and we are live finally I have been waiting for this webinar forever and we are now live we will give people like a few minutes to get in but we are very excited today for presenting that it's time for sauce to go up market expert panel that we will have today and we have several guests as you can see I'm pointing the wrong way this way we have several guests and we will do interest very shortly I'm just letting people sort of come into our guests that will come to introduction very soon and what we will do now is that we will go into first intros and I will let our guests introduce themselves and then we will dive into some challenges of the markets and we will give some advice the best advice for you guys and then we will have Q&A at the end but from a hygienics perspective in the webinar when you have questions there's a question tab you can put your question in there and if you have questions during the webinar I will either take the question and say it to the experts here or we will wait with that question to the end of the webinar but it depends on what the question is so let's see how good questions you guys can ask today and with that in mind I would like to say hi to our guests and I would also like to do an intro for each of us I will do an intro to start and then I think Marcus should go and then George could go so my name is Sarah Storm I have been in revenue for 22 years now almost 23 I'm getting older it's amazing and I have the last 10-12 years been in SaaS working with companies that provide marketing and sales technology of different kinds I've done all the roles from SDR booking meetings to being an A closing deals to being a VP sales and a CRO and in many of these companies I have seen a lot of different sales methodologies and a lot of different marketing approaches which is very interesting considering the topic today and me and George run a company called break the box we're hosting the webinar today where we support SaaS companies with getting their stuff together for revenue which is challenging in many many ways and so that was all for me I will now hand over to Marcus to do his intro go ahead Marcus yeah thanks very much Sarah so thanks for having me I'm really looking forward to the discussion yeah so now my name is Marcus Stahlberg I'm the CEO of Enrich an account-based marketing platform I've been working with complex sales and marketing like I'd say from you know maybe 20 years or something like that I look at like I'm really like my background is an engineer like but I'm like a wannabe marketer like so I've been like really working with like a lot of a lot of things around marketing like a serial entrepreneur several different companies and like obviously as an entrepreneur like I did a lot of a lot of sales myself and I've been you know witnessing this like gap between sales and marketing like forever in B2B like it just doesn't go anywhere and like I'm really looking forward to the discussion so I'm like Enrich is like so we work with companies who want to go up market so this is like a very good good area or arena to discuss discuss these challenges and issues which we see happening day in day out like it's not just you know the CMOs issue it's also the CEOs and CROs and like the sales leaders so it's really like a company-wide issue and yeah really looking forward to discussing this this topic perfect Marcus thank you so much George let's go ahead let's do that that is me so my name is George I have also been in revenue sales and marketing operations for what is it 20 22 years we we have a panel with over 60 years of commercial experience which I think is I think it's super cool uh quite rare uh that people have their resilience to to stay in that bracket for so long but um yeah I I've also been through all roles from basically from SDR to sales enablement to senior account enterprise sales VP sales CRO uh what have you everything in between uh I've also done B2B sales consultancy uh in this is the second time now with um break the box and also part of what we do with companies is exactly uh ABX or ABS and ABM uh set up exactly because there is a big need for uh specifically for SAS companies but in the market in general to go upstream in order to move us close to mid segments uh up to Enterprise as possible um given the shape of the markets uh I'm super interested in discussing the the sales and marketing collaboration I've been in many many many management meetings where I have been the very traditional uh very annoying uh commercial responsible VPCL CRO uh that says to marketing we don't you know the leads are yet you're not giving us anything uh the campaign is not working for the last month we need to put it down stuff like that uh but there is uh I understand the last five years there is a lot more nuance to this uh and as Marcus said account based sales or an account based approach to your revenue is uh it used to be a competitive advantage a few years ago and now it's becoming more of a do or die situation as the as we progress so looking forward to that and uh that's me thank you so much and I would like to add a thing I just realized when we're sitting in this webinar now live that maybe not everyone knows what account based sales and marketing is either that's a definition question right so I think that we should give a definition here and I will let Marcus do the definition on the marketing side so account based marketing from his expertise working with customers doing this on the marketing side and then me and George will come in with a definition of ABS or account based sales because these two obviously need to work together but there are a few separators or differences between these two approaches even though they should be run parallelly so I'm going to hand it over to you Marcus to take the definition of account based marketing and we start by educating our audience first before we dive into this well this is a super uh tricky one uh because there are many definitions of what ABM means um I'll I'll let George define ABS in more detail and I'll I'll try to define the like kind of the big picture here because I don't uh personally I don't I don't really um kind of see that um well let's put it this way so you have you have this school of people who look at account based marketing as a marketing tactic so or or like a channel or or like more like a kind of something that happens within marketing in terms of like targeting specific just one or a few specific accounts with very like tailored personalized uh campaigns and content and uh like with with multiple channels this is like a good strategy in a good good approach in general but uh that's not what I would call uh ABM because ABM um in my view is a go-to market strategy and actually