The Transaction

TT - 068 - Davis Potter - Full Episode
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Craig Rosenberg: [00:00:00] By the way, I'm very happy that Davis is also one of the few that came in, in a podcast type

studio. Yeah,

I mean, he is looking good.

Matt Amundson: he looks good.

He's got glasses like us. Sam, hide your face.

Sam Guertin: F---,

sorry.

Craig Rosenberg: wait, what happened? Is he

Matt Amundson: Sam's not wearing glasses. He's not, he's one of these kids is not like the other.

Craig Rosenberg: He doesn't need it.

Matt Amundson: Well,

Davis Potter: he is better than us.

Matt Amundson: oh, there he

Davis Potter: Oh.

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah.

Sam Guertin: go. Problem. Problem solved.

Craig Rosenberg: Thank you,

​

Craig Rosenberg: All right, so guess what? I gotta start this one a little different because I'm not sure, Matt, you know, do you know what Davis has been doing?

Matt Amundson: [00:01:00] Well, I studied a little bit on LinkedIn. I will say I crammed for the final, uh.

Craig Rosenberg: Exactly. So like we gotta, like, you can get some, uh, some color and context from it. But, but look, here's the, here's the deal everyone. So first of all, Davis, I will give you this fun fact about Matt Amundson. My cohost is also my, my sons, I have twins, they're football coach,

Matt Amundson: It's true.

Craig Rosenberg: and we won the, we basically, uh, won all our bowl games to win the state.

Would you say Matt, last year? Yeah. So.

Matt Amundson: that's correct.

Craig Rosenberg: Isn't that wild? So we do B2B sales and marketing stuff 'cause we work together too. And then we do the podcast. Andy's the coach of my kids. And um, so we have to clarify when we do phone calls, we have to say, is this business Matt Podcast Matt or football coach Matt?

Matt Amundson: That's right.

Craig Rosenberg: And also he cosplays other coaches in the league. So sometimes I have to clarify. No, I mean, Matt,

not, not the other

Matt Amundson: I've been [00:02:00] building AI agents of my competitors. Just get inside their

head.

Craig Rosenberg: I actually, I think that might be interesting on the B2B

Matt Amundson: Yeah, just have it analyze game film.

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah. Yeah.

So, uh, so yeah, so I met Davis, um, uh, God, it was just a couple months ago really. And, um, he's building a killer, uh, uh, future topo slash Serious decisions, uh, advisory research company. And, um. Focused on ABM.

So this, this'll be great. And, um, and he's new talking about ABM, I mean, you're not new Davis, but like you, you, you have a,

Matt Amundson: New

take.

Craig Rosenberg: fresh point of view coming into the market, which is big. 'cause the old ABM stuff's just boring, retread. Stuff. So, um, and we would not make the show. So anyway, yeah, so we met and then he is like, Hey, do you want to do this thing?

It's like demand base. So like, you know, they're in the portfolio. So it was like we've just sort [00:03:00] of, the relationship's sort of taken off and I'm like, you gotta get on the podcast. And that's how we got here today. But Davis. Um, before we go tell Matt and the audience a little bit about, and we never do this, by the way, we never let people advertise, but in this case, we do need this. So tell us more about, uh, your business and what you're trying to do these days.

Davis Potter: Yeah, let's do it. Well, thanks so much for having me. Uh, and for the, for the intro, Craig. So a little bit about four js. We're again, the market research and advisory firm, but we focus so intensely on actually bringing modernization. And innovation to account-based Go-To-Market strategies. We, we bring up Topo too in a lot of our calls where it's like, you know, ever since 2019 after the acquisitions happened, we have the six year gap where everybody's been regurgitating the same ABM concepts, deployment models.

The [00:04:00] research hasn't been strong either, so we wanted to take a fresh take and. You know, actually study the market, see where it's going, build some new models, conduct the new research. And now we're, we're blending in the account based side, but we're also digging into AI too. So, you know, how is that impacting these, the Go-To-Market strategy?

How are marketing leaders thinking about building their functions? And so it's, it's been really cool.

Craig Rosenberg: There you go.

Matt Amundson: Love it. Love it.

I, mean, we, part of the, part of the reason why we started this podcast is we just kind of both agreed that, you know, the old playbook just wasn't working and you know, ABM was. More than just like, kind of like a blip in the radar, right? Like this was this big movement and uh, then there came the next big wave or, or one of many next big waves being AI and how the interplay between those two I think is, uh, is something that's [00:05:00] really essential.

And so, you know, when I was looking through some of the research reports, just putting together, you know, how you're, you're, you're, you're sort of finding the inflection point between ABM and, and, and ai I think is some of the things that. People are really curious about. It's not just, I, I think most people know that there's, you know, there, there's a way to turbocharge their Go-To-Market strategy, be it ABM or, or any other MO methodology using ai.

But a lot of people just don't know how. Right. They, they, they can see how they come together, but like. How are other companies doing it? What tools are they using? What changes in the way they do reporting? What changes from an operational perspective? And there's just been to, to your point, Davis, there's been a little bit of, uh, you know, a recycling of the old. Playbook that, like Craig and Scott were largely re responsible for building and, and sort of educating the market on how to do, but you know, that's just that it just doesn't work in, in the new AI world. So we're, we're, you

know, both Craig and I are super curious to get into [00:06:00] what you're seeing out in the market and, and what these changes are, how these changes are impacting people's businesses.

