Episode #338:
Vlad Berson, Chief Marketing Officer at SOLVE, explains why ABM is an enterprise-wide go-to-market motion, not a marketing program. He outlines the alignment, skills, and long-term investment needed to earn executive trust. He also shows why strong segmentation and buyer relevance create the foundation for sustainable enterprise growth.
“ABM does not save you money. ABM gives you opportunity for bigger returns. For these types of programs to be successful, you have to over-invest in all of the people that are involved.” – Vlad Berson
Vlad Berson shares a practical view of ABM maturity for B2B leaders pursuing larger enterprise opportunities. He explains why organizations must align sales, marketing, leadership, and customer-facing teams around shared account outcomes. The conversation covers executive trust, longer sales cycles, better measurement, stronger segmentation, and the investment required to build a sustainable enterprise revenue motion.
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[Transcript]
[00:00:05] Steve MacDonald: Welcome, everyone, to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspectives. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host. Today, we’ve got a really interesting conversation. We’re talking with Vlad Berson here. Vlad, you and I were talking about this, and we’re going to be talking about ABM maturity, like the scale that most companies are on. You’re so qualified to talk about this.
[00:00:24] Steve MacDonald: You’ve literally launched ABM in three different B2B organizations. It’s one set of learning, actually, to keep ABM up and running. It’s a whole other thing to start it up and define what it is inside the company and everything. Are we actually executing ABM properly, right? Because not every company is. We’re going to break that down and talk about what ABM is, what the maturity scale is, and how we need to think about ABM in terms of how we’re implementing our go-to-market strategy.
[00:00:55] Steve MacDonald: I’m super excited about our conversation here today. You are currently the CMO at SOLVE. I would love to hear a little bit more about what SOLVE is as well. But if you wouldn’t mind, maybe expand a little more on your background before we get started.
[00:01:10] Vlad Berson: Absolutely, and it’s great to be here. I appreciate you putting me on the podcast. Like you just told the listeners, I am the Global Chief Marketing Officer at SOLVE Fixed Income. We’re an AI-driven fixed income data and analytics company. We were doing AI since before AI was cool. And I won’t get into the very weeds of how that works. But suffice it to say, we have clients across the global capital markets industry, on both the buy side and the sell side.
[00:01:35] Vlad Berson: Like you mentioned, I’m a multiple-time CMO, so I was a CMO at a company called HazelTree prior to this, similar to fintech, a New York-based fintech startup in the treasury management and securities financing space. And then I’ve also spent time at much larger firms. So, I was Global Head of Marketing for Capital Markets at Broadridge, and had a couple of other marketing roles there as well.
[00:01:55] Vlad Berson: But really, without giving you the whole resume, my whole career, and you can see by some of the gray in the beard now, it’s a longer career, has always been in financial services, right? So, either on the client side, banks, broker-dealers, asset managers, et cetera, as well as on the fintech side, so the vendors providing technology and innovation into that space.
[00:02:15] Vlad Berson: As we’ve talked about before, sales, marketing, and product management are three legs of a go-to-market stool. I’ve spent time on each of those legs. I’ve owned product. I’ve taken things to market. I’ve been a smiling-down sales guy. For the past several years, I’ve focused exclusively on marketing in this space.
[00:02:31] Steve MacDonald: Well, let’s take that background, which is absolutely amazing, right? Just the fact that you have sales, marketing, and full product go-to-market experience, and then applied that in a B2B world three different times on ABM. You wanted to start our conversation out by talking about just the definition of ABM. So, I’m going to throw that over to you to get us started here. Why did you want to start there?
[00:02:56] Vlad Berson: Because I think there’s a lot of, certainly in my experience and in a lot of folks out there who are in marketing roles that are either coming into, whether it’s a big company, small company, startup, scale-up, enterprise, whatever, nowadays a marketing leader is going to be challenged with, “Oh, and can you do ABM?” Of course, we all say yes because we’re all in the sales and marketing business of ourselves. But the reality is everybody misuses this acronym, ABM, right? Probably more than any other acronym. You ask eight different people what ABM is, you’re going to get nine different answers.