like um account based marketing is uh like probably not the right word for that you should use account based go-to market or ABX uh like for it rather and again I'm not going to go to the sales part of this but like generally ABX or account based code market consists of account based marketing and account based sales and just very briefly what account based marketing from marketing perspective means is that like you need to have a very clearly defined ICP and this doesn't mean ICP meaning like a company like definition like which kind of companies you want to get business with you know during the next two years or so and this can be some kind of wishy-washy like let's let's just invent something but really that you know we commit to uh like uh targeting these accounts for like and investing to these accounts like uh you know tens of thousands like uh per month or or like per year uh whatever so so it's it's a super important thing like to define it properly and then like align basically your entire marketing process around those accounts so um you know it might be a thousand accounts it might be a two thousand accounts and then like you know everything else kind of becomes noise uh within this this motion so you don't care about like let's say you have 100 000 visitors on your website you don't care about those you know like at rest apart from these accounts like if they visit visit those so you kind of you should build everything around uh around that that that's what uh ABM at least like in in my definition means perfect George do you want to jump in on the ABX site can I just say one thing before so when we say ABX that means both it means like a full motion right just to clarify so ABS is account-based sales ABM account-based marketing ABX we will have a lot of abbreviations so I just I will do some translation and ICP means ideal customer profile which is a company profile that fits whatever you're selling to the market and of course when we do account-based anything we go even a lot deeper than most companies do today to understand what is the perfect fit accounts for us not just a market share so with that I will hand over to George this way no this way here uh to give us a definition of account basis uh yes so I I first want to start by saying that account based ideal customer profiles uh and all of that sort of segment of terminology are some of the most misunderstood interpreted and most horribly implemented uh strategies that I've ever seen in any in any business I'm not only talking about SAS now I've been we've been at events where we ask people what their ideal customer profile is and they say companies with 5 000 employees this is a company size not an ICP just to just to be clear uh so to define ABS or account-based sales in in a very simplistic manner it's the it's the equivalent it's the it's the exact opposite of spray and pray so it's it's the uh the opposite of uh of volume versus uh over quality uh it's the the new the new way to approach sales moving from the boiler rooms in the 80s where we but three thousand yeses lead to three thousand no's lead to yes like that type of um that type of mentality because you you might think that since it's in the 80s it's not done anymore well I can guarantee you it is done in every second company we call everyone we pursue three four five six days every inbound lead regardless of what they are and the argument usually from sales is well we have a big Target we need to try everything uh and the point the problem with that logic is that this is an understanding of how customer acquisition cost works uh how time investment works how much these hours that we're wasting on on an SMB customer affects our performance company performance organization performance um so I would say ABS is about having a qualitative and targeted approach to who which accounts or which customers to make it simpler you pursue either that is as Marco said from traffic on your website or it is when you reach out yourself to to customers proactively where do you invest your time and why and that comes usually either from historical data what type of accounts you did well uh with consistently the past years or if you're a newer company based on your value position uh what uh what customers would then have the larger largest benefit from your services and those are the only ones that you actually prioritize um so that is in a nutshell kind of big natural but sir still um what ABS is thank you so much and I want to add a story here because I started working with ABS like way before it was a name or a thing even and I remember when I started in sauce 2012 I had what I called like a want list of accounts like companies that I really wanted to work with when I started my first software gig and we're talking 20 accounts 20 companies uh that first year that I worked I had a big hit list of other things like other companies that was ICP match that was within specific sectors Etc but I also had those 20 and my goal was as an individual contributor now to talk to the leaders of who work in that now I think it's my goal was to open dialogues with those accounts I didn't even have as a goal to close them because they were all high ACV so high contract value high ticket value and I knew it wouldn't be like I called them and they will just agree to a meeting and close the deal I knew they would be a sort of a process that took a bit longer and also required a bigger buying committee to get an accept to do what I wanted to do and I was selling a small platform at the time but I also realized that when I go towards those accounts I am able to increase what I sell from a concept perspective a lot because I was able to create a user base in the in the account when I was selling to them that was a lot bigger which led to a lot higher ticket item for those accounts and my goal was to just talk to them not even sell to them just get into a room and talk to decision makers that was there and talk to their teams and understand what was going on and that was 2012 and for me when I've gone into a new role as a salesperson I've always had a want list every year these are the accounts I want to I want to I want to get those brands like these are the ones I want and that was related to multiple of different things when I decided on the account one of them was like they look cool again this is very immature because I was very young they look cool I would like that brand in my portfolio or they turn over enough for that to mean xyz or they have this problem I can see it on the data that I can get access to when I do research they will have a need for this they will have a want for this and they will also solve a big issue for them or they have an initiative going on this year that is really