Mandy Hornaday: okay. Awesome. Hey, Brandon, welcome to the Growth Activated show. I'm so excited to have you here today.
Brandon Redlinger: Thank you so much for having me.
Mandy Hornaday: This is so timely. It's such a timely conversation for me because I know you're a tried and true ABM expert. Your background is really impressive, which you should share here in a second. But one of my clients were just about to kick off an ABM strategy. So I'm really excited to pick your brain on how AI is changing it and evolving what we've all known to be true for so long now. So why don't we start with a little bit of your background?
Brandon Redlinger: Yeah, for sure. So I've been in B2B my whole career and mainly selling to other sales marketers. I've had sales marketing and revenue operations. I've had one small stint going outside of selling to sales marketing and operations, but it's still in B2B. So yeah, I did. I was early on at the team at Engagio, got acquired by Demandbase. So I ran ABM at Engagio and Demandbase. And I was at revenue.io, was at Chili Piper. So a lot of names that probably people in other B2B circles have heard of. If you're not in B2B, you probably have no idea what I'm talking about. But these days, I am a fractional. And that means I get to lead marketing for a few companies. So I get to see a lot more things instead of just being inside one company, what, you know, running things there, I get to have a wider breadth of strategies and and systems and it's a lot of fun. like it. I like it a lot.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, I've also been fractional for about two years now and it is really cool to be able to see across multiple companies and what's true and be able to test and experiment within different environments. I feel like it accelerates learning in a lot of ways.
Brandon Redlinger: Yeah, and it really keeps you up to date. like there are a lot of things that you might not get exposure to because you're stuck in just one company at one site. Like I've got one client who's been around for 150 years. There are almost 200 million in revenue and no big organization. I've got another one that's really small. It's a seed stage. Right. I got one that does million dollar deals. I got other ones that do high velocity deals. So and you can you can learn from each of those and pull in strategies or pull in playbook. or you know different tests that you've run so I think it's a big advantage for companies who hire fractionals and fractionals themselves.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's like you're just building more tools in your tool belt sort of thing to pull out at any point. So Brandon, before we actually dive into all the questions I wanna ask you, I wanna actually just sort of level set on what ABM means to you because I think sometimes we all have different definitions of it. And sometimes I hear marketers that I sort of think, wasn't that just targeted account demand, gen versus-
Brandon Redlinger: Exactly. Yeah.
Brandon Redlinger: Yeah, right.
Mandy Hornaday: So in the context of what we're speaking about today, how would you define, how do you feel, like what is the true definition of ABM as a strategy to you?
Brandon Redlinger: Yeah, good question. I like It really has to be a strategy that supports your overall business goals and not just the campaign. So and what does that actually mean? That means an entire different go to market motion. And for it to make sense for you, it really has to be a defined set of target accounts that you care about mostly. And then you're doing more personalized, relevant and timely outreach to those accounts. I don't think it has to be any more complicated than that. Now, where I think people do get where people complicated more than any other place is the number of accounts. And that's when it gets to, is this ABM or is this just demand gen and we're doing demand and just smarter the way we should be doing demand gen and right like it's a spectrum and I think it's slightly different for every company. But the those companies that do those larger deals that have a smaller more defined TAM. That's when ABM really makes
Mandy Hornaday: Okay. And then what about like one to many, one to ABM Lite or one to few and one to one? Like how do you see those show up too? Is one like, is that just targeted account demand gen or?
Brandon Redlinger: Yeah. I really think with AI, like that one too many almost becomes your demand gen. Like this is what demand gen was supposed to be and this is what it really should be these days instead of just anyone and everyone in our team. It's doing it smarter. It's doing it much more targeted. I think that's just, technology and especially AI lets us scale these sorts of things. We couldn't do it before just because we were limited with resources and just it wasn't, you we didn't have the tools to actually do it, but now that we can, it's almost become, yeah, your one to many, it's just demand gen now.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. Well, and I saw you had posted recently on LinkedIn and actually preparing for this episode, Exit Five had just resurfaced your interview. I think you might have done it in 2023, but they actually just republished it. David said like, oh, a lot of it's still relevant. So I was listening to it knowing that I was going to talk to you. And then I saw on your LinkedIn that you had mentioned there were some cringeworthy things that you used to say or believe about ABM that maybe aren't true today. what, what in your mind, what has
Brandon Redlinger: Yeah.
Brandon Redlinger: You
Mandy Hornaday: What have some of those big changes been or how has your perspective changed around ABM?
