This episode features an interview with Jon Miller. Jon is the Chief Marketing and Product Officer at Demandbase and a legend in the ABM space. He co-founded Marketo, which was acquired by Adobe in 2018, and Engagio, which was acquired by Demandbase in 2020.

On this episode, Jon unpacks the next evolution of account based marketing, the key reasons why sales and marketing aren’t always aligned, and the importance of establishing customer-centric marketing and demand gen teams. 

• When sales and marketing are having trouble aligning, it's almost always because they’re looking at different data. Look at the same data! 
• If your brand or product market fit isn’t where it needs to be, you’re going to be facing headwinds every step of the way when it comes to your demand gen strategy. 
• The next evolution of account based marketing is account based experience.

“The thread that runs through these best practices is this concept of account based experience. And it's a concept of really understanding where the account is in its journey and applying all that account intelligence that you have to not treat every account the same, but to really interact with them in a way that's going to be relevant and appropriate for where they are in their journey. So that's absolutely a key theme to how the best companies are doing this.”

“I think of all these kinds of different forms of account intelligence, which is both first party intelligence. Like you're talking about how they come to the website as they downloaded things, but also have they sent emails and attended meetings as well as third-party data, things like intent and what technologies are they using and contact information, all that kind of stuff. I think all of that account intelligence is really owned by marketing and sales. And it's actually one of the most important things is when you get marketing and sales, looking at the same data is to me, one of the most important factors for driving alignment.”

“We've all seen this, right. When sales and marketing are having trouble aligning, it's almost always cause they’re looking at different data.”

“If you just think about it from an org structure, I don't recommend an org structure that has, ‘hey, this is my ABM team and this is my demand gen team, and this is my PLG team.’ Instead, be customer focused. Maybe you have a, ‘here's your SMB team and here's your mid-market team and here's your enterprise team.’ Or maybe you don't have three, maybe you only have two whatever's appropriate for your business. And then those teams should be using whatever is the right go to market strategies to reach, you know, the segments that you're trying to go after.”

“No, not everybody thinks of STRs necessarily as a demand gen channel per se. But I think that when an SDR is doing it right and they're not just sending out robo spam, but they're really sending good well-crafted personalized messages, it makes such a difference because it's the human touch. And, I really do think that in the world where there is so much digital and scalable things, the human touch really matters. 

“The first thing I would say is you have to take into account your brand and your product market fit. And I think most demand gen people don't think about this enough. If your company's brand isn't where it needs to be, or you don't have great product market fit, you can have the greatest demand gen strategy in the world, you can run amazing programs, have killer SDRs, do everything right. And you're just going to be facing headwinds every step of the way.”