relevant for what we do so these were all the different reasons why I chose them but the interesting thing is that when you have that type of focus I did a bunch of small deals too with companies coming from a list right again this is 2012 we called it felt like yellow pages it wasn't it wasn't completely yellow pages were very early and all of these accounts I got to know and I got into often the deal would come at the end of that year because I had to work with them for a couple of months and do workshops and do discussions and do buy a committee meetings and things like that to get them to sign but those tickets made my year like 60 70 percent over budget I took my budget on the normal accounts and then I just got the extra cake from these accounts and this is a very interesting way of going about it and most sales people still don't even think about this as individual contributors and a lot of sales managers don't think about this either but this is again it's icing on the cake but it can be really nice icing if you guys are with me on what I mean great so I would like to dive into the first conversation starter and it's going to be pretty rough and this is a point of view we might share or not but my first question to the group now is the SMB market is it becoming a dead end for SaaS profitability and SMB it means small and mid-sized businesses right just to clarify with the abbreviations again and dead end for SaaS profitability is a bit more complex let's dive into it so Markus what is your take on this what do you think will happen to the SMB market for SaaS moving forward yeah this interesting question first of all like in terms of being a dead end like of profitability like I think growth is also another another question there like is it the dead end of growth so in general I would say that like there are kind of two two ways to approach this question so either you can approach it in a way that that it is like you have to get up market because SMB is no longer serving you like your needs like either profitability or or growth growth goals or or or so or then like you just do a conscious decision that you know SMB is not for us because of unit economics or like you know profitability or or like other other factors and I think it is an interesting interesting question like in general what we see is that that there are different approaches in general to the SMB market like especially like if we compare the US SaaS companies and European companies in in Europe it's far more common to do PLG and this kind of SMB quite a long time before going up market before like moving to be more sales-led whereas in in in the US like many companies start with the moral sales-led motion or many companies have this like competence of doing doing a sales-led approach so then coming to this this question that is it the dead end of profitability I think you come like you need to think about like the market in general so so how is how are the dynamics of the SMB market for you so like typically like it is go to market is more like spray and spray like you have big volume instead of high quality you have low average deal sizes if you have high churn then profitability might be an issue if you need to you know invest a lot per account like in terms of CS for instance like that could be that could be an issue in terms of profitability so I think like I'd say still it is it is really like case by case whether it is a dead end or not in terms of profitability but I think like for every company it is a dead end in terms of growth at some point like so at some point like you can't you can't like you can no longer sustain the growth rates like by only focusing on the SMB market I love the I love the example from slack that is kind of the poster child of PLG so like one could have imagined that you know slack can become like you know go somewhere like you know a billion of ARR or something like with PLG but you know they didn't so so at a certain point they had to I think like they were maybe like 50 60 million or something like that and they had to like really kind of move to a more like an enterprise uh up market up market type sales led motion in order to sustain the growth so I think that's uh that's an important consideration here here as well I fully understand what you mean and I'm gonna come with the statement and then I will let George go so my blanket statement is the following so hiring and having humans and people spending time and salary costs on a market that doesn't even sustain their salary uh from a ticket size is not worth it anymore like we have customers everywhere business to business buyers who's telling us I do not want to talk to sales for this tiny purchase and tiny can now mean a SaaS platform a CRM like tiny we're talking uh ARR that still is what we would consider a sales led motion it should be but it's not anymore because the customers are telling us that we would like to just buy the thing I want to buy online like can I just can I please just buy it online so my prediction here is that the SMB market and we're not talking top mid segment we're talking like this part of the market is going to be a dead end from a perspective of what it costs to spend hours time and platforms to drive sales process when the ticket size isn't worth it because that we can do completely online a digital workflow that just allows the customer to buy from us if they want and not buy from us if they don't want to we shouldn't plug in sales resources there so my idea is that we will have growing and like shrinking sales teams so the people who will be left standing are the people good at addressing top and mid market and Enterprise they will be superstars they will be five instead of 30 they will drive a lot more revenue on those five people than the 30 did before because of ticket size and the rest if you have a PLG motion that will be your PLG motion so we're not talking about doing at the SMB market is dead from a revenue perspective we're just talking about that it's dead from a sales team and marketing efforts perspective right because this is a different thing so that's my statement so everyone will just lose sales people because we won't afford to keep them on the low ticket items George let's dive in what do you think okay I need to unmute uh what I right so what I wanted to say is that I I agree with both Marcus and Sarah but I I have to also add that there are several examples from uh besides slack from super huge and like uh very poster boy examples of a PLG product led growth motion such as slack such as Coursera as an example one of the most famous uh education platforms in the world right so uh and they still I was actually listening to a podcast with their CEO about six months ago where he