Brandon Redlinger: Yeah, think it, two things I think really have changed mainly with AI and it really has to do with, I think it's just what we've been talking about is where you do draw the line. Right, like it used to be everyone, and it's not a hard and fast rule, but the general rule of thumb was like, if your ACV is 50K or more, that's when ABM works, right? I've seen companies making ABM work where it's 10K, right? And... again, getting into semantics, but is that really ABM or is it demand? I mean, sure, in the sense that you have a defined target, a defined list of accounts, and then you're moving through those at a higher velocity, and you have a system for dispositioning them out and then getting new ones in and refreshing them, that sort of thing. And you have you have a dedicated team doing this. That's Yeah, that's my biggest change. And the other part of that, it goes along with it. But it's It's personalization, right? Now there's a right way and a wrong way to do personalization, but we can now personalize that scale, putting that in air quotes, personalize that scale much easier now with AI. And I think there's a lot of tools out there that promise that. Now, does it actually do a good job? It entirely depends on your data and how you set it up and what that actually means. But for me, the golden rule has always been, the magic formula, I should say, is always personalization, relevance, and timeliness. And I think if one of those is off, it can throw off your entire messaging and then how it lands. But I always thought, like, people that are like,
Brandon Redlinger: Brandon, we root for the same hockey team or we went to the same school. Sure, that's personalized. You can't turn around and say the exact same thing to you, right, Mandy? Because you probably don't want to talk to you. You don't care about the abs, right? So that's the personalization part. But how do you actually tie that? How do you make that relevant?
Mandy Hornaday: Great.
Mandy Hornaday: Right.
Brandon Redlinger: And the bottom line is that's not really relevant. So let's make let's let's have the personalization related to actual business objectives and things you care about and things that your company cares about and people like you care about. And then the timing part of it. If you're doing really big deals and it's really infrastructure that you're selling, you might be locked in on a three plus year contract. And if you get the person wrong time there. Sorry, you're not going to be in another deal cycle for another year or two. Right? And those are much longer sell cycles. And then again, that gets tricky. How do you know when the contract is up? And if there are 12 months cycles, when do you actually start to reach out again? So I think that there are a lot of different things that go into the equation. But yeah, generally, that's how I think about it.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. Well, and so super hopeful. And if we step back and we sort of peel out maybe targeted account demand gen or doing ABM at scale and we stick to the high touch, maybe it's one to one, maybe it's one to few strategy, who is that right for? I know you had said maybe 10K, but maybe 10K is associated to a targeted account demand gen. Where are you seeing, I guess, where should marketing leaders consider or how should they evaluate whether this is a strategy that could be helpful for them and worth the investment.
Brandon Redlinger: Yeah, like, yeah, for me, it's like really true ABM is when your reps have less than 20 accounts to go after. And I think I would start with there and the I see it still today. I saw it 10 years ago when we were doing ABM that the What's the word guys are like, but like the the the want that people Always have is I want more accounts. I want more I want more and when you have more it's hard to actually focus and Some of the best companies that I've worked at have that focus and some of the best reps within those companies have the best focus. When I was at Engagio, did a really good job at this, at Engagio. We had something that was called entitlements, and there was SLAs on the other side of that. for example, every target account has to have a personal touch, not a Marketo touch, an actual personal touch. Your key stakeholders, once a week, at least once a week, right? So you have all these things that have to happen against them. Your lead response time has to be within three hours, business hours, that sort of thing. So if you can't meet all of these demands or all of these SLAs, then you have too much. On the other side of that, we have resources dedicated to them. So we call them account entitlements, but think of it as things that you can do against the account. So for example, tier one could be you have $500 or $1,000 worth of direct mail per account per month. And then at your lower, you know, less value accounts, or if it's your one to many, it's 50 or whatever that is, right? So you have a, you're specifically breaking up your resources across your accounts and you can say these are all the things that you can do. So it's, you know, on the one hand, it's you have to do these specific things for your SLAs. And then the other thing is, these are all of the resources that you have available to you. And another example is if it's a tier one account, you get executive alignment and executive workshops and executive support. If it's a one to many, it's director level support and workshops, that sort of thing. And if you find that your reps are using two of your 10 entitlements, then it's okay, maybe either the entitlement wasn't right. again, going back to you have too many accounts and you have too many things that you need to be doing against these accounts. And then of course, you have to make the math the actual business economics work too. have to add and that's a little tricky because if you're just getting an ABM program up and running, you don't have a baseline for conversion rates and value, velocity, volume and conversion rates across the whole funnel. So it's really hard for you to say, I expect in this amount of time, this many deals to close worth this amount. So it's hard to forecast that. But if you've been doing it for two, three cycles now, you start to get a sense for that and then you can say in order for us to hit these revenue targets which contribute to the overall revenue that we expect from ABM, these are the things that have to happen. We have to have this many accounts. And then you can start to say, right, how do we start to incrementally increase conversion rates at this step of the funnel so that we can have 5% increase in our revenue from target accounts this quarter or whatever it is.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. This idea of entitlements is so interesting because it almost frames it as like incentives, if I'm thinking about it correctly. Like you're incentivizing sales to do these things that usually maybe we're forcing them to do. But I'm curious, like in that scenario with tier one accounts where you're giving, you're dedicating spend and resources for a sales rep to take advantage of,
Brandon Redlinger: Mm-hmm.
