Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: You're listening to B Two B, Revenue Acceleration, a podcast dedicated to helping software executives stay on the cutting edge of sales and marketing in their industry. Let's get into the show.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: Hi. Welcome to B. Two B. Revenue acceleration. My name is Orania Matier and I'm here today with Daniel Engelbretson, partner at Kronos. How are you doing today, Daniel?
[00:00:22] Speaker C: I'm doing great. How are you?
[00:00:24] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm thanks. Very good. Today we will be talking about mastering account based marketing and SDR integration. So how do we get SDR into the ABM strategy? Your company at Kronos helps a lot of organizations to get their act together when it comes to ABM. In fact, we actually work together and you're working with our parents company, Memory Blue, for a few months already and had a few successful projects under your belt. So before we get started, maybe, Daniel, it'd be great if you could share your background, which I think is very rich, but also tell us a little bit more about Kronos and what you do for your clients.
[00:01:00] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. I am a born and bred marketer. I went to undergrad for marketing and economics and got my Master's, my MBA and did analytics and marketing at the same time. So came up through academia from a marketing perspective. And my internships in college were for an ad agency alongside a startup. And then every one of my jobs was marketing, marketing, marketing. And my first job straight out of school was for the CEO of a rapidly growing company that had a very aggressive M and A strategy. And that's where I really cut my teeth. And I was responsible for the sales team. So we had like ten junior salespeople account managers and I had to generate the leads for them, and then I also had to pay their commissions and I also had to track their metrics, and I also had to just deal with them. So I learned very early, don't send bad leads to your sales team because you're going to hear about it. And if I did send bad leads to the sales team, it was my team. So I think starting my career there was a really important jumping off point for me in what I do today because I just learned that lesson really early. So from there, I went through a series of roles at Fortune 500 Lean Manufacturers, where my job was basically digital transformation. I got recruited a couple of times to basically upgrade marketing at those companies to go from traditional marketing, communications and events based stuff to digital demand gen with pay per click and SEM and things like that. So after a couple of rounds at Lean Manufacturers, I then moved into VC backed Tech, where I worked for a VC backed startup that had raised like $300 million. And I'll never forget when I got my budget approved at the VC backed company because it was almost the same as it was at the Fortune 200 manufacturer. So it was a whole nother game. You go from very lean budgets to growth at all cost. So I kind of learned both sides of that coin, the lean, lean, lean prove everything and the growth at all costs, which took me to where I am today, where what we do at Kronos is help people build and scale their demand generation. And we do that on the back of an account based framework. And part of that is because in my head, when I think about account based, I think about lean. It's about being very efficient, about where you apply your resources, how you apply your resources, who you target, when, why. So it really spoke to me from the very beginning in 2016 when I got involved in ABM to today. So today Kronos and Memory Blue work together to help people build and scale those account based motions. And we do that through a combination of the tech stack and all the tech related the management and technology and kind of tactical execution pieces of it, the budgets and then the BDR Motion as well. Which is where we partner with Memory Blue because we find that if you have a holistic strategy that takes it all the way from that first point of awareness through to actually booking for the sales team, you get a lot more complete of a picture, a lot better of a result. And the sales team and the marketing team, they're just happier with the result when you can trace it all the way through. So that's a bit about my background and what we do today.
[00:04:14] Speaker B: That's wonderful. Thanks for that, Daniel. So just want to dive straight in. You spoke about ABM framework that you're putting together. What would be specific about your ABM framework versus what the common framework is in the market? And I guess is there any part of the methodology that you would like to emphasize that is important for you in order to drive success?