said is that we can't grow anymore this is this is and we are the biggest platform on the planet in our category but we can't grow anymore we will leave the PLG alone we will have what we get from there uh what we will focus even from a product development perspective we will focus on the B2B market on Enterprise because it's not possible and I want to add something to what Sarah was talking about when it comes to the cost of acquiring customers uh sales is one part and sales salary costs uh number of touch points systems is uh something that not a lot of people think of but if they have any considerations about the the cons of um SMB it is sales cost what most people will fail to to calculate is that even if you onboard them uh with a no touch motion from the website uh they will still have tickets to your support line they will still call you you will still get reviewed based on the quality of that support that could hurt your brand because you can't you can't delegate resources to a mom and pop shop because who has that much money to to have them on a call for the three hours because they forgot their password right because you need to still service them then there is an element of if you are even in a 30 percent level focusing on SMB your product development also needs to follow you need to build and maintain feature for these guys which also contributes to technical debt it contributes to deprioritization of larger ticket items so if there is a um a cost hole to in the lag over a cost vacuum in lack of a better term that is usually hides under the the volume that these customers have so but there is a lot of them and we're making x percent ARR out of SMB without really doing anything but the not doing anything is false because we're looking at it from a from a sales perspective only we're not looking at it from a customer success support or engineering product perspective so when it comes to my prediction I think that even if the the point if not is it's not if SMB sales survive is that if they should in most organizations it's not only a market problem because growth uh company growth is one thing and I agree with Marcus 100 we have very many live examples that it's just not doable after a certain level if you want to continue growing and B if you're a younger company and you're not as uh worried about sustained growth if you have any targets that have to do with predictable Revenue since SMB has insane churn because look everything that you buy for 300 euro a year you don't really care about you might continue or you might not continue or you might pick something that costs 280 instead of 300 right you might also go out of business if you're a three-people company like all of these things happen so it's uh it's uh usually decent effort uh low value and high risk segment to address this is why I believe companies needs to start going upstream uh as fast as they can actually current market thank you I have a question from the audience uh that I actually think we should address so uh we are asked how can we be sure we're ready for up market right if we try to not and not be ready it's more likely to cause damage or to be a to be a good experience for future attempts I think bad experience for future attempts and I take this so um you will never feel ready to go up market uh there is no there is no it starts from strategy but when it comes to the company feeling uh ready to know how to do this uh it's when we feel 100 confident it's probably too late to start uh in my experience it's the same with companies that do meet segment and start thinking about Enterprise uh you it is uh it will be a trial and error process you need to sit again to where we started with tailoring an ICP uh talking about what you're gonna address when you're starting to address that market and the more customers you're going to talk to you will be able to tailor your approach to be more and more ready month after month but I've seen a lot of companies stall and eventually even fail because they waited too long uh to be ready even from a product perspective yes I will I will just give it to Marcus from here yeah I um I agree with you um but I think that's a bit arbitrary answer I mean it kind of means that everybody needs to go up market immediately and and I don't quite think it is like that so I think there are certain stages of the company evolution where like you just need to build one model and focus on one model and do it really well rather than like you know trying to branch out because um you know like let's say you are a 1 million ARR company and and you want to have PLG and uh you know some kind of like SMB sales motion and upmarket motion it's probably you know it's not sustainable you can't do it so so I think like if if you have a well-working machine like for SMB then I think like it could be useful to think about certain kind of uh thresholds of of growth like or or like uh revenue like where you can actually start uh or you should start seriously considering like uh building another motion uh like on top of it uh there was a like there is this um like uh common wisdom like uh in the in the company evolution like that that's you know you need to reach 10 million before like 10 million in ARR before you do like a second uh the second motion I think it's too high like um so if you are like doing SMB or PLG like I think 10 million is too much and uh there was um especially like for European companies like it has to be much lower than that and uh there was a number of three million ARR and I I kind of like that I think that that sounds pretty decent so like if you have an SMB motion you can take yourself your company into into three million and it's still growing then at that point like uh you need to uh it makes sense to start looking into the upmarket motion in parallel of the of the SMB motion and I will I absolutely agree with with George uh this question about when when are we ready like is asked so often and and you're never ready for anything like you just need to start it is like uh you need to go with um like you can go with you know crawl walk run like you you learn as you do but you know if you start thinking about it probably it's the time to start doing it already but I have a question for you Marcus because I've been thinking about this a lot and obviously you're right that not every company on the planet needs to go off market we're only talking about companies that are selling a bit more complex products that can actually have a product that increases your ticket value if you sell to the right accounts based on them being able to be uh getting a lot of value from the product right because one of the things I'm thinking about as a as a person who's led a lot of sales teams I think that