Davis Potter: Yeah.

Craig Rosenberg: it'll be fun. Oh, sorry, Davis, were you gonna say something?

Davis Potter: Oh. no, no.

Craig Rosenberg: Actually, before we go, I did you guys, since you said interplay, I just have to ask you guys. I'm gonna ask Davis first the cold play affair concert thing. Have you guys seen this? It is unbelievable.

Davis Potter: That is so bad. And the worst part about it too was uh, he had the newly VP. Of the HR department there in the background, which was, which was the worst.

Craig Rosenberg: it was, I mean, if you're, if you're the, there's so many ironies in this, by the way. I, I, if you, have you dug into this at all, Matt? You looked perplexed, which is weird. You're very hip and you know, you, you read Perez Hilton and all these things, [00:07:00] so I'm surprised

Matt Amundson: you say, did you make a 2007 reference to. Online Gossip Rag Perez Hilton. Uh, yes. That, that makes me quite hip. The fact that I read that. No, I was, uh, it was funny because I was. I had to jump off this call for a couple minutes. I was here on time, but, uh, HR wanted to have a quick chat because we actually did a social post involving the meme from that.

And I was like, uh, oh, do you want me to, do you want me to take it down? And they were like, no, no, no. It's, it's, it's, it's cool. It's hip, it's happening everywhere right now. It, they were just kind of, uh, surprised because largely our social media is just like, um, you know, awards and thought leadership and, um. And, and press releases and stuff. So I was like, oh, oh shit. Am I in trouble?

Craig Rosenberg: so he was having, he got caught cuddling with the people leader to top it off. Her new VP of HR [00:08:00] was there embarrassed, called out on the kiss cam, and then Chris Martin commented. On stage as well and realized what happened. Right. Because he is like, what a cool moment. Oh wait, maybe it's not a cool moment. You might be having an affair or something. Oh no. I hope they didn't get in trouble. I mean, it is incredible.

This

Matt Amundson: You, say cuddling. I say canoodling. I like a canoodling there.

Craig Rosenberg: Let's do a poll,

canoodling, or cuddling. All right. So Davis, um, speaking of amazing things, uh, how about if we start with the show? So we have two, as you know, we have two main questions. Uh, the one is, the first one is, is, you know, we just, we like to hear any kind of, uh, fun, exciting, scary, uh, heroic or funny. We love funny, uh, Go-To-Market stories from you, anything that you've seen out there in your travels that, [00:09:00] or in your personal experiences. And then we'll dig into the second part we want to get into, like, this one will be amazing. On the ABM side in particular, the, you know, one to three things you're seeing that are working today, um, in this. Really interesting, frankly, uh, Go-To-Market environment. All right, so those are the two things. The first one is you gotta tell us a story and, uh, no pressure, but we do judge you on your

Matt Amundson: The entirety of this podcast will be measured on, on the story.

Davis Potter: And if it doesn't go well, we're shot. We're done.

Matt Amundson: Well, we'll

just shut it down. We will just shut it down.

Davis Potter: I have a good, good first like big marketing mess up

that I ever in.

Craig Rosenberg: Thank God Jesus. I was worried about this

Matt Amundson: Yeah. I, I

Craig Rosenberg: We love marketing. Marketing. Mess up. Thank you.

Davis Potter: this was my first job

Matt Amundson: Yes. Yes.

Craig Rosenberg: We love these.

Davis Potter: living in my parents' house [00:10:00] for the first couple months. So I was working at a company called Systems,

Matt Amundson: yeah.

Craig Rosenberg: Oh, we

Davis Potter: you know fairly large company, billion dollars in revenue. And, uh, I just joined their ABM team. They completely transitioned their demand gen to deeply focusing on ABM.

So they're, you know, going into it for the first time, trying to figure it out, partnering with all the large, uh, you know, analyst firms or consultancies working through it. And I, uh, I was commuting like two and a half hours both ways from Wyndham New Hampshire into Cambridge every single day. And so ended up moving into Cambridge.

Uh, found an apartment there with a couple really great roommates, and one of the first large projects that I was tasked with owning End-to-End for our financial services [00:11:00] vertical ABM team. We were doing a webinar and, uh, you know, put, put in a, a pretty decent amount of investment behind it

Matt Amundson: Sure.

Davis Potter: in a thought leader. For the webinar, you know, did the full day. The script had a, a room that was dedicated, brought in, uh, you know, food and breakfast for this person and also the subject matter experts from the Pega side who were chatting through it. Uh, they had a kick ass webinar. They recorded it, did the full thing, we had it edited. And then, uh, the day of recording, I'm in my parents'. Basement. I was back home for this, you know, relaxed thought. We had everything set up and join it. We had strong registration. We made a full push on the, on the sales team. Got the VP of sales involved to help push the registrations too. So everything was firing, everything was cooking. Get on the webinar [00:12:00] and. A different webinar, prerecorded plays. This was the first oh shit moment that

I've ever had in my career where I'm like, oh my gosh, we just invested probably 30, 40 k into this and we have the wrong webinar playing. Everybody signed up for it. This was my first time owning it end to end, and, uh. That, that was a, a very interesting day. I was like, oh my gosh, I'm gonna get fired. I'm done. I'm canned. There goes ABM career right off the bat.