[00:04:37] Speaker C: Yeah, I think account based marketing or it's called a lot of things these days, ABX, ABM, account based, CTM, whatever you want to call it. For me, when we started Kronos, the original vision that I had was how can we build the most effective program from a resource allocation perspective that we could while keeping it as lean as possible from cost perspective? Because I know there's a lot that goes into standing up an account based motion. You got to have all the tech, you got to have the people, you got to have the BDRs, you got to have the content, you have to have all these things. And it's expensive and it's a big barrier to entry. So I lovingly refer to our approach as the Minimally viably Productive Campaign or MVP, because what you sometimes run into is kind of all this fancy tactics and really expensive tech and really expensive touch points which aren't that's not that they're not good. It's that if you're starting from nothing, often you don't need the fanciest, you don't need the most expensive. You just need a productive program because it really comes down to generating the data that you need to be able to justify, hey, this is actually working. This is actually a good idea. So I would say what's most unique about Kronos and its approach is how we've really worked hard over the last I mean, Frank and I, one of the founders, had been working together since 2012. And Mick and I, one of the other founders, have been working together since 2015 or 16. So we've been refining this forever and we've just leaned it out hard to get to where we are today. So it's really about what is that minimally viable jump off point to be able to show the data and tell the story and prove the result so that you can scale it.
[00:06:20] Speaker B: That makes perfect sense. One of the biggest challenge that we tend to hear around Account Base is everybody kind of wants to do it. Sales team wants to do it, marketing team wants to do it, product team think it's also a good idea. BDRs, they are happy to help, but then it's about getting everybody organized to work as a team to actually deliver it. So I want to speak to you about SLA and how do you get all those functions to align? Because I guess that must be pretty critical from the success of a campaign, right? So how do you go about setting up those SLAs between teams? Because most of the people we've spoken to on the podcast about ABM have been people who are actually working in organization. So they are part of the team. But as an outsider, you are the third party. You kind of need to tell people what to do, right? So how do you go about getting to SLA and getting everybody to understand what part they can play in your ABM playbook to make it work? And how do you hold them accountable moving forward? Because one thing is to get them to agree. But I think driving consistency, that's probably the issue. I think people on Day know when you're in the honeymoon period of your IBM approach are probably like, oh yes, of course, my darling, I will do whatever you want for you.
Six years down the line, they may just see something a little bit differently. So I'm interested about the initial setup of the SLA and how do you drive consistency to make sure the efforts are not plunging over.
[00:07:49] Speaker C: Yeah, I love that you called it a honeymoon period, because that's what I call it too. And it's usually about five months. Four or five months is where that cutoff is. Everybody's really excited and then it starts to stall out four or five months in and that alignment really comes down to setting the right expectations and making sure everybody understands what is actually going to happen. And there are two tracks that this typically goes down. The first track is I'm a business. Let's say I'm a business that has a product. Maybe it's a new product or a new market, or maybe I'm a young business and I haven't totally nailed down who exactly should I market to. I have a lot of good ideas on that, but I don't know for sure. I don't have a scaled program. So if you're down that path and you're trying to establish that product market fit and really nail down here's who I should sell to and why, here's what makes a good customer a good customer. If you're still nailing that that's one path and I'll come back to that, versus if you've been in the market a long time and you know all day long who your target audience is and why, and you're just trying to grow that faster, that's a different track. And the reason why I say that is because if you're trying to scale demand generation motion and you haven't nailed down who should I target and why, your expectations out the gate need to be how do I nail that down? And so making sure that you're communicating regularly and we do that through a process we call a feedback loop, where we get the sales, the marketing, the PDRs, everybody into a call every other week. And we're actually listening to calls. We're looking at notes, we're hearing how it went. We're getting feedback from the sales team. We're talking to the marketing team and we're learning, hey, when I talk to this guy, I should talk about this, but when I talk to that guy, I should talk about that. Or if they have this certification or this in their title, this is what they care about. So you start looking at the raw notes of that, basically, and you start dialing that in. And as you dial that in, then you can look to get more predictable with what's going to happen and how that's going to happen. But you just can't get predictability until you do that. So knowing that that's where you're at or learning that as fast as possible is kind of one track. And then just having that active feedback loop and really talking a lot together as a team about what's working and why, that's the one path versus the other path of scale that comes down to accountability of you all agree we're going to target this audience to get this outcome and you deliver that outcome. And if you're not delivering that outcome, there's an execution problem. If you are delivering that outcome and sales or somebody is saying, hey, this is not good, well then you're not aligned on what is the outcome you're looking for. So often when you get into the end of the quarter or the end of the year and somebody's not hitting their number or the growth is not where it wants. Sales starts talking about how marketing is not delivering good leads and you can't wait until the end of the quarter for that conversation. You've got to be having that conversation every week or every other week. So that's not where this ends up because either path, it's a momentum game. You have to build momentum. You need the data, you need the understanding, you need the expertise, and you need the momentum. And if you don't have those conversations and you're not aware of where you are, you'll burn out four or five months in. And this is going to take 912 months to really get going.