[00:03:25] Vlad Berson: And so, it’s really important to understand what the expectation there is for the leadership that you’re about to join, because everybody has a different, sometimes magic-wand-oriented expectation of what an ABM program is going to do for them. That’s why it’s important to start with basic expectations of what we’re talking about.
[00:03:43] Steve MacDonald: So, I have to ask you, what is your definition of ABM? As we discuss the ABM maturity scale, let’s ground ourselves in a single definition.
[00:03:55] Vlad Berson: Absolutely. I’ll humor you on the podcast by continuing to call it ABM, which is actually, like I said, an acronym that I hate. The M in ABM tends to set the expectation that marketing is going to go off and do something in a corner, and then everybody else will reap magic benefits from it. A modern ABM program is going to be tied to being able to sell in the voice that your clients are expecting. So, that takes many different forms, and I know later on we’re going to talk about the different sort of flavors of ABM programs and different levels they’re at. But ultimately, what these programs are intended to do is to deepen and enrich the relationship that you have with a buyer. And again, in my world, a buyer is typically a person, but at a firm.
[00:04:34] Vlad Berson: We sell in the B2B space. It could be a whole buying group. It could be identifying different types of organizations that you’re going to be selling to. And again, my experience is based on never having come into an organization where it is like, “Here’s how we do ABM, and you could just run this machine.” We need this thing, and you got to go figure it out.
[00:04:50] Vlad Berson: There’s a lot of expectation around it and a lot of conflation of what an ABM program is with what an enterprise sales motion is. A lot of people hear ABM, and they’re like, “All right, cool. So, you’re going to come in, and we’re going to do something totally personalized for client XYZ or prospect XYZ, and we’re going to have a dinner for their executives, or we’re going to have something personalized for them, et cetera.” That may be part of it if the motion warrants it, but there are a lot of different flavors around that. There are a lot of other things you could do that I suspect many companies are already dipping their toe in the water on, if not actively doing. And they may or may not be surprised to hear, like, “Oh, okay. That’s a foundation of an ABM program that’s also accomplishing certain things for us in our selling motion.”
[00:05:31] Steve MacDonald: So, what is the biggest confusion factor that you, or challenge that you have to overcome? You’ve rolled out ABM three different times. One is getting a consistent definition, right? What else is in the way? What is the big challenge that you’ve seen in rolling it out?
[00:05:52] Vlad Berson: The really short answer to that question is going to sound very trite because it’s in, like, every ABM article, and it’s called sales and marketing alignment. But that interlock between the sales team and the marketing team is why I don’t like using the M part of the acronym.
[00:06:04] Vlad Berson: It is more than just having an agreement ahead of time that we’re going to invest in such a program and we’re going to pursue this together. Because everybody’s going to say yes to that. “Hey, sounds great. We’re going to do more stuff. Sounds like marketing’s going to do it. I don’t have to lift a finger, and it’s going to get a more personalized experience for some of our clients.” Nobody’s going to really say no to that. But what that alignment really entails, or really starts with, that I think a lot of people miss, is a real interlock on what the goals of such a program are, right? So, what is it that we’re trying to do, right? And the answer is not get more sales, because duh, obviously.
[00:06:37] Vlad Berson: The answer takes the form of, hey, we have an enterprise account, and we’ve been selling to the users down here at this level, but now we need to build a relationship with the C-suite up here because we want to pursue an enterprise relationship across North America and South America, right? That’s a very different goal than we need a personalized, tailored experience for this particular account to increase our user base and double the number of users or, we have a retention issue, churn risk with a particular client, and we’ve got to make them feel loved and make them feel like we’ve actually evolved the product based on their particular brilliant input, et cetera.
[00:07:10] Vlad Berson: Those are all different goals, right? But if you’re not aligned to that, you’ll have a wonderful marketing program that perhaps isn’t delivering the results the rest of the company expects, right? So the goal of an ABM program shouldn’t be to launch an ABM program. It shouldn’t be about creating a more personalized experience. It should be very well structured in terms of what it is that you’re trying to achieve because, without that, that’s where I see these things, like, fail before they get off the ground.