Surviving the Oh Shit Moment
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Matt Amundson: And were you fired?

Craig Rosenberg: No, right.

Matt Amundson: survived. Good for

Davis Potter: I survived. We, we made it.

I,

Craig Rosenberg: I think this is great. So, Matt, would you have fired Davis?

Matt Amundson: of course. Instantly. I, I,

Craig Rosenberg: on the spot.

Matt Amundson: come on, man. The thing about, the thing about marketing, it's like everybody has a story like that,

Craig Rosenberg: Yes,

Matt Amundson: way or another. I, mean,

Craig Rosenberg: I, I thought you were gonna say that. Yeah. I mean, that's

Matt Amundson: [00:13:00] I mean, we've heard the stories and so many of them around webinars. Honestly, this is like the second marketing webinar story, which is just to say like, on 24 or got to webinar, what the heck were you guys doing? Like you were the bane of many a marketers existence with like some of these issues. Because better software could have solved a lot of these things and probably, you know, like look. You know, if you're gonna live to be 95 at this point, you're gonna now live to be like 89. The pure stress of that probably just shaved a solid six or 7% off the end of your life. Yeah,

Davis Potter: That is going right into this.

Matt Amundson: trust me. Trust me. This, I mean, this is my old hairline. Just pure webinars, man. Uh.

Davis Potter: Yep.

Craig Rosenberg: Oh man. Uh, it is a, uh, yeah. Webinars have been and continue to be fraught with peril.

Matt Amundson: Yeah, because

Craig had the guy [00:14:00] Kawasaki story. We had the

dog story.

Craig Rosenberg: dog story?

Sam Guertin: Sam McKenna's

story. yeah,

Craig Rosenberg: yeah, that was good actually. Wow. So, hey Sam, you should do a cut on webinar. Uh, just fa not fails, but uh, Davis just made it a three, so that means we'll have three good

Matt Amundson: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Oh, oh, yeah.

All

right. We can, Yes. We can continue with the podcast. You made it through the first gate.

Craig Rosenberg: Geez, man, that was nerve wracking. God, I thought the, you know, I thought the guy froze. He, he should, oh, sorry. My, uh, my screen froze. Um, but, uh, okay, so let's dig in. This is gonna be really interesting for Matt and I don't know if you, you know, historically, you know my history, but Matt was, you know, at EverString and, uh, was really. You know, one of the thought leaders in, in account based, um, back in the day, um, sorry for the back in the day,

Matt Amundson: No, that's okay. It was pre, It was pre, [00:15:00] pandemic, you know, and, uh, really pushing, um, the market. I thought you had a, uh, Matt had a really, uh, great point of view because he had, you know, he also owned sales development, so like he could, uh, help people, um, you know. Get this stuff to more of a reality than you know, others in the space. And so we both love

Craig Rosenberg: this and we both would love to hear, uh, the, the one to three strategies or tactics or plays or however you want to talk about it, uh, that the things that are working today and just, you know, let's take the show the rest of the way with that.

Davis Potter: Let's do it. Made it through the initiation of the the

Craig Rosenberg: Barely. I was getting a little worried there for a second.

Yeah. So, so, so give us, give us some, uh, you can, you know,

The Evolution of ABM Deployment Models
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Craig Rosenberg: just however you want to talk about it. We want to hear what's working.

Davis Potter: Let's do it. Okay. So it's interesting [00:16:00] on. The evolution and almost the, the way in which ABM is modernized. I'm sure you both have seen a million times, just like all your viewers, that traditional pyramid looking shape where you have one to one at the top, one to few in the middle, one to many at the bottom, and that came out in the 2010s, 2016 to be, you know, specific with it.

Serious Decisions was really pushing their one to few that came out around 2015 along with their road show. You have Sangram who did a great job, uh, really pushing the flip my funnel messaging. And then after that, again, that 2019 period, we haven't seen a lot of innovation

Fresh Take: Why ABM Needs a New Approach
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Davis Potter: since. And what, what we were seeing in the market, and this is one of the reasons why we've even started for jex, like some of the initial thoughts were, okay, you know, we're getting a lot of inquiries on LinkedIn [00:17:00] for consulting help, or you know, how do I, how do I launch a successful ABM program? And, but We were thinking, alright, maybe there's

a a ABM agency play or consultancy play. But when we really started digging into the market, it's like, you know, our, our perception on the practice and the way it's being, you know, deployed in both really large enterprises and then also some of the smaller companies. It's different than how a lot of these traditional consultancies or even the, the research firms are positioning it. So we had a unique take and the way in which we're seeing ABM. Being deployed right now is, you know, through, through a few different modernized deployment models. So we segmented it up into really three buckets. So if you can imagine that his, the traditional pyramid at the top, we have one to one and [00:18:00] one to few, and we call those enterprise ABM. And the way in which we define one-to-one. As you're building a really personalized, you know, through deep research, highly bespoke campaign covering multiple opportunities in one account, multiple business units, multiple buying groups, one to few is the, uh, segment based campaign or a cluster based campaign of 25 accounts or less. And then growth ABM is what we have for a operating model. Around one to many. This was, this was one of the biggest pieces or disconnects that we were seeing where, you know, some companies would say that they're deploying one-to-one to 25, 50 accounts with per each practitioner. So one practitioner can't cover, you know, 50 accounts and actually leverage one-to-one. It's more of a, [00:19:00] a, what we call growth ABM. Deployment model or you know, a growth ABM strategy. So that is where you get the coverage across hundreds or thousands of accounts using a tiered

methodology. I think this aligns closer Craig to, uh, Topo and, and what you all. We're leveraging where, you know, you have these distinct tiers, usually three,