[00:11:16] Speaker B: Yeah, that's kind of why I'm asking you the question, because we've seen it where clients want to have a bit more of that account based approach and they go for the first six months of the year, but then for some reason that two or three deals that they were expecting to come by then are not coming. And then they just say, all right, let's fold everything. Let's fall back to what SMB and smaller deals and forget about all the strategic things we wanted to do. Because at the end of the day, people also need to make their number, and particularly the smaller organization or the mid sized organization. So you mentioned the people who are growth at all costs versus being a bit more nimble and making sure that everything is measured. I think that people who are growing at all costs sometimes make decisions six months later, change their mind and go back to it. And it's a little bit of a back and forth. And I guess what I would like to understand based on that is and based on what you just mentioned, so what would be the early sign of a successful account based campaign before you bring that big fat multi hundreds of thousand deal back home? Because that's the thing to keep the momentum, you almost need to have some social proof that you can share with people. Right. So how do you go about that and build that with your clients?
[00:12:27] Speaker C: Yeah, there's also two ways I would answer this. There's the real way, which is my belief, and then there's what everybody always wants, which I'll start with what everybody always wants. Everybody always wants to map it to dollars. Right. Because at the end of the day, you're spending money and you want to make money, particularly as a third party coming in and helping you do it. You're spending all this money like, where's the payback? And one thing to keep in mind is your sales cycles are your sales cycles. Right. So if you have an 18 month sales cycle or a twelve month sales cycle, you can't expect a deal to close in the first three months. That's not a realistic timeline. Right. So got to keep the sales cycles in mind. But I always bring it back to. Our goal is to help you. Your marketing goal should be about how do you get the right relationships with the right people in your market. And that means that people at your company are speaking with people at your target companies and you're building a rapport and you're top of mind because that person might be in market today or they might be in market tomorrow. They might be market a year from now or they might change jobs and be in market. There not everyone's in market today. So as you're kind of sifting through the market and meeting people, you want to make sure that the people you're actually speaking with are the right kinds of people. So the first really leading indicator of that is especially with our programs together is when these meetings are set up and they occur and the sales team has had that call, always polling the sales team. How good was that meeting and why was it good or bad? And we rank them on a score of one to 1010 being awesome. And we really want to understand, do you want more of these meetings or less of these meetings? Is this going to go in pipe or not? So you start learning the quality of those conversations and meetings early on. But something we've seen in the last six, eight months, especially in the SaaS tech world, is that pipeline is slowing down. In general, you see that not just inside of our business, but in general. And a lot of companies aren't struggling to generate pipe, they're struggling to close pipe. So there's a lot of conversation around accelerating that pipe and just making sure that you're getting the most out of the pipe. So another place that typically goes as you get a little further down is you look at pipeline health. So we look at volume, veracity and velocity. So velocity being how fast is it moving, how many days in between stages and things like that. And how does that compare to other channels that you have running? Volume being how big are they, how big are the deals as estimated by the sales team, but also how many deals are coming in versus other channels. And veracity being basically are they as big as you thought they were and they are moving as fast as you thought they were. So that's how we typically are looking at the pipeline itself. But that's where tying it as close to dollars as you can is what people want to hear. But the reality is that if you are only looking at dollars, it can be really misleading and it can be really lagging. It can take a long time to really understand how many dollars is this opportunity for real. Because salespeople don't want to put a dollar value on an Op if they don't feel good about it. Because now they're committing to that right that's in their funnel. And so they don't want to put a number on it until they have to put a number on it. And so if you're putting pressure on your sales team to put a number on it faster than they're comfortable, you're going to create a lot of friction in that process, which you don't need. So the other side of this is you sit down and you say, we're going to go target this audience, and here's why we're going to target this audience. These are the accounts that we need to win and here's why we need to win them. And everybody agrees on that. And my opinion is you should be measuring well. How well are you doing at engaging and penetrating those accounts. Once you've decided on those accounts, as measured by are they seeing your messaging? Are they coming to your site? Are you growing that traffic? Are they opening your emails? Are they picking up the phone when you're talking to them? Are you getting meetings? So we start to really look at penetration of those target accounts as measured by awareness, education, preference, intent, in terms of what they're engaging with and how much they're engaging and how they're progressing through. So especially if you're in the first three or four months and trying to understand, is this working or not? Just being able to really measure how's that progression going and what's that penetration look like.