[00:07:37] Steve MacDonald: So, here’s a weird, but I think a really good analogy. I’ve been doing a lot of work asking LLMs like Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT this question: what do you need for a really good prompt? When we’re asking you to do something, Claude said the pattern it sees is that it only gets two of the six strategic inputs it needs. So, most prompts don’t start out with exactly what you’re talking about at the corporate level, right, just different departments’ level.
[00:08:13] Steve MacDonald: What are we trying to do here? What are we trying to accomplish? And getting that alignment, and to further accentuate the importance of what you’re talking about. So, when you and I first got together, we were on a call and I asked, “What do we want to talk about?” And I asked you this question. I said, “What do you see as the two greatest challenges for creating long-term sustainable growth?”
[00:08:31] Steve MacDonald: So, I’ve asked that of over 125 different C-suite executives now. Number one, by far, is internal alignment; it’s the number one challenge. So, when you say, “How do you launch? What are the challenges around an ABM program?” That’s consistent with the challenges of creating growth within the company overall. Whether it’s ABM or not, we have to align and decide what we’re doing. So, I just wanted to stop and say how important it is. It doesn’t sound trite to me at all. It sounds like one of the most important things that you can do.
[00:09:07] Vlad Berson: Yeah. No, look, I appreciate you saying that. And it’s funny, you just brought up Claude and prompting, et cetera. I just gave what I called a TED Talk, obviously internally, which means, like, “Hey, you all have to listen to me pontificate about stuff.” You know, talking about why marketing here at SOLVE or elsewhere shouldn’t just be measured in demand generation, right? Demand gen is one of our functions. But whether you’re talking about an ABM program or everything else, an ABM program doesn’t take the place of all the other marketing that you’re doing, right?
[00:09:34] Vlad Berson: I kind of walked the team through, what is it, you know, why would we do X, Y, or Z? Why are we going to publish this thing if it’s not producing leads? Why issue a press release? There are no leads that come from that, right? You’re not going to measure success in those areas. And part of that discussion was, to your point, that 94 percent of B2B buyers are now using LLMs as part of their search process to build a shortlist and select vendors.
[00:09:58] Vlad Berson: All right? That doesn’t change just because you’re thinking about targeting a particular account through ABM, right? What it does is actually amplify your challenges around non-ABM things, right? So it’s going to amplify your challenges around content marketing, around thought leadership, around the way you describe your value proposition, because it’s not just about registering once you’re sitting across the table from that executive and being personalized to their particular company.
[00:10:23] Vlad Berson: Claude has to understand it that way, right? And you have to get on that shortlist, right? Your target ABM personalized company, before they ever get into that motion with you, is using ChatGPT and Claude and all these LLMs to even decide who to talk to, right? So ABM doesn’t replace all the other stuff. You don’t get to, like, turn off Google search because you’re doing ABM.
[00:10:45] Steve MacDonald: Absolutely. Absolutely. So, another thing that sounds like, okay, yes, we’re supposed to do that. You talked about an ABM needing enterprise selling skills, right? And I like that because I, yeah, account-based, we use the acronym so much we even forget what each component is. Like, it’s like, “Oh, ABM means marketing.” Maybe it should be ABG, like account-based go-to-market or something. I don’t know. But why do you want to focus on this conversation on enterprise selling skills? And explain that a little bit.
[00:11:19] Vlad Berson: The way that ABM is described is, it’s this very tight interlock with sales and marketing, and that’s certainly true. I think that’s true in general for go-to-market at modern companies. That’s the way that it should work. But however you’re envisioning an ABM program, so the marketing piece of the ABM program, whether it’s one-to-one targeting or creating something experiential or really getting to know such-and-such executive and you get them the T-shirt with their face. At the end of the day, marketing is not sales. So sales still has a role to play, and when you’re building these types of programs in your organization that hasn’t had them before, what you’re actually typically trying to do is you’re trying to change the sales motion from what usually, for a startup or scale-up type fintech company, can be a bottom-up sale, meaning like.