Brandon Redlinger: Yeah.
Mandy Hornaday: Is it up to them to take advantage of those things or is marketing also driving things in the background or are they just supporting once they've served up the list to say, hey, AE, you can choose any of these 10 things. Tell me more about that because I think it's a really interesting approach.
Brandon Redlinger: Yeah. So my one change that I've made to this in the last, probably just year to be honest, and it really is taking a more data-driven approach to this. So early I did engage with it was, yeah, here just all the things. The exercise was let's list out all of the resources and then break them up accordingly so that we don't go over budget. But at the same time, I want to make sure we're not under, but I never want to underspend. If you underspend and you don't hit your number, then that's a bad thing for you as a marketing leader, right? So if I'm direct mail gets this amount, like I want to make sure people are actually using direct mail in that instance and make it as easy as possible for them to now be using up all their budget in direct mail. And these days it can be a much more programmatic way to do something like direct mail. But other things like executive alignment, executive workshops, it's more, okay, this is available to you. But now with more data and better attribution, we can say, actually, if you do an executive workshop at this stage of the funnel, your likelihood of closing this deal goes up by this much. So you read, I'm gonna give you that information, you do with it what you want. And of course, if they're smart, they're gonna say, yeah, you're right. Let's make sure I'm working in the executive workshop. or this type of touch at this stage of the buyer journey.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. interesting. Okay. So let's go back to someone has validated that they've got high ACVs or high deals. They think that this is the strategy for them. They've got a
Brandon Redlinger: Yeah, small or TAM, like more clearly defined TAM.
Mandy Hornaday: Clearly defined TAM, okay. And then they have a dedicated sales team that has a manageable amount of accounts. It sounds like 20 or less, just generally would be your kind of rule of thumb or has that even changed with?
Brandon Redlinger: No, no, I think for true ABM, like honestly for for real true ABM like that, I think things have changed less. because it's a lot more built on relationships that you have to that you're building at that level. Right. And you can't automate a relationship. You can't use AI for a relationship. And even if you could, I think that would break the trust between you and the buyer. So it's a lot more high. It's a risk. So I really wouldn't want to automate the relationship. There are things we can do to automate the, you know, the the operations side so that you're a reminder to go do these certain things or here's all of the research I've done for you now you still got to use that human judgment. So this is where the like, know, human in the loop kind of comes in and I have some some mixed feelings about human in the loop to be honest when we're talking about AI, but I think it's really important here. I think there are other times we overuse human in the loop, but I think here, those high value relationships, it's very important.
Mandy Hornaday: Okay. Okay. So as I'm even just thinking myself, I think one of the things that we're always as marketing leaders struggling with is capacity. And so I think that to me is one of the biggest humps to overcome with ABM because it feels like you're spending a lot of energy on very specific accounts. And so I'd be curious, like in that scenario, you've got, maybe you've got five AEs, they all have 20 accounts from a marketing leader's perspective.
Brandon Redlinger: Yeah.
Mandy Hornaday: How are you approaching that? you gonna start and pilot with one AE and work across their 20 accounts? Are you gonna start with maybe five accounts within an AE's 20 accounts? how have you seen, where marketing teams don't have a function built dedicated to ABM, how can they kind of get this going and not overcommit, but still get something meaningful out of the test, I guess, is what I'm trying to.