Sometimes two, depending on you know, if you can actually make a difference. between how you Go-To-Market and what some of the tactics are that you deploy in the campaign. But the accounts are segmented by tier based off of, you know, how many, uh, how many resources you want to deploy into the account based off of what you're gonna get. from an informed revenue potential. Um, or what makes sense for your go-to-market strategy. So you have enterprise ABM at the top, one-to-one, one to few growth ABM at the bottom, which gives you that [00:20:00] operational framework for one to many. It brings that scale. This is where we're. seeing a lot of integrated marketing teams demand gen teams transition into, and that transition is coming from the top down. It's, you know, the VP of marketing or the CMOs trying to figure out how we build this holistic account based Go-To-Market strategy. So those are the main deployment models.

And then we also, if you can picture almost like, you know, on the side of the

pyramid. our third deployment models is deal acceleration. So this would be adding supplemental support. Additional resources for one specific deal, either to help give it some extra juice to create it, or usually where we see it being applied is there's an open opportunity that's fairly large or really important. How do we give it that one-to-one ABM style treatment in the account instead of, you know, giving it a [00:21:00] full one-to-one, uh, enterprise ABM. Strategy where again, you're covering, you know, multiple buying groups, multiple business units, multiple opportunities in that account.

So it's it's a it's a lighter more streamlined and, and targeted approach.

Craig Rosenberg: so can we talk about, well Matt, are you cool? I'd like to talk

about, uh, growth ABM. Can we do that? So like, what are. Uh, well, let me make a comment. Um, one of the things that I definitely have seen, you know, I'm working with way earlier, stage now than I, you know, um, and one thing that's been really encouraging has been targeting, I feel like the new, uh, sort of Go-To-Market founders, the, the folks coming to market that used to think, well, we're just going to. You know, sell to everyone. I'm [00:22:00] seeing more and more where people are defining an ICP that's not sophisticated, but smart, and that to me is a victory because when we put a name on it, like ABM or account base like we did. You know, called it account based, and it was like you put the name on it and it sounds like this big lift when in reality, in my, my opinion, the biggest victory is, is less the one on one-to-one.

Because the one-to-one, like if you went to SAP 30 years ago, that was there, right. They would do that. They threw the whole book at one, you know, these accounts. But if you growth ABM as you describe it, that's. Like that should be widespread and that should be your baseline Go-To-Market, especially if you're doing any type of outbound.

But like even Matt, you know, is driving tons of inbound, but he knows who he wants to bring in and, you know, he's, he's putting planning himself there. So that's why I want to talk growth ABM, I feel like that's [00:23:00] the key that we, you can apply across the board and it should be like your baseline Go-To-Market strategy no matter what. So with that first. What does growth ABM look like and what kind of things are people doing in the growth? A like how are they setting up? What kind of plays are they running? How are they working? How does this work? Good, let's, let's dig in there.

Davis Potter: Totally agree. And then also, um. Uh, remind me because I don't wanna, I wanna, I wanna get both of your thoughts on something that we haven't released yet, but we're really, you

know,

Matt Amundson: are we breaking news here?

Davis Potter: We, we might be breaking some news here, which is the concept, and it's not, it's not anything crazy or new, but really putting some rigor behind it, around building a Go-To-Market account portfolio.

So taking the whole concept of your target account list. And really driving unity across sales, marketing, and customer success. [00:24:00] Where instead of the ABM team or the growth ABM team, having their own targeting or their own segmented list, sales has been account-based for years. They have their strategic enterprise, mid-market, some type of self-serve, or their PLG customer success has their list as well.

How do you build a unified Go-To-Market account portfolio? And that is something that, that I, I definitely wanna get both of your opinions on. But Craig, to your question on growth ABM, so how will see this be, uh, being deployed in market is again, you're covering hundreds or thousands of accounts, but not, you know, this massive 30,000. Account, target account list, you're, you're getting more pointed. We'll see about 2000 accounts on average, um, through some of our research where it's, it's, it's right around that number in terms of how many accounts are being deployed, if you're [00:25:00] leveraging this for your integrated marketing teams or your demand gen team, and how they're doing it is based off of again, informed revenue. potential. So it's not just this tiered list based off of, oh, these are the large logo accounts that we're gonna put in our tier one, which is our highest priority, the the top accounts that we wanna win. From a business standpoint, you're not just taking these logos, throwing them in and saying, Hey, this is, this is our wishlist of who we think we could go sell to.