[00:12:02] Vlad Berson: “Hey, we have a better mousetrap. You’re the user. We’re going to sell it to a user. Hey, there are 10 users at this company. That’s great. We’re building, we’re growing,” et cetera. But if you think about the sales part of that and the skills that a salesperson needs, not just the salesperson, everybody sort of non-marketing involved in that. That’s a really different conversation that they need to have versus, “Hey, now I got you in front of the global chief operating officer for this division of this job.”
[00:12:29] Vlad Berson: That is a different skill set, and it’s not easy. It’s not like, “Oh, just do it differently.” I’m not implying that it’s this easy thing to miss. But it is so critical because otherwise, great, now we’ve got you the C-level executive that you want to get in front of, and now they’re interested, and who’s going to be in that room? Who can have that conversation. Because if you just show up and you’re going to do, “Oh, yeah, let me show you a demo of the thing,” and, you know, “It can save you this amount of money,” and, you know, “It costs this.” That’s not the level of conversation that you’re going for as a result of a really targeted ABM program. Certainly not at the enterprise level.
[00:13:01] Vlad Berson: Where I think a lot of investment is missed, or at least a recognition that, “Hey, this is part of what we need to build,” is, “Hey, you have talented, charismatic salespeople who have made a lot of money and built a great career doing it this way. We’re about to change this way.” And how have you enabled them to go and have a very different conversation, different sales motion. Have you thought about things like, I’ll use realistic use cases. If you’re selling a product or service that is bottom-up and has a three-month sales cycle, guess what? You’re not going to sell an enterprise version of that across three different geographies in three months. So all of a sudden, you have a salesperson that, even if they can directly have that conversation, they’re really smart and talented. Cool, now you’re just giving an 18-month sales cycle. Are you changing their comp so they keep getting paid?
[00:13:49] Vlad Berson: Like, how are they measured and compensated by moving that deal forward? So it’s not just a marketing piece of this where you’re doing the M part of the ABM, but how do you actually complete that entire journey? ABM gives you access to a more complex, not a less complex, buyer journey.
[00:14:05] Steve MacDonald: I think what you just highlighted there was the ABM maturity scale. Because when you adopt ABM, what you’re doing is you’re saying, “We’re focusing on big opportunities in the company that don’t happen overnight. They’re going to happen over a very long period of time. And so we have to really develop a relationship.” That relationship has to be built on trust, and we have to have teams that nurture across this. So if our sales team is only focused on this month, this quarter, because that’s the way we’ve compensated them, that’s the way I’m going to operate if that’s the way I’m compensated.
[00:14:48] Steve MacDonald: You just said it at the end there, like, how do we incentivize people to actually be in the game longer? How do we incentivize marketing to take more of the nurturing capability of building the relationship and trust and nurturing? How is sales coming farther down the early stage of developing a prospect, and how do we have marketing come further into that stage so there’s not this gap in the middle? Where marketing wants to flip the lead over, and sales doesn’t want to take it because it’s not mature enough.
[00:15:19] Vlad Berson: Yeah. Look, and then that whole conversation about flipping the lead over and, you know, just had a conversation about conversion rates and MQLs, QL conversion, like the bane of every marketing person’s reporting existence.
[00:15:29] Vlad Berson: When firms are going down the road of, “Hey, we need an ABM program,” part of it is like, “Hey, you’re not going to measure that by MQLs typically,” or certainly not on a monthly basis. It’s when you’re envisioning a one-to-one, we’re going to target this client, in my case, bank or broker-dealer or whatever.
[00:15:47] Vlad Berson: It’s not about, oh, and we have a target goal for how many MQLs to generate, et cetera. So you need to think about how you’re going to measure all this differently. There are different timescales. But there are different measurement mechanisms. So what are you going to measure? One of the things that I’m very passionate about is, especially dealing with certain startups, founders of private equity firms in some cases, who sometimes fall down this trap of, like, “We’ve got to really get sales going. We never needed marketing.” Or, like, you know, the worst is like, “I’m a huge believer in marketing. That’s why I have the kid at the front desk do it, because they’re creative.”