when it comes to having one foot in and one foot out I think that's a challenge right because what I would do if I was running a sauce company right now and my goal was to create we have the SMB motion working to digitalize it so I can sort of get that team to be smaller but it's still working uh I would focus on hiring two free sales people the same way I would build an enterprise team two free sales people who can run next to marketing while we're doing the the upstream of emotion right while we're doing the the the motion that has to do with opening up bigger accounts because this is a different type of game on the sales side and on the marketing side as well because one of the things that I can see is people are sort of testing it out but they're not listening to it and that I think is a mistake do you agree absolutely I um it's exactly like that um which is why you need like an owner for it you know is it the CRO is it the CEO like somebody who like um you know it should go to the board level that this our strategy strategic decision which means that like if you you know know anything about strategy it's not going to be you know a few months it's going to be a few years like this is the direction we're going to take so you know yes and I also think that one of the challenges when it comes to account-based sales is that even if we have a marketing team that understands this because I I feel like a lot of marketing teams are more mature in understanding why this is a smart approach to a market right and it's not it's nothing bad on the sales people they're just not trained in these topics like they don't have the skill sets because it's not trained because they have been working SMB or mid-segment and they don't think about marketing ways of communicating and opening up accounts while while you're trying to target them with salesperson because one of the things that I've been thinking about is so if you do that structure you also need to have the owner run both or do you agree with that Marcus or do you think that the owner of the project over running upstream with the group with the team on the marketing side and on the sales time should that be the same owner should there be a marketing and sales led like a marketing and sales sales lead who run this parallelly what do you think well it's a it's a it's a tricky one um so I would I think there are different uh models uh to that so it could be this parallel like uh approach um that you have some kind of committee in a sense like uh but usually it's better to have one person uh CRO CEO who who kind of can own both uh both of the motions I would say that this is probably one of the biggest challenges at least I see is that like when the sales motion has been built to support this SMB approach it's um I have to say that I haven't seen a single case where it would have been successful to transition those those sales people to do up market so it's almost always you need new new new people like who actually know how to do it or as one one company did it is that they forced it so so they they just kind of cut completely the SMB from certain reps so you can't do anymore you are not allowed to do SMB anymore you only do these target accounts and obviously you know they want their mission so then they just need to deal with it and like you know manage it somehow so in incentive and force might be required George I know you that you have been in these situations plenty of times let's let's jump over to you yeah no I wanted to say to compliment what uh Marcus said uh I absolutely agree that this is of course you should ease people in but then there also needs to be a line in the sand that at the end of the day it's not a it's not a community decision it's not what the company's strategy will be I see that a lot with sales teams that there is a directive coming from marketing or even from from the CEO and especially high performance will say no but I don't believe in this and to which I have to say great but uh you're not making board decisions so I would ask you to kindly go in the direction that I'm asking you to go and I have to add one more thing where I I know that both sales managers and sales people will identify with because I think we're when we're talking to marketing we're lying uh sales people very often what we say is we don't believe in the strategy what happens is that SMB has a lot of goddamn inbound and we don't want to do outbound we don't want to pick up phones we don't want to call the email we don't want to go on LinkedIn we don't want to multi-thread we don't want to put the effort in that uh a one ticket ARR uh deal has we want to to be comfy and cozy and do the three to four users on on SMB because it's it's easy and it gives us dopamine and over time maybe if we're lucky we reach budget and we get paid uh but uh it's uh management needs to really push people out of their comfort zone one because it's their job to make executive decisions and a lot of people are to be very blunt are very gun shy uh when it comes to these things uh I I heard a lot of both CMOs and CROs tell me it's like but the organization doesn't take good to it but yeah but that's also your half of your assignment to to to figure it out of how to how to implement it it's not theirs and the other end of it is um has to do with people not understanding that uh it also stalls their growth because if you're for the audience and for the people that will listen to this on demand after if you're planning to stay employed anywhere as an inbound AE or an inbound salesperson forget about the there is no shot this is happening uh your career will just stop developing after a point uh I know because as Sarah said first of all because I'm leading teams already I also consult in a lot of companies and talk to their management teams as Sarah said sales teams will become smaller because uh the delivery to be transparent is just not good enough most people are delivering under 40 percent of annual budget uh and this is not because we're not teaching ourselves new things we're not doing the things that Marcus was talking about now or Sarah is talking about uh because we're comfortable so we need to also I want this to also at some point move away from the corporate speak when it comes to yeah percentage of adoption and people are hesitant and talk about what is actually happening in this organization uh and I haven't met a single salesperson probably besides Sarah that really really likes outbound most people are scared of it so if you give them a list of 10 accounts from with help of marketing which to me is not called outreach anymore but I digress uh they still don't want to do it and this is the problem as a manager it doesn't really matter in that sense if you have a