It's informed revenue potential. So based off of signals, whether it's contact engagement signals or uh, account level signals, as well as, you know, looking into the various different segments. So who are your best fit customers? Where can you actually get the LTV going in and analyzing, you know, your [00:26:00] actual customer base and having a informed opinion. Around, these are the segments, or you know, for example, these are the industries that we're gonna go after. And this is a data backed reason as to why here are the sub industries. So maybe it's healthcare and then pharmaceuticals is the sub-industry that we should be going after. So what are the segments and the subsegments or the microsegments. Deeply understanding that, understanding your ICP using that to inform your tier one, which is your smaller subset of accounts, they get deeper personalization, they're eligible for more tactics. So for example, maybe your tier one accounts would have direct mail as something you could partner with the sales team around versus your tier two and your tier three counts, tier two. Is almost that, you know, mid-level where they still are Go-To-Market, strategic priority. They get [00:27:00] dedicated resources, but not as much as

your tier ones. And then tier three is more that scaled approach. So they're probably getting, you know, digital, um, or any type of tactic that you can do at large. Uh, but it's the, it's how, how much you're putting in from a resourcing perspective into the campaign from a tactic perspective. Um. And so That's the difference between, you know, a tier one account versus a tier three. Uh, and then also, you know, getting really, really pointed in that targeting aspect as well.

Craig Rosenberg: Right. Got it. Okay. But like if, so you mentioned direct mail, like what, what does a modern program look like? You could take any tier, like what do they do?

Modern ABM Tactics: Personalization at Scale
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Davis Potter: Modern program. Um, so from a campaign aspect, it is not a, we're gonna do, you know, a 30 day sprint and [00:28:00] these are the different pieces we're gonna have, you know, direct mail in there we're, we'll maybe do a VIP executive dinner for these tier one accounts. Um, we'll have custom landing page that we create that's really specific to their industry, their vertical, their panes. It's not doing that for 30 days, it's more of a, a holistic approach. So you are thinking about this campaign and how it's gonna run for, you know, uh, the entirety of the year or almost continuous. Um, and so, you know, what we're seeing work from a, from a tactic perspective, the, uh, in account for, you know, tier ones I is doing really bespoke executive style engagements. Um, webinars are still working well, but you know, a, a, the a, anything that gets really personal, and speaks [00:29:00] directly to the pains of these people versus a generic, you know, uh, landing page or whatnot. I'm not sure if I'm explaining this, uh, very. strong, but, you know, getting more pointed in targeting, uh, and targeted with how they are. Messaging, uh, uh, to these, these accounts

Craig Rosenberg: But like on a webinar then you were like a personalized landing page. Is that what you mean? Or, or you mean that it's just relevant to, to them.

Davis Potter: relevant, relevant to them. So almost having this, you know, ABM playbook of all of these various tactics that can be deployed. Uh, your webinar, your digital media, maybe it's paid LinkedIn ads, your executive VIP dinners. Um, your executive, engagement. So having your executives reach out to the buying group [00:30:00] members in those target accounts.

So almost listing out this full playbook of here are all the tactics that we have at our disposal that We can put into a campaign. And then based off of the tier that the account falls under, it dictates the, the eligibility from a tactical standpoint. And then they're taking those tactics and building this, you know, ever running style of uh, a campaign specific to those accounts.

And then also looking at the different segments as well. So in growth, ABM, you're probably gonna be, uh, targeting, you know, multiple industries. So thinking about on that campaign, how your building bespoke and custom pieces tailored to the segments or tailored to the industry, for example.

Matt Amundson: Hmm. Quick question for you. So I would say, [00:31:00] You know, for our listeners here, you know, we've heard a lot of things so far about aBM that probably sound pretty similar. right? like, this is. like, a lot of this stuff is, you know, kind of the basic blocking and tackling of ABM, but. We, where we've seen the advances in Go-To-Market through ai, how are then we bringing AI into this process?

Like, is it in the targeting and ICP, is it in, you know, the, the rollout and execution of the programs? Like where does that come in and where are you seeing, and, and how are people utilizing that and what types of results are they seeing?

Davis Potter: Some of the biggest areas research.

So again, if you're building these really personalized campaigns, whether it's one-to-one or growth ABM, how can you. You know, execute this really deep industry based sub-industry based, account specific industry, [00:32:00] uh, or account specific research. How can you do that at a greater scale instead of paying, you know, tens of thousands of dollars to a research

Sure.

to

AI in ABM: Research and Personalization
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Davis Potter: go gather all of that information? So research is a huge one. Content personalization. We've seen some really cool, uh, roadmaps as well. For a few of the, the landing page companies where they're using ai, um, you know, uh, and even building agents to do personalization at scale to bring specific content recommendation as well. Um, so research content, building your, uh, target account list is another piece.

AI for Targeting: Predictive Models and Signals
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Davis Potter: Where they're analyzing the different, uh, buying intent signals, Go-To-Market engagement touch points. So spanning across first party, second party, third party signals, and using a predictive model to build [00:33:00] these, these great target account lists that are so much better than just thinking about, you know, here's our generic ICP.

Let's just go pull these accounts from some form of data vendor. And then start doing marketing towards them. Uh, that's another aspect. And you know, the, the biggest, the biggest impact that we're seeing is on the, the scale of a where instead of taking, uh, scale and efficiency, where, you know, looking at one-to-one or one to few, instead of taking. Three months to wait for your account, specific research to come in, uh, building content and copywriting from a campaign building aspect. It's shortening the window for, you know, these, these foundational pieces to be, which is allowing more [00:34:00] accounts to be part of the program so you can get that greater coverage without sacrificing. The personalization and without sacrificing, you know, you're having to use more generic tactics.