[00:16:16] Vlad Berson: Your salespeople don’t take the place of marketing. These are two very distinct functions, and obviously, I’m a marketing guy, so I’m very passionately advocating about why it’s important. But sales doesn’t take the place of marketing, and marketing doesn’t take the place of sales. So again, when you’re building an ABM program, and the goal you set is, like, hey, great, this is a global enterprise, and we’re in this division of it, but we want to enter this division of it. And that division by itself is a multibillion-dollar company if it were breaking out on its own. Great. The people in charge of that, we can try to get in front of them. We can get in front of those influencers and identify them. But it’s like, hey, look at your CRM. Do you even know anybody on that side of the business? No. Cool. Okay, here’s where marketing can help. We can help find the right people, start building relationships and engagement, and do all the marketing things. But we’re going to sell to them. The sales piece of that doesn’t go away.
[00:17:03] Vlad Berson: So the salesperson who perhaps had some relationships over here or there, they got us into that side of the business. Guess what. All that hard work that you did before ABM, you still have to do it over here with this new thing, and we’re going to help you. We’re going to give you the visibility in there and all that great stuff. But marketing isn’t going to go sell for you, just in the same way that you’re not going to go in and build awareness and credibility for us. So again, that goes back to alignment, but it really goes back to: do the people have the skills to go do that? Do they have the right expectation that they’re going to be required to go and do that to be successful?
[00:17:33] Steve MacDonald: I love it. What you’re describing is an entirely new go-to-market motion where marketing and sales take on additional responsibilities. You and I talked about, and you’ve mentioned it here, executive trust building. In a non-ABM strategy, you might be a SaaS company or something like that, and you’re trying to sell to thousands of small businesses. You’re not developing executive trust programs. But in ABM, you are, and that takes work. And it takes work a long time before that account can maybe be qualified as BANT qualified.
[00:18:09] Steve MacDonald: And so who’s going to be doing that work? That’s that ABM maturity scale that you were talking about. We’ve got different things to do, and it’s going to take longer, and we’re not going to see the ROI immediately. But I talk to CROs every day. They’re like, “Steve, if we’re not out a year in advance creating awareness and trust, when that RFP comes out, or that day-one shortlist closes, we’re not on it. So we have to be out, and we have to be in advance, and we have to be developing trust and relationships.” So who does that in the ABM model.
[00:18:51] Vlad Berson: What a fantastic question, Steve. Unfortunately for some companies, it doesn’t just magically happen. We’re smart enough to get ourselves to this point, so therefore, the rest of this is going to be easy. But the reality is that ABM programs, whether big, small, or medium-sized, don’t save you money. They don’t save you effort. It is all very additive to everybody’s job. As I said before, it doesn’t take the place of broad-based demand gen, et cetera. Part of what you described is like, that motion changes. Building executive trust becomes so critical because the executive that you’re dealing with is very rarely at the point in their cycle where they’re like, “Hey, I need this system. I need such-and-such a system. I want to see the features. What does the reporting look like?” You’re already too late if that’s what you’re trying to capture.
[00:19:35] Vlad Berson: So what you need to establish is that trusted relationship with that executive who, again, if you’re trying to do these kinds of motions, it probably means that you don’t have that level of relationship established anywhere. You need to go and build those. And that level of trust is not about, “Hey, these SOLVE guys, like in my case, man, they’re really smart about showing bids and offers and things like that when you’re looking at the price of a bond.” That relationship that you need to establish is like, “Hey, these guys really understand my business, and it’s good that they have other clients, and that’s part of how they understand my business.”
[00:20:05] Vlad Berson: But the credibility there is not about your product. It’s about, you understand my challenges, whether it’s regulatory, it’s competitive, it’s whatever’s happening. Our CEO retired; now we have a new one, and there’s the usual Game of Thrones bloodbath happening, and you’ve got to be sensitive to that. To establish that relationship where they’re coming to you for, “Hey, let me ask you a question. What do you think about this?” And the this in that question is rarely going to be about your product. It’s like, “What do you know. What are you seeing across the industry?” Being that sort of consultative partner to that target audience is not easy, but it also doesn’t happen overnight.