[00:16:42] Speaker B: And let's dig into the role of Dsdr BDR because this is one of the topic that we really want to the topic we want to get into. The ABM as a general topic, I think is quite wide. Probably spend a few hours just speaking about it, but I don't see from my opinion, a lot of people deploying their Bdrsdr successfully to achieve this ABM type of me. Let me tell you what I think, Daniel, and by all means, you don't need to agree with me, right? We are happy to have an healthy debate with you, but we tend to have lots of clients that come to us. They want to put an ABM approach. Either have a playbook or we try to develop a playbook. Try to understand the usual things. Who is Daniel? What's his title? What does he do? What should he care about? How do we translate our value proposition in his context? What would be the social proof that we can use? Is there any specific use case that would be relevant to him and his industry that we want to speak about, et cetera, et cetera. So you dig dig into how can I translate my value proposition in the context of that guy so I can be relevant to him? And hopefully light up the light bulb that says, hey, you know what, let's have a chat. We start with a lot of good intent and as we get going, we fall. And I think that's the case of Memory blue and operatics and lots of organizations in our space bdisdr on demand, we fall into the trap of number of appointments, number of opportunities and stuff like that. And the way I would look at it, if I was to take an analogy, I think this is the tip of the iceberg. And you mentioned it. Everybody wants to see pipeline. This is what people want to see and this is what I want to see. And the thing is that to get pipeline, actually to see the tip of the iceberg, you need to have a big fat ice cube underneath it to push it up. Right. Which is all the intelligence, all the data collected, all the people that have said no to you. Because the people that say no to you, we won't be buying your stuff, daniel in 2024 or 2025. Well, that's fantastic. It's as good as a yes because you can remove them from the focus and you can get closer to the one that are left that still have an interest around your solution and you can even get more personalized and more relevant to them. So again, we're all starting with good intent. So beginning of a relationship, but then one quarter goes and it's like, okay, we need meetings, we need more meetings, we need more qualified opportunities, we need more this, we need more that. And we end up being in a trap of actually moving from trying to have what I would call good conversation, good business conversation with people that matters to actually trying to, hey, Daniel, we really need to get a meeting with you. Right?
[00:19:15] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:19:16] Speaker B: And sometimes you may not want a meeting with us. Daniel yeah, but we feel that the call to action, what we are supposed to do is to get a meeting with you. If we don't do it, we're going to get a slap on the wrist. Right. And I'm trying to balance that because it's very difficult for clients and for us to be able to have a conversation about, hey, what we should have is really to have qualitative conversation with people that matters in accounts you want to sell to and over time nurture them because it's a little bit flaky. And what is the right thing to do is the important versus the urgent. People at some points need results. So first of all, I would like to get your views on the role of the BDR SDR. How do you think they should be incentivized? How can they be deployed? Maybe I should not ask you three questions into one, but maybe let's start in term of what do you believe is the best strategy in term of deploying a team of BDR SDR to support an ABM approach?
[00:20:10] Speaker C: Okay, well, the first answer is that unfortunately, it depends. It depends a lot on your audience, your market, your product, how complicated it is, et cetera. So I'll expand on that. But there's definitely more than one answer to this question and it does depend on your and who you're targeting because there's kind of two ends of the spectrum. There's the end of the spectrum that is lighter on the touches, higher volume, and just a lot of activity. And there's the end of the spectrum that's a lot less touches in terms of being made per day, but a lot more critical thinking that's going into that. And there's a lot of tools and tech that help you close that gap so that some of the critical thinking can just be done for you. There's a lot of tools to do that, but at the end of the day, a human still has to be a human on that spectrum in terms of just really thinking about what they're doing and why they're doing it. And so depending on how sophisticated the product is, how hard the value prop is, how high the, the target contact is, things like that, you slide up and down that spectrum.