Matt Amundson: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. What, what are you seeing that's just like kind of knocking your socks off, right? Because like every day it seems like we, we hear about some crazy use case or some crazy story, some crazy application of either a combination of AI tools or, you know, uh, people who are building like AI agents to do like end-to-end workflows.

Like where are you seeing, like, you know, 'cause I know we've. We've all been sort of hip to the idea that like, hey, you can, you know, you could write content, you can use this for like much more advanced scoring. Um, you can use it for some, some, some scaling applications. But like, what are, what? Like, you don't have to name the vendor or like, the, the results, but like somebody did something, and you were like, holy shit. Uh, I've never thought about [00:35:00] that. That was like super impressive.

The Reality of AI Adoption in Marketing
---

Davis Potter: I'll tell you the exact opposite because that. is, that is really more my, the, the sentiment from what I've been seeing. It's less on the, wow, these companies are doing this, you know, incredibly well, or this is a, a really great use case for ai.

Is more conversely where you go under, in these organizations, you look under the hood and it's like, you know. They're just using these really ba, they don't even know how to properly prompt in a ChatGPT or a, um, they aren't very advanced in ai. Some companies are. We actually had a scenario where we quoted, uh, ABM team who saw crazy gains cost efficiencies as well. From using ai, and, uh, we were asked to pull it because their CEO had a mandate where they couldn't use aI in any of their processes, but they were doing it [00:36:00] anyways. And so, you know, we're, we're seeing a lot more of that versus really pushing the boundaries with this new, this new technology. That's the craziest thing from, from my perspective.

The Power of Unified Target Account Lists
---

Matt Amundson: Well, it doesn't surprise me. Go ahead, Craig. Sorry.

Craig Rosenberg: well, I was gonna say, there's a, I was gonna give a madism,

Matt Amundson: Go.

Go.

Craig Rosenberg: you know what Davis is essentially pointing out as something you say, which is, no, you have to figure it out. And then you use ai. This is the, this is chronic in all three. Go-To-Market revolutions from a tech perspective that I've been involved in, which was MarTech. Sales tech and now Go-To-Market AI tech is that everyone gets excited about the tech, that the tech is going to solve my problems that I don't know. Right? Whereas the most successful companies understand what they need to do [00:37:00] and then they use. Ai. So like if you, if we go in and someone's like, well, we're using all ai, but they don't, you know, they don't understand the strategy, what they want to achieve with these companies. Like, so for example, the, if you just take something that we've talked about ad nauseum on this call, which is targeting, well, I mean. Dude, like the, the data will help you, but like, if you don't have some idea, this is ridiculous. Like, what are we doing here? Um, if you know the segmentation decisions that Davis brought up. You, you kinda, you can have data help you, but like, you gotta believe like what you're about to go do. Um, and you have to understand it.

It's gotta be part of your strategy. Like the best people come in and say, well, here's what we're gonna go do. Right? And then programmatically, yeah, there could be some really good ideas from this show. For example, no plug, you should listen to this show or follow us on LinkedIn or [00:38:00] follow our LinkedIn page. By the way, Yeah. Yeah. You

uh, to get. Yeah, I did. That was cool. Um, yours of sales. Yours of sales. Um, uh, but, but if you don't figure that out first, then um. And you can't be successful with Go-To-Market, uh, with ai, in my opinion, in the sales and marketing space in particular. And, and it's like, you know, like Dan Gottlieb, you know, when he is on the show, he is like, look like, uh, the best AI implementations are not.

When someone says, well, we need to use ai, what should we do? It's when someone comes in and says, I want AI to give me a QBR that captures data from my CRM, my product. Data set and from my ERP, I want it to be a four pager that we deliver in a 30 minute meeting in Vegas for our QBR meeting. That those are the ones that are successful, the ones that aren't successful. This might even say we want to do Q bs. [00:39:00] What can tech do that doesn't work? Or just what could tech do in general? So like, I'm not. You know, that's not surprising to me, Davis on that, and that that happened in the first ABM thing was that people, and they still do, by the way, let's, let's be honest. You know, the, the, they, they equate the vendors to doing ABM. I have this vendor, we're doing ABM. Whoa. Like, no, no, you're not. Or say, you know, so like you have to, uh, delineate that one. I, I'm just gonna go on a couple things that Davis brought up and then talk about, so on. So what we found really early at Topo with the account base was that there was something really simple that you brought, just brought you brought up earlier on your new release Davis.

I'll just give you this tidbit, which was, uh, um, marketing was doing all of this work. So Marketo and Matt was at Marketo. So they were doing their thing and they were driving all of these leads. Um, and they did this thing called lead scoring to determine [00:40:00] them. And it didn't, it wasn't. It was working okay, especially in the corporate market, but it wasn't working in the enterprise and it wasn't working because many people didn't sort of figure out the, the, the, uh, company, right?

Whether the company was a fit, it was always content. Sort of led us down that path, right? And so what that created was a schism. It wasn't supposed to, it was supposed to bring everyone together. Schism was sales. So sales then started outbounding like crazy. That's when predictable revenue came out. And I, I used, that was my big thing when I was tour the world on ABM.

I'd say, how can marketing be in their heyday generating all these leads? Yet we've seen the biggest. Ramp in outbound sales development I have ever seen in everyone's reading, predictable revenue. There was a very simple issue we saw, which was, uh, we weren't using the same. List.