[00:20:38] Vlad Berson: So I’m fortunate to work, you know, we have a great executive team. My CEO is really great. We still have to enable those people. Like, how do you arm those people, especially if they’re not as lucky as me? How do you arm your CEO to have that conversation and really build credibility? Because it’s not one conversation. It’s an ongoing relationship that you’re trying to build. Marketing has a role to play there. We can give you research and visibility into who you’re going to be talking to. We’re going to give you some tidbits. You know, you, though, whether it’s the CEO or the senior sales executive that’s doing that, or your CRO, whoever is now going to have that conversation, you have to invest in enabling them to do that.
[00:21:16] Vlad Berson: Because to your point, Steve, it’s not an overnight process. It takes a really long time, and for most of the duration of that time, you say, “How’s it going?” The answer is not going, “Yeah, I had some good meetings. We want to talk.” There are no leads; there’s no deal yet. There are no dollars that you can point at on a slide. We’re building the relationship. Hey, we’re getting more engagement from this company, so we have this executive, and we, oh look, we have one layer down. We have these people who are engaged, and this one is down. That takes a really long time. But the reason you do it, as you said, is like, need to get on the shortlist.
[00:21:48] Vlad Berson: Because next year or 18 months from now, when they start to really go down this road, you mentioned the shortlist. Ninety-five percent of vendors that were selected by B2B buyers were on the shortlist on day one. That means if you’re not there, you’re in the 5 percent. You’re fighting against 95 percent. That’s the investment. And it’s not measured in demand gen metrics.
[00:22:09] Steve MacDonald: This is why it’s an educational process. To roll out an ABM program and set expectations, it requires a whole new level of patience organizationally, measuring different things than we’ve measured before, and if everybody’s not in alignment on what we’re doing and the investment we’re now willing to make, because that investment means we’re going to have salespeople that have to be incentivized to work on deals that may not come to fruition for another eight months.
[00:22:44] Steve MacDonald: Now, at the enterprise level, that’s accepted. This is an enterprise deal, of course it’s going to take a long time. But unfortunately, people don’t apply that same thinking onto ABM. If you’re going to go after a particular account, it’s because it’s a bigger fish that you want to land, and then, therefore, if it’s a big enough fish to land, you’re going to invest more in it. It’s going to take more time. You’re going to do things that are different than what you did before. So is that enterprise mentality a good way to set expectations on ABM. Or I’m just trying to get a simple way to think about this.
[00:23:20] Vlad Berson: No, you’re exactly correct. Internally, it’s all like, yes, we’re doing this ABM program, but the recurring meeting about it is not called the ABM meeting. It is called the top-down enterprise meeting. Because we have this kind of bottom-up direct sales motion, and we’re trying to build this top-down enterprise motion through this type of ABM program.
[00:23:35] Vlad Berson: But that is exactly what it is, right? And that’s why I keep coming back to it. It’s not just a marketing thing that happens. You are changing the entire sales motion for this company. And again, you wouldn’t take your superstar sales guy that was literally a rock and roller, selling licenses or whatever you’re selling, and be like, “Magically, this person is going to be good at this top-down enterprise motion, to go sit in a boardroom and talk about something else,” right?
[00:23:59] Vlad Berson: Hopefully, you can develop them that way, right? They have to want to be developed, right? They’re probably doing really well at what they’re doing, right? And it’s not a promotion necessarily, right? It’s just a different body of work. Then they have to be capable of doing that adaptation, right? You could try, and then they’re not getting it, right? So it’s like, great, who is that voice going to be? It’s really easy to be like, “Oh, it’s going to be the sales guy,” right? And then most organizations do it this way. They’re like, “Cool, who was our highest-performing sales guy last year?” Sales guy, or salesperson. “Congratulations, you’re now an enterprise salesperson,” right? And that’s not exactly a one-to-one, right? It’s how do you develop the skills, not just in marketing, but in sales and client success and implementation and support after.