But from my perspective, it begins with your organization, including your BDRs, have to have a very crisp understanding of what is the problem that my product solves, who has that problem, and how is that problem experienced on a day to day basis. And one of the key things that I see happen poorly is when you think that you need to target this person in the organization and that person's familiar with the problem, but that person doesn't actually experience the problem daily or at least on a regular basis. And even if you eventually have to get that person, that's not really the person that you want to try to reach right now because the pain is not real for them. The problem is not really real for them. So a lot of teams will focus in on the role that's really not the best role to start that conversation with. And a lot of what you need to be doing, scaling up this motion, is figuring out who is the right person or the right kind of person to really start the conversation with, who's really going to be like, yes, that's my problem, I have that problem. What you're saying makes a lot of sense to me and I want to talk to you about solving this problem because at the end of the day, my fundamental belief is we all go to work to solve problems. That's what we're doing at our jobs, we're solving problems. And we all would happily take help solving that problem if we genuinely believe that it was going to be helpful and it was going to save me effort because nobody really wants to do more work than they have to. So your job in marketing and in the BDR Motion is to learn as quickly as possible who has these problems, how are they experienced? And what do I need to be saying to really demonstrate that I understand that problem? I have empathy for that problem, and I have a real solution that we should at least talk about. And if you can crack that code, that is the most fundamental, most valuable part of that motion. And depending on how hard that is and how sophisticated that is, how sophisticated the BDR motion is. And so one of the key things in that is that feedback loop and really working together between sales and marketing and the BDRs to say this is what's resonating in the ads. This is what's resonating in the emails. This is what people are clicking on the site. This is how the conversation went when we taught them and so on and moving that back and forth. So if you are orchestrating that motion, collecting that feedback and having a conversation about it as the BDR ramps on a program, because all BDRs ever have to ramp on a program, what they're doing is they're learning that, they're hearing the cues, oh, use this word, not that word. Because everybody wants to think that their value proposition is really sophisticated and they want to use these big beautiful words and these long sentences. But the reality is that you've got like 5 seconds maybe and you got to use the right words, not the fancy words. And so the faster you can learn that, the faster you can be productive. So that's kind of the first kind of tenet of it, of how do you deploy the motion. And beyond that there's definitely a math piece to it. There's just pure math of productivity yields x result. And what you do with that math is you set guardrails. You say I should be able to perform within this range. And if you're out of that range from a mathematics perspective in terms of touches and connects and dials and all this stuff, if you're out of that range, then you have a productivity issue. But if you're in that range, then you have some other problem. It's the wrong person, it's the wrong message, the wrong time of day, it's the wrong channel, whatever that might be. So you start dialing that in. So that's kind of where I start to answer that question as far as how to deploy it. But the last thing I'll say on that and I'll pause is many of these conversations need to be between a human and a human. You just can't achieve it with a form or a video or an ebook or whatever. Those things are great and they're helpful and I'm not saying you shouldn't do them, but people at the end of the day, statistically from the research, they do want to talk to people if they think that person is going to be helpful. The problem that you run into is that people will just automatically tune you out because they think you're not helpful. Which is why it comes down to how do you warm them up, how do you get right things, et cetera.
[00:25:39] Speaker B: Yeah, it's kind of coming. Back to the thing as well. If your main objective is to get a meeting with someone because they've got the right role and you forget to have a conversation and forgot to tell them why the organization, why them and why now?
Help people to understand. I've got so many people who call me and I just pick up the phone because this is the industry or email. And what is it that you want to achieve? Like tell me the why. Why me? And to your point, lots of people target me because you're the CEO of the company. Yeah, but I've got people in my team that deal with that. Right. If you are a recruiter, it's great that you talk to me, but I've got recruiters in my team and I've got a head of people. These are the people you should talk to. They are responsible with it. I trust them to do it and they don't seem to have done their research to do that. They kind of go to I think they tried their luck and they may try to get me to give them the name of someone else now. It's kind of linking me to another step, which is I believe that sometimes it's difficult, particularly for some of the program that we work together with you guys at Kronos, the memory of Blue Side and some of the relatively complex value proposition that we worked on, very specific ACP. I think it's actually difficult sometimes to find the right person. Right?