solid strategy it's your job to educate your teams on why this is good for the team why it's good for them as individuals it's not for them to see a presentation from me or Marcus on ABM and say oh I get it because I'm 25 now and I understand six year strategy they want and they shouldn't um yeah sorry I went on the rant but uh that is my I've got muted before a censorship in a webinar um yeah anyway that was my two cents I forgot what I was about to say thank you George the rounds are amazing uh I will actually move over to the next thing now because we have what we have 20 minutes left right and I want to be able to do Q&A but by the way we might not have time for Q&A put your questions in the question tab and I will push them and if we don't answer in the webinar we will tell you afterwards I will DM you with the answer uh I want to move over to so we now understand that there is a need to move we see some challenges with comfort which I agree with and I want to get from both of you so how do you do this how can we build a scalable playbook for transferring over from the spray and pray and the transactional mindsets we have as organizations into an account-based sales and marketing um go to market and structure for our organizations and I will leave it to you guys to decide who wants to take it I see that Marcus is eager I'm gonna leave it to Marcus here we go great so this uh like um um this transition I mean we already know uh discussed uh discussed this quite a bit uh and um what my experience is that marketing is usually willing to take this change like they are they are like kind of understanding what's like what's needed like from marketing perspective and sales isn't George talked about it in a beautiful way just a moment ago so so so there is a clear clear like um you know disconnect which often uh often happens but then I think like the uh in order to get to a point where you can even think about the scalable playbook so you need to have this alignment and uh maybe wrapping or summing up a bit like what what we just discussed you need to have somebody who owns this uh whole ABX uh motion and typically um what I like to use as uh as a kind of um let's say criteria for is this really something that the company wants to do is that is it discussed in the board like uh is is is this ABX uh like uh in the level that the CEO talks about it or like you know even the management team talks about it within uh with the board and the board understands what it is like why are we doing it when you get to that level then you can start like looking into like actually uh scaling it but I think like um um not many companies are at this this stage and so so it's super hard to get uh get to this point so once like you have all of these things you have an owner like you have the the board support marketing knows what they're doing sales knows what they're doing maybe also product is like aligned with this CS is aligned with this you have everything in place then you can start to scale and uh like uh uh I don't think actually the scaling is hard after after this because then then like the the scaling is actually starting from your uh from your ICP again like it just starts from like uh finding and iterating and scaling your ICP uh which means uh not necessarily in a way that you just you know add no add new accounts but you find new segments that require new kind of messaging you learn to you know like how to how to convert those from cold to hot and then like how to do the sales process and so forth so I would say that uh uh I think scaling is less commonly the problem I can and it's more about getting to a point where you could actually you have anything to scale because right just so difficult to build this kind of aligned like motion right so before we go into building a scalable playbook we need to get buy-in from the highest level so we can then push that into a playbook to just deliver on it and actually Carl had a question I will push it up on the screen we should be able to see it I think wait no it didn't work his question was what common pitfalls do you see companies doing when they are attempting transition and the second question is how do you avoid it so that's for you Marcus I know you've been in several projects like this and for George as well because this is a challenge right I I think like this uh will start sound like a broken record but the most common pitfall is about the sales like uh exactly what what uh like George uh was was talking about so so not being able to transition from an inbound based sales motion into an outbound based sales motion it's usually as simple as that if you have an outbound based sales motion already or people who can do outbound and they have an option to do code outbound so just randomly get you know any any of these accounts or do warm outbound where marketing is warming these accounts up you know any smart sales person is going to choose those warm accounts so it it won't be hard to get to that point so I think like that's that's the most common pitfall and like you'll drop into that um like in cases where for instance marketing is trying to push this alone uh that you don't take this you you don't kind of assign this to the uh management level and then I would say in the management level also they need understanding of what this is in a way that it's not about lead generation it's not about you know move turning inbound into account based inbound because that's that's kind of the common uh pitfall that I see that that uh people you know whether it's CFO whether it's the board whether it's the CEO uh like I think that that when we add this ABM into our approach our inbound magically turns into you know high quality like that we'll start to get this high quality leads from this ICP account no it won't work that like that it's like uh it's it's it's a way to make your uh like um uh this uh ICP led uh code outbound warm outbound and like just align align the motions motions around it I need to add a couple of things now uh both to Carl's question and I also feel like a bit like a traitor to my people uh talking down on sales uh so I I need to sort of uh even it out a bit so what happens is that so so how to avoid the pitfalls to what Carl said right so the first thing is uh multi-level buying this is not an initiative just to be transparent this is not an initiative you can health half us either the organization is behind it or they aren't we we can't we don't have the it's a complex motion it's a very profitable motion it needs a lot of effort to get started with it and it's like going to the gym it takes a while to give amazing results right it's not a it's something that you need to commit to and the second thing that I want to mention is that