Brandon Redlinger: Yeah, okay, good. Yeah, this is a good one. So here's what I see a lot and I'm sure you see too is we just happen to close a few big ABM, like big logos for big deals, right? Like we should do ABM. And then all of a sudden it's the thing that you have to do or the board tells them, why don't you just go do ABM? Well, you have to prove it out first, right? Like you can't just now all of a sudden. spin up ABM and then now you're doing ABM. The other thing, there's so many mistakes that people make along the way. It's like, okay, where do I go? Okay, here's another really big one that I've seen happen all the time is we need to do ABM. Let's take our best sales rep and turn that rep into an ABM rep. And then they've never done ABM before. They don't know the motion. They don't actually, they don't know how to do the deep relate. they're not built on relationships. It's the wrong rep to be doing ABM with. Now you just lost your best SMB rep or what you know, you just lost one of your best reps and they're flailing trying to do ABM and they don't have the right support to do it. And then now your ABM fails and you just lost your best rep. So I think this way this is where either agencies or fractionals can come really come in is they're gonna lead your ABM. You haven't justified the full investment in ABM yet, but let's actually test it. But it goes back to let's have a really strong hypothesis. Let's use actual data. it one account that we just randomly ran into closing that made the team think they can do ABM? Or is there actually a little bit more data behind? Yes, we've actually won more accounts like this. Here's the threshold. Here is... hypotheses on why it works and then let's actually be thoughtful around selecting their accounts because the other thing too is yeah maybe big name account comes in and okay you're right that was one-off but there's a smaller subset of this you know these bigger accounts that we can go after or maybe it's an industry and maybe it's not like billion dollar companies it's 500 million dollar companies okay that that probably still works for you right but the the mistake
Brandon Redlinger: that I see people make there is it's more of a wish list. I would love to have Google and Amazon, AWS as customers. Let's just put them in account list. It's not a wish list. It doesn't work like that. Let's, again, use data to verify that they look like accounts that actually look like customers that have a high probability to buy from us, to close. yeah, so I know that was a lot, but there's, yeah, there's so many ways that this goes wrong that I think can easily be avoided if we just slow down, if we're really thoughtful and we're using more more data and not just CEO or board says we need to do ABM because ABM's hard or because we just closed the big deal.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah.
Mandy Hornaday: Mm-hmm. Well, and so what do you feel like are key markers or green flags for an ABM pilot then? Where would you encourage people to, how would you encourage them to start to prove concept?
Brandon Redlinger: I would. Yeah, well, yeah, I would would start with just doing a full close won analysis and a close loss analysis. And I might have talked about it on Dave's podcast. Now that I think about it, but like getting CS involved, I'm really big on that. And I still think that that's a big miss for people because your quote unquote best accounts might be the biggest deals, biggest revenue for your company, but they might also at the same time, and be the biggest resource suck for your company. Right? And that's why I want that's why I really want CS involved in that. And there are other things that they can see behind the scenes too for like onboarding companies that get onboarded have these types of things in common that pre-sales really might not necessarily see or think of or onboarding is quicker or more successful. Those sorts of things. Again, I want to get them involved so that I make sure it's successful across the entire company. And I might have mentioned this on Dave's podcast too, but even implementation, making sure your software supports these large accounts. So if you close a big account,
Brandon Redlinger: But then later on, you find out that you don't have security or certain compliance or anything like that. Or the resources to onboard. I think I talked about this at Dave's podcast, but it was I was at a company we closed a big name account. They never got onboarded, not even remotely close to being onboarded. One quarter in, they realized that it wasn't going to happen because of certain things that we didn't foresee in presales. abandoned it entirely. For us, there was a huge chunk of our revenue. For them, was like chump change. It was like, you know what, not worth our time spending, not worth our team spending any more time trying to implement this because we know it's not going to work. So the best thing we got out of that was we were able to throw their logo on our website for one year and that's it.
Mandy Hornaday: Wow. Yeah, I think there's so much we can learn even about ICP and targeting overall from our CS function for sure. Not just the rules. Yeah.
Brandon Redlinger: Mm-hmm.
Brandon Redlinger: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they have so much more insight than we give them credit for because it's yeah, it's not just about can we close the deal? It's can they be successful? Can they actually stick around? Can they expand? Will they be champions for us? We have to think about all of that. But sometimes I think on the pre-sale side, we only think about can we close this deal? Can we actually, yeah, can we use this logo, that sort of thing? But as a marketing leader, it's up to us to make sure it makes like a business economic sense.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, well, and one of the things, one of the areas I've seen ABM in terms of like us considering it or going after it is actually for expansion because we're in these large accounts, but maybe we only have a very small portion of the pie. And so I don't know if you've like, if that's a good place to start, if you're trying to prove out concept and value or build the motion, but I know for me that's, definitely been, I think the place my mind goes to of like, that would warrant ABM for me. And that could just be my world.
Brandon Redlinger: No, think that's another great one. Yeah, 100%. 100%. I mean, do a white space analysis. And then if there's a lot of opportunity that you see there, I think it's a great way to do ABM, not necessarily is it for NetNew or is it for that. I think they can be done separately. Yeah, they're not mutually exclusive. But yeah, 100%. I worked at a company where we had that a multimillion dollar deal and we could sell more products into that company. We could also sell the same product to other business units there. And that was actually the biggest opportunity for us. And what we did, we couldn't use their website. We couldn't use their logo on our website. We can do any case studies, but we can actually do case studies for them internally to send to other business units. So that's what we did. We hired a video crew. went in, we had our champion do a full case study, we wrote it up, we did some videos, and then now we could send that to them internally. So it wasn't anything that we could put on the website, but we had one dedicated person for that. And their entire job was to make sure that they were successful and did expand into that account. They didn't touch any other accounts. They didn't do any other work outside of working with just that one, one client of ours. And that was that was one of those where it just kind of we stumbled into it. They closed and ended up being a multimillion-dollar account. We need someone to help make sure that they are successful. there's a lot of other opportunity here. So it wasn't just, I let some more accounts like that. It was we can actually sell way more into the same account, a lot more. And again, that we identified other business units being the biggest opportunity. And that's what we ended up doing.
