so much getting–I’m interested in hearing what other people say, but sometimes just the act of talking about it ultimately is what generates the final conviction in my gut for what the right answer is.
Casey Munck:
So what marketing revel in our culture today needs to be celebrated now and why?
Jon Miller:
Yeah, I was thinking that. I mean in terms of who I admire is Ferris Bueller. I think imagine if we all could be Ferris Bueller in our marketing who has both some charisma, has some smarts in terms of how he kind of tricks the family and just everything works out for him. That would be awesome if our marketing could be like that.
Casey Munck:
That’s a great answer.
Galen Ettlin:
So we just need more days off is what you’re saying.
Jon Miller:
Make your own days off
Casey Munck:
Need to watch that movie again.
Galen Ettlin:
Kind of on the other side of that, instead of what inspires you or what you think we should all be inspired by, it’s time. Now for our ‘honey, I don’t think so’ segment talking about what’s annoying you lately that needs to stop in the marketing or MarTech space. You have 60 seconds to make your case, Jon.
Jon Miller:
We need to stop focusing on marketing source or marketing the influence pipeline and instead focus on the total pipeline number. Marketing is not, and sales, it’s not like a baton handoff anymore where marketing just generates a lead in hands to the sales because that linear process doesn’t match how buying is happening today. Buying is on linear mark and sales teams need to work together in a more non-linear way rather than a relay race. The better analogy is like a soccer team who has players in different positions, but they pass the ball back and forth. Now, can you imagine a soccer team that puts on the scoreboard, here’s the number of points scored by the writing or the fullbacks versus the number of points scored by the forwards. Doesn’t make any sense. What you care about is the total number. Did we have enough points to beat the other team? And sure, the coach that might be tracking the underlying statistics for improvement, but the headline, the thing that you focus on is the total, because at the end of the day, you scored the goal as a team, and that’s how marketing and sales teams need to be working.
Casey Munck:
Amen. Jon, I’m with you on that.
Galen Ettlin:
I think that’s a perfect note to end our podcast here. Thank you so much, Jon, for being a part of this episode.
Thanks everyone for listening to the Rebel Instinct podcast. Be sure to follow Act-On Software for updates and upcoming episodes and remember to always act on your rebel instinct. Until next time.
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