[00:24:40] Vlad Berson: God forbid you win one of these accounts, right? You have to keep it. That changes everything for your post-sale world and support process. All of that is, so when we say investment, it’s not just a money investment, right? Because some of that is hard dollars that you have to spend on skills, technology, et cetera. It’s opportunity cost. You’re typically taking a salesperson away from where they’re making money, which is how they got on your radar to begin with, and putting them in a much longer sales cycle. So now they’re down to zero, and now they’re negative because you have to spend money on them to keep them incentivized and keep them developed, right?
[00:25:10] Vlad Berson: So it’s just, not that it’s wrong to do, but everybody has to have a really sober conversation about what it really takes to get one of these programs up.
[00:25:18] Steve MacDonald: So we’ve talked about a lot, right? And our poor human brains can take about two or three things max at a time and remember. So for all the C-suite executives that are going to be consuming this podcast, if there was one thing that you wanted to make sure that they took away from our conversation, what would that one thing be?
[00:25:41] Vlad Berson: For these types of programs to be successful, you have to overinvest in all of the people that are involved. That’s kind of the bulk of what we just talked about, but that is your marketing people, that is your salespeople, and in both cases, that might require you to bring in different people, and then bring in more people with the right skill set. But it’s the people around that group that also require investment. Again, I use the example of you’re going to use your CEO to have C-level conversations. Perhaps they all think that they’re instantly ready to do that, but you need to invest in a CEO who, of course, is always the smartest guy in the room, so they don’t necessarily like to hear that they need to develop skills. But you need to spend time, money, and resources developing the skills and enablement for everyone involved. ABM does not save you money. ABM gives you the opportunity for bigger returns.
[00:26:31] Steve MacDonald: I love it. The podcast is designed to bring different perspectives, insights, and experiences from across the world and across the C-suite to ask: how do we solve the challenges? How do we grow? And I think what you did today is reset expectations in a big way. If we want to invest, that’s my big takeaway. In addition to the one you said, there are multiple takeaways, right? But one of my biggest ones is you’ve got to have the right expectations and invest in ABM.
[00:27:06] Steve MacDonald: Because if you go in saying, “We’re going to do things with the same team, the same way, we’re just going to call it ABM now. We’re just going to go after bigger companies,” you’re going to fail miserably, right? You better be ready to upskill, bring in new people, invest in putting the time and effort necessarily into those relationships, or don’t start. That’s my takeaway.
[00:27:30] Vlad Berson: No, look, I very much agree with that. If I could give you another illustrative point on how firms can get there, you can’t build on a shaky foundation, right? You take the world’s best AI and feed it crappy data, you’re going to get a crappy output. It’s very difficult to launch and run an ABM program in any company if you don’t understand what markets you’re selling into, if you don’t have a good view of, let’s say, segment marketing, right?
[00:27:52] Vlad Berson: ABM purists will actually describe that as being like one-to-many ABM, so it’s a part of the ABM pyramid or ABM motion. Most of us would just call it, “Hey, no, I know I sell to different segments,” right? It’s past three guys in a garage throwing stuff at the wall to see if it’ll stick. You understand you’ve got to sell to big firms versus small firms, or whatever your particular segmentation is.
[00:28:11] Vlad Berson: If you don’t have a good handle on that, like, no, I understand what my TAM and SAM are. I understand what my ICP is. I understand how to get to those answers, forget about the individual answers, how to get there. Those are all the tools you need to ultimately decide, okay, here’s the company I’m going to target for an ABM program.
[00:28:28] Vlad Berson: But a lot of firms out there are like, “We don’t do any ABM. We need to start.” I’m like, no, you have a pretty good breakdown of different customer segments, and you have different value proposition messaging to them. That is the start of what you need to get there.
[00:28:40] Steve MacDonald: I love it. I wish we could go on for another hour. I just want to say thank you. If you share it this way, and we do that episode after episode, and we have individual nuggets of learning that we’re taking away, then that’s like the rising tide that lifts all boats. And you were completely an amazing part of that rising tide today. I just wanted to say thank you for coming on.
[00:29:00] Vlad Berson: It’s very kind of you to say. Thank you, Steve.