Mandy Hornaday: Awesome. Well, and I love your, I love the point about doing the case studies and the videos and stuff so that they can circulate in their own company. What else works? Because sometimes I think people just think ABM like, okay, we're just going to go send a bunch of outbound email or maybe like invite them to an event. what are you feeling like, what are you seeing that is actually, what is that list of menu options, if you will, and what's working today in 2026?
Brandon Redlinger: Yeah.
Brandon Redlinger: Well, you what's coming back is events. events are big again right now. And I think there's a few reasons why, but I think people are getting a lot better at events. And I'm a big event person myself in delivering great experiences to people. And I think that's how you get in front of lot of executives, but it's gotta be the right event and you gotta put the right resources into it. But also like a lot of people are working remote or hybrid these days and they don't get a chance to go meet. people in person and I think there's just really something about like Yeah, spending time with people outside of like the natural work environment where you get to, know, the guard comes down a little bit and you get to be a little bit more real with them. And I mean, my favorite is having those having those dinner experiences, because I think there's just something about breaking bread with people that just connects you at a at a different level. And I think the same goes with like culture building within your company, those companies that are fully remote. There's nothing like getting together, having an offsite and know, bread and spending time with people in the evenings and getting to know people, right? Like that's how you build relationships and it's all about building that relationship. So I'm really big on that right now.
Mandy Hornaday: Okay, okay. And I heard you say direct mail. Is that still a strategy that is working today that you think or yeah?
Brandon Redlinger: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I think the overall, again, it's gotten much easier to do direct mail at scale these days, but the direct mail that still really works is the direct mail that's personalized and that's relevant. Actually, relevance matters less here. It's personalized. I'll give you a story back when I was at Engagio. One of our SDRs found out that a buyer at our target account that he was trying to break into really loved stress balls for whatever reason he went out he he on amazon he got some very unique stress balls and sent the stress balls to him and that meant a lot for that particular person and he got the meeting $10 worth of stress balls on Amazon that he found and, know, Sendoso makes it really easy to just buy and send and, you know, get the track back to your CRM. And we got that because it was not big, fancy, expensive gift. was personalized because he, the SDR did his research to find out that he really was into stress balls, right? The personalization piece works. So, and also,
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah.
Brandon Redlinger: So like. On the other side of that, if you are sending a lot of swag, it's just gotta be good quality swag. I think that's what people want more than anything. Good quality swag doesn't necessarily have to have, and it probably shouldn't have, your logo on it. Big front and center loud logo. People really don't care about the logo. They just care about the swag, and every time they wear it or see it, sure, it reminds you of them, but it doesn't have to have the big logo to remind you of them. But when people send me swag, and it might be cool, but if it's not quality, I'm not gonna wear it.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so events, direct mail, some good stuff. I think a lot of experiences.
Brandon Redlinger: Yeah, yeah, think it's experiences, right? Experiences and relationships. Like it's all about building the relationship at the real ABM, the true one-to-one enterprise ABM level.
Mandy Hornaday: Okay. So how are you seeing, I know you had mentioned it's a great opportunity to bring in like a fractional to drive this. Where, like, are you finding that there are very specific ABM roles? Are you finding that the existing marketing org absorbs it within their existing roles? Like, guess how structurally, in terms of how to get the work done and get it done well, what do you see that works and where do you see it fail?
Brandon Redlinger: Yeah.
Brandon Redlinger: Yeah, again, for for true ABM. Well, I think for any ABM these days, I'm seeing a lot more like of this GTM engineer role come up. And I think it can be very, you know, it's very powerful for both. But it's just the idea that someone who's a little bit more technical is coming in and looking at like, I think it's, I almost think it's the next evolution of kind of like, a mix between growth hacking and revenue operations. That's, that's kind
Mandy Hornaday: Mm-hmm.