[00:41:00] We weren't using the same criteria to figure out what a good account was, and that actually was the most simplistic, but most important thing we would do from an ABM perspective was to get everyone to agree that these are the types of accounts. There's an addendum. Are you ready?

The Board Deck Problem: Training Upwards
---

Matt Amundson: Oh,

Craig Rosenberg: Oh my God. Did my sound go off? Hold on a sec. That's amazing. You guys there.

Davis Potter: yep. We've got.

Craig Rosenberg: Hello?

Matt Amundson: Oh,

Sam Guertin: we're, we're, waiting for the addendum. Hello.

Craig Rosenberg: with the Hello

Matt Amundson: Oh yeah, you

Craig Rosenberg: Siri's talking to me. Hold on one sec.

Davis Potter: You are leaving us hanging here.

Craig Rosenberg: D dude. How do you get this Siri thing off? Hold on one sec. There we go. Okay.

That was amazing. You gotta admit, that was amazing. Stop it, dude. I mean, I see. That's why I went immediately on Davis's Tech thing. I was like, oh, I'll jump in. Okay. The second thing is that there's an addendum, which is, I actually don't believe you can control sales. Or sales [00:42:00] development and with Clay and with these other tools, you definitely will not. So you have to do your, be like e either one is, you know, you wanna agree generally on the ICP and the target accounts. And then, you know, sales is going to do their thing. They just are, and you can't let it drive you nuts. So like, but any kind of joint marketing, any kind of integrated plays, um. Generally speaking, um, you know, you, you want to have a set targets, but you can't lose your mind on the fact that the SDRs are downloading whatever they want out of clay.

What you have to do is use the data to show what accounts are working and what's not working. But like right now, we will see, we will continue to see essentially shadow. Target account list creation, it's, it's always been like that, but the key is one, if it's crazy on the sales and SDR side, I tell marketers all the time, well then just. Do [00:43:00] you know, you do your ICP thing and you send them the right things and the numbers will eventually play out. Or what's best is like you do have this baseline of, of what the target accounts are. You've agreed to it, you get executive alignment on it, and then you, the way you track opportunities. ICP opportunities versus other. And you, you come back to that because we are gonna see incredible shadow, target, countless generation right now. 'cause it's too easy for these guys to do

Matt Amundson: yeah, we are living in shadow AI right now in a big way, like all over the GTM org.

Shadow AI: The Next Frontier in GTM
---

Craig Rosenberg: What? What do you mean?

What are you talking

Matt Amundson: There is so many people in a go-to-market organization who are just like, Hey man, like I am, I'm building an AI that does this. I'm building an AI that does that. I think the next big frontier is just like, you know, like the the enterprise AI license where, you know, you're sort of bringing all AI agents together, but, sorry, I[00:44:00]

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah. Yeah, you're right. I, no, no, I get it now. That is true. That is the, that you speak the truth. Yeah. Um, all right. So what, why is that

Matt Amundson: Well, no, 'cause I made, I did a bow. He liked the bow.

Craig Rosenberg: Oh, did he?

All right,

Davis Potter: Oh, I

missed the bout.

Craig Rosenberg: Davis, uh, thank you for not. Oh, wow. Okay, Sam, you should laugh about that. Should make you happy. That, that should make you happy. Um, alright. So Davis, uh, sorry, I wanted to jump in 'cause account base is a passionate area of mine. Um, so, um, the, the other thing I wanted to to ask you about was. Tracking and reporting. It's boring guys, but like I just, that was always the problem. And I'm gonna make a comment to you that you can take to your customers. Now that I'm at a venture firm, I have learned something, which is, if you train a [00:45:00] organization on a new set of metrics or how to look at things, they have to train the board.

Matt Amundson: Mm-hmm.

Craig Rosenberg: They often do not do that.

Matt Amundson: Right.

Craig Rosenberg: And so like, when someone's created, like, you know, we had Jon Miller on and we told him, Hey dude, like work backwards from a board deck because it, it happened with ABM where it's like, well, this is great. We won't track leads anymore. Well, the, the, we had spent 15 years training the board to look at leads. So now, like if we don't. Like effectively move the people that make the financial decisions, uh, then, um, then actually the program's gonna be, it, it'll, it, I mean, generally they, they'll let you work, but you, you aren't effectively communicating it to the top. And I think it's one of the reasons why Matt likes to say that we've taken a big step back on having CMOs at the executive table.

Um, is, um. You know, whatever we do from a tracking [00:46:00] perspective, like I've seen lots of board decks, like it can't be too granular, but it can't be high level without explanation, especially if you're moving off

leads. So you know that that's really important. Okay. Let's let Davis talk. So how are people let, what are they tracking their programs on today and how are they doing it?

The Account-Based Arrow: A New Measurement Model
---

Davis Potter: So, uh, this, this is something we've spent a lot of time on as well, because when you think about, when you think about the board decks, and I'm sure John Miller brought this up too. But so many organizations are stuck on serious decisions, demand Waterfall, and we, it's the 2006 version that companies are still running and it's really, it is simple and easy from that mathematical standpoint where you're working back from, you know, the lead to MQL, the SQL, uh, or S-A-L-S-Q-L, and all of these different stages in [00:47:00] the linear format. But I, I think in 2025, everybody agrees that the way in which buyers buy is not linear in any capacity.