uh if I were a CEO of the company that wants to go that direction what I would do is bring my uh CMO and my CRO in a room and do a therapy session and I'm being very serious now like couples therapy because uh sales and marketing flat out in most organizations hate each other and I will explain why I hated marketing on my end and why the narrative that we're running today didn't fly with me uh especially when we say this will pay off in a year it's like yeah but as a CRO I'm sitting on this chair in every town hall meeting in every old hands with a budget on my lap that you're asking me to fill uh in a year I might not have a job if I continue missing it so I respect your strategy but I also like to pay rent and stuff uh so it's a it's a disconnect usually there is a big disconnect in urgency between sales and marketing I've been to many companies where the CMO or a head of marketing goes into a session and reports on website visits and reports on MQLs or market marketing qualified leads and all these things are well and good most organizations even don't even have targets for these things uh we just saw a graph that it goes up and that's great uh and the perception is always that marketing has half the pressure that sales have and the perception is true because at the end of the day it is sales that close the quarter um and in my opinion as a CEO or even as a CMO if you're listening to this and you want to convince your counterpart you need to address this and you need to say I know that you guys are under pressure right you know that it's it's your head on the chopping board at the end of the day not mine or less maybe mine is second but it's not the first uh so show understanding this so this is this is something that is I understand that it's hard for you guys it's hard for you to buy into it it's hard for you to sell it to your team but there are incremental stages when you're implementing ABX yes the big benefit will come once in a year in a year and a half uh that you start getting qualitative high ticket inbound because that's the end goal right however if you train your sales people into ICP if you start working up these accounts and you are half decent in Outreach you will start getting some results within a few months from implementation and this is the point that I would lead with either as a CEO or as a CMO that we both have benefits and there are smaller more tangible more short-term benefits now and some of them the big ones will come in a while uh because there needs to be an incentive because sales can't uh think two years ahead uh when everybody is pressuring them yes Marcus yeah so this is super good uh good point I I think like um you are touching a very interesting area uh which is um what I think CRO should still be able to look at like so so the strategic versus tactical time frame so you know the next quarter versus you know like uh a year from now which is actually like this this big difference I really liked uh or loved this story Sarah from you as an individual contributor you were kind of doing a strategic approach yourself like you were thinking that okay while when I just do this consistently the future will be at the end and I think this is one of the reasons why you need the board like to to kind of buy this in or the CEO to buy this in uh because like um uh even though I I'm not like and I wouldn't suggest that let's transition 100 like let's let's only focus on this long term and like forget about the short term like it has to be a balance and I think I think this is I think George you are absolutely right that this is probably the the biggest uh problem with the language like I think marketing also suffers from it so so when marketing is forced to do only short term they actually can't really deliver proper value so so I think that's where the the main misalignment comes from and uh if the CRO happens to be like uh you know you know like not really thinking or like not having the strategic like a side in in in this person's like mandate then you need somebody you know who has this mandate like to to think strategy and kind of kind of fix these things that it's okay we will have a bit less of the quotas you know this quarter and next quarter and then we expect that we will get more like third quarter and fourth quarter but it has to be that kind of that kind of thing I think this is really uh I think this is really the key uh key area and I've seen a lot of this kind of the other side where kind of the CRO or or sales and the organization forces marketing only to do short term and that's also like uh that that won't lead anywhere either that's that's a really really bad approach and this is such an interesting point of view because I have never really understood like it blows my mind that me as a salesperson that they don't see the what's in it for me like if I get to work with 10 15 20 30 accounts a year I get to really get to know the accounts right if I get help from marketing to do that connect and start dialogues like this is this is the best part of the job I get to get to know organizations really well I get to do research I get to talk to them about things that actually matters to them like for me all of these things because we have a lot of discussions that is like but I don't want to do outbound and I don't want to do the activity levels that is required like this is your path to not have to do that number of activities on new accounts every day like you can go from doing three really good emails a month from from doing cold calling every day like why wouldn't you want to do that as a salesperson like I love that part because I get to really help accounts I get to find problems that they don't know about and solve them for them like this is and again I'm a very engaged IC when I am in an IC role but for me this is the funnest part of the job and it also takes away all of the things that is uncomfortable calling 20 people a day that you don't know and that you haven't done research on because you haven't had time because you need to call 80 to get to talk to 20 that is what is the hassle of this job and why would you want to prefer doing that when you can talk to five six ten people in an account and really get to know them right and bring value so that's one of the aspects that I don't get why I say what is the problem for salespeople here like for me this is a given thing to want to move towards and I think it's about the different type of skill sets you have right and who's training you the other part on the marketing side that I think is very interesting is that if I can do tailored accounts tailored account campaigns that are really tailored to company specific challenges again that's all the good stuff so these things feel so self-explanatory