Brandon Redlinger: how I see it, right? It's someone who's a little bit more revenue focused using the systems and building more repeatable, repeatable systems with the tools and technology, either that they have available to them or that are out there that we should procure and start using. So I think that the GTM engineer role, bless you, is going to be a lot more relevant and helpful for just your go to market in general. And I think a like Clay, example, like I'm a big Clay user, they're integrating AI into a lot of the things that they're doing. So whether it is using their Clay agent, their AI web scraping agent, or they're integrating other tools so they can do the personalized emails at scale, because they now have a native sequencer, or you can, you know, you can write the personalized snippet and then push it to your Gong, Gong Engage, or your SalesLoft, or outreach or whatever you're using. So but yeah, a lot of that is can be now architected by this GTM engineer role. And then again, it it and also like account research, like all of that stuff. So that the reps are spending a lot less time doing those, you know, more manual tasks, and they're spending more time building relationships and actually selling Yeah, there was this line that always stuck with me from the, I think it was from the book From Impossible to Inevitable by Jason Lemkin and Aaron Ross. And I think it was Aaron Ross who was saying, reps are like airplanes, they make money when they're in the air, right? And how can we make sure that our reps are in the air more, actually doing selling activities? Again, the GTM engineer role can help make sure your reps are in the air more.
Mandy Hornaday: Awesome, awesome. Okay, wow. I knew that there was, saw, gosh, it must've been like six months ago at this point where it seemed like everyone was talking about the GTM engineer role and then it kind of went away. I haven't seen, and of course now, at least from my, at least it could just be my LinkedIn feed that it went away from, but now of course now it's like the good AI engineer role. Yes.
Brandon Redlinger: I think Claude has just taken over your LinkedIn feed, that's all. It just got drowned out by all the Claude Code noise. That's probably why. I think you're right, I see less of that and I'm guilty of that as well. I write about Claude more than anything else now.
Mandy Hornaday: Exactly, exactly.
Mandy Hornaday: So Brandon, back to, guess, one of my questions, obviously with ABM, if you're truly doing it with a really large enterprise account, it's probably, you your sales cycle might be anywhere from 12 to 24 months before you actually see whether this works in the long run. So what are kind of the green flags along the way that you would encourage people to keep an eye on to say like, yes, let's keep going. This is a strategy that's working and will eventually even if it takes a year or two to see a closed deal.
Brandon Redlinger: Yeah, good question. it's for me, it's, mean, having your systems and having all of your data set up properly so that you can measure and you can start to do attribution. And it's not full funnel attribution. I'm really big on stage based attribution. So again, going back to value, volume, velocity and conversion rate across each stage of the funnel. And then, then you can actually start to see, right, what are the things that are actually working to move the account from one stage to another.
Mandy Hornaday: Mmm.
Brandon Redlinger: and then you can look at, okay, is my time in stage increasing? And overall, is it increasing? Or maybe you're segmenting and based on territory or based on rep, it's increasing. And then you can go in and you can dig a little bit more. I'm also really big on campaign based attribution as well, because there a lot of things that go into campaigns and you put budgets into campaigns, not necessarily just budgets into channels. I think the traditional way to think about it is just budget by channel. But if we're being realistic here, what we're doing, like it's never isolated. The campaign is never isolated to an individual channel. So I think about doing campaign or attribution at a campaign level. So once we start to apply the campaigns to the different stages of the funnel, we can now see again, what's actually effective at moving companies from one stage to another. How can we start to move them faster? And the dollar value of those opportunities So again, value, volume, velocity and conversion and value of course only comes into the equation after it becomes an opportunity because usually you only assign a dollar value to an opportunity after it becomes an opportunity and not beforehand, right? So yeah, that's how I think about just kind of making sure things are on track so that the 12-month sales cycle is still 12 months, not. Our hypothesis was 12 months, but in reality it's 18 months and now we're to be short by the end of the year and me, my marketing ass is on the line.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. I love that. I love that. I don't think I've ever, maybe I haven't thought about doing it like that or tracking. mean, of course to do stage-based tracking, but not to sort of look and say, okay, is our hypothesis working? Let's look at, you know, let's just look at it in this bite-sized chunk while we're waiting for the full timeline to kind of come into effect. think that's a great, that's a great approach.
Brandon Redlinger: safe place at a time.
Brandon Redlinger: Yeah, and then I'm not really big on like overall activity metrics. But again, I think activity metrics from a rep perspective can be helpful to start to connect the dots on how to start increasing value, volume, velocity and conversion across those stages. So yeah, I used to be really I used to hate on activity metrics big time. But now I'm like, okay, there's something here. Right? Like if reps are hitting their numbers and everything is great. You care less about the activities that they do themselves in the number of activities. But if it's thoughtful and like overall emails, I don't care that much, but all right, like, but touches per account. like it does start to play a role. The other really interesting thing that I've been trying to do and doing with some success that I think might be, I don't know, I really haven't put this out there yet, but this is the first time I was talking about it, but it's, the idea is sentiment analysis by account over time. And sentiment analysis has
Mandy Hornaday: you share.
