In this episode, Hushly CMO and COO James Kessinger joins the podcast to talk about the “bowtie” marketing model and how technology allows marketing to contribute to all phases of the buyer journey including the post-sale and loyalty phases of the customer relationship.
Is the “bowtie funnel” the next new thing?
The bowtie funnel is one in which marketing owns, oversees, or contributes to post-sale efforts like retention, loyalty, and customer success.
“Customer success is looking at marketing and saying ‘What can you be doing to help me? You’ve got a bunch of technology you use to go get these accounts, we need to basically activate these accounts, get them to use our software and continue having conversations with them, even if it’s a private conversation.”
While the bowtie funnel concept isn’t new, it’s more relevant than ever in this economy. More than ever, companies are concerned with net revenue retention (NRR), because it’s easier and more efficient to drive additional revenue from existing clients than driving “net new logo” accounts. Marketing teams have found efficiencies by working more hand-in-glove with sales, and now are expanding this alignment with post-sales.
As people looked at expansion opportunities, they brought customer success teams back in.
“CS teams were saying ‘It’s cool that we can do these campaigns, but I actually need to communicate with them better too. Can we talk about what’s going on with all of our products?’
New accounts are harder and more expensive to get, and the sales cycle is longer. Companies know if they can’t get more out of the back end, it’s going to be hard.
Does every retention-focused marketing effort have to be ABM?
Yes, by definition, because you’re talking directly to the existing account. Retention efforts should keep them in an ecosystem of personalized content and one-on-one conversation, rather than turning them back to the website and telling them to research it themselves.
“Hopefully, the client success manager has a good sense of the needs, so instead of turning them back to the website, keep them in an area that is just for them,” James said. “Your marketing should be very curated, so in that sense, it is ABM — or ABX, account-based experience.”
What customer success teams need for ABM to work for current customers?
The marketing-sales alignment is different in post-sales activity from pre-sales activity. The customer success team needs to be on board, as well as the accounts team, if they handle renewal.
On the customer side, you are dealing with the users of your product and not so much the buying team that originally purchased your solution. You should already have the groundwork laid with the original buying team as they were part of the selling process. Now you need to educate, provide best practices and inform the users of your product as you take them on their journey from onboarding to upsell. Communications to the original buying team will still continue to happen as you better educate these new users.
It also helps if you’re keeping the customers’ leadership informed (through business reviews and other snapshots of success) about how your solution is providing them with value. That precludes the question, “Before we buy something else, what have you been doing for us in the first place?” In cybersecurity, when success means nothing happens, bringing in the product team to help paint the ROI picture can be effective.
“These experience platforms aren’t there to do ticket management,” Kessinger said. “The idea is, it gives you the ability to have a consistent experience, a consistent conversation, and a consistent place to go. You can bring whomever you need to into the conversation.”
Paint the picture of what an account-based experience looks like from end to end.
First thing’s first: we’re not trying to get a lead for a lead’s sake. We want to understand how to prioritize leads.
“If three people from the same company come in and they fit my personas and ICP, I should treat them differently than one person from a different company downloading one single asset,” Kessinger said.
Setting up this hierarchy of assets and intent serves as a prerequisite to ABX. With this in place, you can operationalize third-party intent data to understand who’s visiting your website and consuming content, even though they’re anonymous. From there, you can deploy customized targeted ads that drive them to a customized targeted page that speaks to them specifically — whether it’s industry, company size, funnel stage, or all of the above.
But it doesn’t stop there.
“Nobody stays on the page you built for them,” Kessinger said. “If you’re using website personalization, you can change buttons, text, graphics, and other things to make the experience consistent with that curated ABM side. So now the homepage is totally different based on who they are.”
Once these pages are built, marketing can share these page templates with customer success teams so they can use them to keep engaging and upselling accounts.
What does it take to get started? Is it possible for a generalist marketer or a one-person marketing team to do it?
Often, marketing ops can be the bottleneck. It’s no small ask to create half a dozen landing pages. No-code platforms like Hushly can provide templates to be used for ABM. With their knowledge of what’s been working, they’ve created effective outlines for companies to start with.
There’s some basic setup with uploading your brand font, field mapping, set minimum data requirements, and brand assets, but generally, the biggest piece is the content marketers. You need an asset taxonomy.
When you load content to Hushly, you have catalog fields and tags, so Hushly can scan assets and auto-tag them. Hushly can read a piece of content and weigh it according to various topics covered in the piece.
“It’s 10% about this, 30% about that,” Kessinger said, “So now as a marketer, you can start to understand what content is being read and engaged with… You end up with an understanding of what you should be writing more of and where your gaps are. If only 10% of your library covers a topic, maybe you should write more on it.”
The key to getting started and maintaining efficiency isn’t gaining the ability to do everything, but spending more of your bandwidth on what works.
How is Hushly using Hushly to target cybersecurity marketers?
In the episode, Kessinger was even able to share how Hushly is utilizing their own platform to target marketers. From a go-to-market perspective, everything is targeting.
- Advertisements. Heavy ad play on LinkedIn around the cybersecurity industry and firms in various countries.
- LinkedIn Forms & Data Cleansing. Driving to instant fulfillment through LinkedIn forms (which is one of the highest converters out there, according to Kessinger). Using a new Hushly product, he then pulls the emails out of Hubspot, enriches them and performs human verification, and pushes them back into Hubspot as marketable contacts.
- Intent Data. Uses Bombora for intent. For all targeting, Kessinger has 30 topics he cares about, and when readers consume three of them, they qualify as an MQL. Weekly, Kessinger looks at new accounts and begins actively targeting them through outbound.
- Continuity in Digital Experiences. Website experience changes based on who you are. To target cybersecurity marketers, the Hushly page shows cybersecurity case studies, videos, and other content.
Hushly is using this data to produce a cybersecurity-specific report that aggregates data around which channels work the best, what’s getting the best conversions, who engages with content the most, and other fun stuff.
You can keep up with James through his LinkedIn and explore the Hushly platform at Hushly.com
To catch James’s full episode on the Breaking Through in Cybersecurity podcast, listen at Spotify, Hacker Valley Media, and Apple podcasts.
Recent Comments