to me why this is a better way to approach it and still we have the challenges with different lingo and we don't understand each other and I want to ask you Marcus since you've been sitting with a lot of customers who come from the marketing side to you to use platforms for this what do they face when they go to their management team like what do they normally face what stubbornness is there that they get to address in the sessions they have I don't think many companies ever get to that point so so usually it's kind of this self-hearted type thing so marketing does something sales is you know saying that interesting looks good sounds good but they actually they keep doing the same old uh same old thing very often like and so so you don't really get to that point that there would be an objection apart from uh in the end like when you know you are running this ABM motion marketing is excited you know you get a lot of this you know vanity type results website visits and and hot accounts whatever and sales is saying that okay that's great but then in the end we didn't convert anything and marketing actually doesn't know did they actually do anything uh with with those accounts most likely they didn't and then like the end conclusion is that ABM ABX doesn't work for our company and you know they didn't even try this is unfortunate like what we see very often like and and I think the main problem again is that there is no kind of strategic ownership like of this within the company so too little force we're giving choices to the left and right here where we shouldn't be as a board and as a management team so this needs to be yeah go ahead George no can I add something to this I was it's interesting because I was just having this conversation with uh with the manager uh CRO uh just before we jumped into this uh when it comes to internal detractors and also when it comes to hiring process and I feel that unfortunately this is not a good a quick fix but it's um it's a mentality question right so I feel that management should not be afraid to both hire and fire people for mentality because if people are problem oriented because all of what we're discussing now if you're rejecting ideas before testing them if you find blockers in everything it's like no no no no this is not going to work this is a problem-oriented person the difference to what you did Sarah not waiting for other people to solve this for you and found and researched benefits on your own that had the curiosity this is a solution-oriented mindset and it's a growth mindset if you're hiring people because they look good on paper uh you don't test them your HR doesn't vet them enough you don't spend enough time with them and you just hire people that are like you because you like them then you will end up with a CRO that is a bit too short-sighted and hard to shift because he's too strong-headed with a head of sales that is the same with a head of marketing that is the same so it comes from the top and it's we need to make if we want to grow we need to make the hard decision so if you have a person in your team that complains about everything over a year it's time to it's time to part ways and the same with the hiring process you need to look for solution-oriented people otherwise this is it's not only ABX it's any initiative that we're going to bump into trouble every time and it's uh most companies unfortunately or fortunately don't have time for that uh where we are if they want to be profitable so that's my my two cents I will actually ask both of you to give one advice now so what should people listening today do tomorrow I will start with George because he's very fast in mind and I will give Marcus a minute to think about it but just an advice what would you advise today to do tomorrow I mean it depends what role you're in uh I would say in all roles uh look at case studies look at material how this actually functions before you judge anything ask companies that have done it but if you're in any sales role make your own five round uh shortlist and try yourself to understand how this functions because the the benefits for you will be immediate and go out and instead of I think somebody mentioned it in the chat instead of pushing to pitch them uh just call and ask them questions so I feel that my solution is a great fit for this type of company you of course know more than me enlightened me am I correct uh and then do that for a bit and you will see results I can tell you as a rep uh when I was in that slot uh you will see results this quarter uh a hundred percent on this I agree with that Marcus what is your advice so I would say again of course depending on the role but like um now assuming that there is a willingness to go up market like to get this higher uh like uh ACV deals I think it is uh like uh what you should do uh or try to do is to start convincing the uh go-to-market leader CEO CRO like that uh this is a strategic thing and if we don't do it we probably are going to miss out on on the growth targets in the long term like that this is this is something that I don't think any company can omit this uh this decision and I I also think that this can be championed by anybody in the organization so it doesn't have to come kind of start from the top but this can be coming from like uh you know a marketing contributor it can come from the CMO from uh like even a sales contributor it is it is like very much possible this is very logical I I think like the audience here's that it it's not it's not rocket science it's like you know we just need to have everybody working working together and and it will work out so if if you get and start convincing the leadership that you know it makes sense to start looking into this I think that's uh that will uh can make a big difference thank you and I will wrap up with my advice I put two advices for CMOS zeros in the chat but my advice if you are a CEO and you're thinking about doing something related to this so George and Marcus is on LinkedIn hit them up invite them to a joint lunch online and just talk to them they will feed you with all the things you need to get this started and give you expertise they will give you an hour for free together in the lunch and use the people around you I'm selling your time for free and use the people around you who has competence we are here and just get up to speed on what you need to do for your business so that is what we will wrap this webinar up with thank you so much for joining everyone thank you Marcus thank you George it's been a pleasure talking about this topic super exciting and I look forward to seeing you all in the next webinar that you can find on our event page on breakthebox.se and have a good evening guys talk to you all soon bye you