Mandy Hornaday: Okay.
Brandon Redlinger: been one of those things that you could do in emails, or you could do just like on a call and like, you know, Gong could do sentiment analysis. But now that with AI tools and overall, you know, actual systems, and you can patch it together using Claude Code, it's you're looking at sentiment from all of the different touches. And then you're looking at it over time. And
Mandy Hornaday: Okay.
Brandon Redlinger: then you can use AI to build your sentiment model. And then you can actually also look at it by the contact, at the contact level. yeah, and you know.
Mandy Hornaday: Okay.
Mandy Hornaday: Give me an example, a contact what says something negative like I don't want to work with you guys and then they say that via email and that's.
Brandon Redlinger: Yeah. even get more granular than that. But okay, so now, you know, I can hook up Claude Code into my email, call transcript, first party engagement data, where they actually do it on the website, you can even do the third party, third party intent data. So now you have a bigger picture of things, and then Claude can now synthesize all of that unstructured data, and it can actually give you a sentiment score. And again, build use, you can use Claude Code to build the sentiment model to give view that sentiment score, which then you can tie to purchase likelihood and then tracked over time. And I think there's value in sentiment analysis itself again, but it's even more powerful when you start to see what the changes are over time. So say you're tracking an account and you notice like fewer executives are engaging with your content, but the technical buyers are now and the technical buyers are ramping up over And it and that shift can tell you some certain things or maybe it deals moving from exploration to implementation and maybe it's stalled in procurement and that sentiment data now combined with who's engaging can start to tell you what you should do next. Because that's the thing we care about more than anything is, OK, you have the data, but what should we do next? So you can start to see, OK, maybe they're not as engaged here. Maybe it's a good thing. Maybe it's not. But that sentiment can tell you, OK, maybe we should put a little bit more energy into executive alignment with the, not the economic buyer, not your champion, but maybe it's the technical buyer. And again, this does rely on data and systems doing things like.
Brandon Redlinger: web de-anonymization and then tying that to the account and then making sure all those are, all your cookies are all tracked back into the same, you know, kind of command center so that all of your data gets pulled in. And then again, using something like Claude or AI to take all that unstructured data, make sense of all that data and then give you that score. So this is, Like I think I've got a basic model working and how can we actually start to scale this? I think there's, I don't know, maybe call me crazy, but maybe that's where some ABM measurement might be going.
Mandy Hornaday: Wow.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, no, it's interesting. And I just have to ask your opinion now, because as you're building this, one of the things that's interesting to me is when I think about AI and the power that Claude Code has, do you feel, because everything you just talked about feels like it could also be a tool that someone could buy if they're doing it. Yeah, right. You could build software if you wanted to. But how are you, are you, it sounds like you're obviously quite comfortable with Claude Code. So maybe in your world, you would just build everything as opposed to buying. But I guess I just would love your, your opinion on whether you think, what would, will you still invest in tools because it, someone's thinking about the architecture and the infrastructure and actually managing it over the long run? Or do you think that we will all end up just becoming Claude Code experts?
Brandon Redlinger: Yeah, no, I think the former I'd like I'll happily buy this because what happens is like the API changes or they upgrade the model and now you have to or like the way that they do things on the back end change and now I have to go troubleshoot that and figure that out and I don't want to have to manage software and then once I do this for you know one company I got to do it for all the other companies too that I'm working with and I don't want to have to do that so I don't I haven't seen that sort of thing available yet and it's like okay I think I can build this let me go build this but I do think eventually someone will probably be able to do that. And I would be happy to buy their software and me not have to build it and maintain it. And I think that in general is kind of the feeling that I get with most solutions there. mean, sure, anyone can build like a point solution and maybe replace simple point solutions, but at the systems level, Like I don't think people are just gonna build their own CRM, right? And now all, and Salesforce is like, I think there are a lot of companies trying to do AI native CRMs, but like that's hard work to like actually maintain all that and build it and support all your customers doing it. So probably big companies that have a lot of money and resources can hire teams to start to build that stuff in house. But most teams I don't think are gonna be doing that. They're gonna be like me, play with it. and then maybe eventually when something is available, buy it.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, yeah, no, thank you for that perspective. I'm just trying to learn as much as I can right now. And it's always fun to hear how other people are thinking about things. well, Brandon, has been great. Is there any final tips or advice or things, pitfalls you would recommend people avoid when it comes to ABM that maybe we haven't talked about yet?