Uh, and so when looking at how successful ABM programs are actually tracking and measuring report, uh, and, and measuring their success in proving the correlation versus causation effect, and also thinking about how that translates back up to. It's the board deck. Uh, we, it's funny 'cause we have this whole analogy of your account base Go-To-Market team. So thinking about marketing, customer success, sales, all your revenue functions should perform like an orchestra.

And when looking at the orchestra, you have various different levels where you have the conductor level, which would be your executive team, what they're presenting to the board as [00:48:00] well, how they're reviewing overall business performance. You have your section leaders, which would be, uh, your vp, senior director level where, you know, they're not, they're not the conductor, but they're leading their individual specific sectors or sections.

And then you actually have the operators or the musician. Who are building the campaigns, doing the tactical work. And so when thinking about these three different levels of metrics, they should all roll up into one another. And on the ABM side, we actually built a new unified data model and framework that we call the account based arrow, which completely takes the demand waterfall and brings it into. Actual account based measurement and reporting, and it has the architecture for your rev ops team and your marketing ops to actually get off of the [00:49:00] MQLs and build the infrastructure without needing a platform or with a platform from an ABM standpoint. so that you can get off of the MQL hamster wheel and start thinking about ABM metrics, which are much more focused around account based buying journey stages, contact engagement, buying, group engagement, uh, and then of course all of your, you know, pipeline and revenue and win rate as well, uh, and sales velocity. But what I, what I really wanna drill in here from a measurement and reporting standpoint, because this is, this is the area where we, we really focus in on getting off of the MQL and thinking about, okay, you know. If we're going after net new accounts, how do we progress the account from unengaged to engaged to [00:50:00] qualified or MQA or XQA, whatever QA you're using. Uh, and then active pipeline closed one. So what does that look like from a whole account standpoint? That works really well if it's a, it's a new logo. When it comes to your existing customers, especially when you're pursuing really large enterprises, they're Already a customer of yours. so that that funnel, that account based journey, stage funnel is gonna break. And so what you have to do, is you have to look at the layer below that, which is the actual contact engagement and the way in which we define contact engagement is first party.

Moving Beyond MQLs: Account and Contact Engagement
---

Davis Potter: So it has to be whether, uh, it spans across customer success, marketing or sales, a direct interaction with your company, so we're not talking uh, some type of buying signal or even a, a buying [00:51:00] trigger, like a job change. That's not contact engagement. Contact engagement is a meaningful interaction with your company. So that could be maybe they attended an a marketing event, they had a conversation with sales, they responded back to a sales email. Um, uh,

they you know, downloaded one of your, something from your website, They filled out a form.

Those are all contact engagement signals. So looking at it from a overall account lens as to, okay, how many contacts are actually engaging with us, that is a good pulse on the account.

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Davis Potter: Not necessarily, you know, the end all be all.

Because again, if you're going after a really large org like a Bank of America, it's not gonna be that helpful for you or sales to just look at this really broad list, but then actually taking that. Overall account list and saying, all right, who are the priority contacts [00:52:00] that we believe are part of the buying group? And then as you have these open opportunities, associating those priority contacts, and if you identify new contacts, associating those contacts to the opportunity and looking at the engagement of the buying group, and then partnering with your sales team to say, you know, we only have 30%. Of these buying group contacts engaged right now. Previously, last quarter we were up around 75%. So what's going on here? How do we actually partner to use some of the tactics in that playbook to go get these key, key buying group members re-engaging. So looking at contact engagement signals, looking at buying group engagement, looking at the account based journey stages. That is one piece along with the, the revenue metrics. But those three layers, people get wrong so often. [00:53:00] And one of the misconceptions about account based too is they're not thinking about the contacts and the buying groups. They just look at the overall account based journey, stage progression, uh, and that I personally, I attribute to some of the platforms, uh, who. Or we're really historically pushing that from a lens, and now a lot of them are transitioning to, you know, thinking about the other layers.

The Replacement for the MQL Industrial Complex
---

Davis Potter: But you have to think about those pieces. That's how you get the partnership with sales. That's how you can actually do strong reporting, measuring the signals analyzing the signal patterns, and that is the replacement for this whole MQL industrial complex. Shout out to Kerry Cunningham for, for pushing that.

Matt Amundson: yeah. Carrie and Terry, um. They really, they wrote the book on it. Uh, I mean, fascinating stuff. I will say fascinating stuff. There's, there's so many changes that are, that are occurring in the ABM space. It's great [00:54:00] to have somebody back in the zone doing the, the hard hitting reporting and analysis.

Craig Rosenberg: That's the transaction.

Matt Amundson: That's

the transaction baby.

Craig Rosenberg: much, buddy. Appreciate it. Good job. Um, good job today. Your story will be part of a montage of other stories as well. That's a huge

Matt Amundson: Yeah, get in the montage.

Davis Potter: That's,

Craig Rosenberg: Keep doing your thing. Keep doing your thing. We need a account based research like crazy. So I I, you're fighting the good fight buddy.

Davis Potter: well, thanks so much for having me on. Matt and Craig. Matt, great to

meet you.

Matt Amundson: to meet you too.

[00:55:00]