Brandon Redlinger: good question. biggest, gosh, this is so basic still, but I still see so many people not really following this, I'm tired of talking about the sales and marketing alignment, but it's still so true. I've got two clients right now where it really is a siloed. you know, sales marketing is still relatively siloed. Now, they're getting in the room and they're still talking, which is good, but not sufficient, not enough. Right. And it still is like, okay, I'm leading marketing, we have a plan. Here's the plan. I'm gonna lay it out for you. This happened twice recently. And then then sales is like, great, we're doing ABM. Here's the plan. I agree. And then next week, it's like, here's our target accounts. I decided for us Like, whoa, wait, that goes against the plan that we just agreed on. you know, and it's still just siloed. I think sales isn't using marketing enough or using them how they should be because again, marketing has more of the tools, the technology, the data to be doing a lot of this to make sure that the foundation is set up and the structure is set up right for you to succeed. So it's, yeah, it goes back to sales and marketing alignment. It's on the leaders themselves to make sure they're aligned. And honestly, point the finger more at the CEO than anyone else, because I think a lot of it just stems from different incentives. And by incentives, I mean the way they're paid. What's going to incentivize someone more than anything else? It's the money that you put in front of them. So if they're incentivized on deals and you're incentivized on meeting set, you're obviously going to be very misaligned. the closer you can align incentives and set up your incentive structure correctly in the
Brandon Redlinger: beginning and again I think that's more done by the CEO than anyone you can advocate for that as a marketing leader as a sales leader but at the end of the day ultimately the CEO is going to decide what I'm gonna pay my marketer on what I'm gonna pay my sales leader on and if that's not aligned your team is never gonna be aligned
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, an ABM can be a great, in previous companies at least, it's been a great, if you can work with a really great AE, sometimes it's a great, you can almost establish a playbook of how, here's what it looks like when sales and marketing really works together well and we're tightly aligned and show the power to the other sales reps that maybe aren't on board as much.
Brandon Redlinger: Yeah.
Brandon Redlinger: Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, Yeah, totally agree. And I think there's, I think it's a great way to like, prove something out and get get sales excited about doing it. But again, I think, yeah, gosh, goes back to incentives, because for me, it's like, I can get sales as excited as possible, but I have to make sure that I am incentivized on that and I'm hitting my number because I never want, like everyone says marketing has to be so revenue focused and I will be, I will happily be compensated on revenue, part of my company on revenue if I have control over how revenue is actually being, not just opportunities generated, but how revenue is being, and that's part of my, like, challenge with marketers being comped on revenue is I have control up to everything until the opportunity and then I have like no control over it after that. ABM helps that but it's like if I had more control over the training and our methodology and the enablement and the onboarding and the implementation then I'd be more on board with that but most of the time it's just marketing you're incentivized on revenue now but you only have power up to the opportunity. And I feel that's uncomfortable, right? Like I don't have control over a lot of the stuff that actually happens before it actually becomes revenue. So I don't know. It's a challenge that I still face. So I think the idea is right, but the execution of that isn't quite there yet.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah.
Mandy Hornaday: Totally.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, well, you were kind of like mixing. went on one and we were so MQL heavy and we like we're trying to get out of that. It almost feels like we're trying to get out of that world and get to the world that we should be, which is revenue. But we haven't bridged the gap on what that looks like yet. So.
Brandon Redlinger: Yeah, exactly. think MQAs was a good replacement for MQLs just for a little bit, but I think you run into the exact same problems as MQLs. So even companies that have moved to MQAs, think that's outdated. So if you're on the MQA model, better than MQLs, but I still think it's a useless metric, to be honest.
Mandy Hornaday: Agreed. Well, Brandon, thank you so much for the time today. This has been really fun. Learned a lot that I'll take to our own ABM programs that we're about to pilot. if people want to, I'm sure they can follow along. I know you've got a big LinkedIn presence. Is there anything? I think you've also run a newsletter, if I'm not mistaken.
Brandon Redlinger: Yeah, yeah, it's called Stack and Scale, stackandscale.ai. I write a lot about just the things I'm learning, whether it's and I try to give away as much possible to so like my Clay templates that I'm building, I love to give those away. People are like, Brandon, you're crazy. You should just charge for these things. I'm not in it to make the money I want to help. I want to help other marketers as much as possible. there's Clay templates there for ABM. Also, I put out recently, one of my more popular ones now is how I'm using Claude Code. So what IDE am I using? What are the skills I'm using? What MCPs am I hooked up to? What CLIs am I using right now too? So all of that for the recent, actually I published that last weekend. It's already my second most popular post. So yeah, feel free to subscribe to Stack and Scale or just connect with me on LinkedIn. And I'm always happy to help other marketers out.
Mandy Hornaday: Love that.
Mandy Hornaday: I love that. I love that. Cool. Well thanks Brandon. It was so so great to have you. Talk to you soon.
Brandon Redlinger: Yeah, this was lot of fun. Thanks, Mandy.
Mandy Hornaday: Hey.