[00:26:53] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:26:54] Speaker B: I would like to speak about the consensus because that's another thing. Do you get your SDR team to get one meeting into the account and then they move on and you just rely on the sales team, the AES, to then go and get the next 1112, 1315 meetings within that account to bring the deal back home? Or do you get the BDRs here to do a little bit more than just opening that first door?
[00:27:17] Speaker C: That again, depends on the program. And one of the programs we've been working together the longest, I want to say it's like two and a half years now that we've been running this program targets large pharmaceutical manufacturers with can be multimillion dollar capex purchases. Right. So very sophisticated. They're not all that. There are some in the low five figures, but very complex scientific equipment with literal scientists that do some really sophisticated like cancer research, gene editing, things like that.
On the surface, you would say, wow, that is really complicated and this is going to work. And this program is one of the most high performing programs that we've run together. And it didn't happen immediately, but over time we learned and matured and got to a point where year over year, the program has crushed itself each year, just huge delivery. And so it comes down to you have to right size the effort for the deal size. Right. And you have to be thoughtful about what does the buying group look like and who are the people. And this is one of the programs where I recall that we started with a certain role type and ended up not we ended up going down the ladder instead of up the ladder because we started with kind of a manager role type and moved down into the scientist individual contributor type roles. But we moved around. And the reason why I picked this one is because over time, these are tens of thousands of employees at these accounts right. With many roles that have these titles. And the company, the client, the mutual client we have is targeting for multiple lines of business. So in that case, yeah, you're calling into the same account across lots of people, lots of locations, lots of lines of business, and cross selling and upselling and things like that. And along the way, we found one campaign is actually generating a lead for another campaign because a BDR can speak to both and happened to talk to the guy who cared about it. So there's a lot that goes into how do I tease that out, how do I make sure I'm targeting the right people, how do I even target the ads and emails, the right people, stuff like that, to be able to kind of segment out who I'm after, when and why. But definitely there are cases where there could be many contacts at an account that are relevant that you're trying to get in front of. And then what Kronos is doing is trying to generate signals from those contacts at those accounts for the BDR to go hammer to get after. So that's a scenario where you're after a lot of different people at the same account over a long period of time. And that can be pretty sophisticated versus there are other programs where it literally is just a door opener. We had one together where it was for an M, a firm that was targeting owners of businesses and we were after a certain type of owner and we're trying to ask them if they want to sell their business. Right. So the BDR is having one conversation and then that's going over the fence to the person who can actually handle that. So it really depends on who and how you want to go about it. But it's a mixed bag.
[00:30:24] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I agree with you. And that's what I like about the way we work together is that we almost get some sort of that intent or the lead or the signal that something is happening and someone is looking at what we are doing. They've been consuming some content, they just make an action, they did something, then we can zoom in and start to engage with them. The product you spoke about when I opened up the playbook and I looked at all the titles, I was like, oh my days. You've got the oncologist director of oncology and then all the things and then all the things that they are responsible for. It's mind blowing because it's so specific but you are right when you actually look at the value proposition of that client, when you speak to the right people, you don't need to be a doctor to speak about it. The actual value is something that a five year old could understand, maybe a ten year old could understand but it's actually not that complex. When you get close to it, that's where we see the campaign working. So we've got clients that may not have that intent and it's a bit more difficult because then what you do you are starting from a white canvas you don't really know if you can prioritize the accounts or not. If it's a low volume campaign, it's okay because you can do all the touches across the different accounts but then it's really about you start from A to Z basically, right? Because you would not know who to prioritize. Or maybe you may prioritize based on a specific industry or you may prioritize based on a location or whatever. Getting that intent, getting that sort of signals at the beginning of hey, there is something going on, people are looking, then helps you to focus, then you know, you can invest time and doing that pinball from one person to the other person is quite interesting. And it's funny because then we see the results of our approach being slightly different from one country to the other. I know that we are speaking about working with that specific client in places like Germany, France, basically bringing the program to Europe. And I know that we probably would have meetings with three, four people when we get to Europe because you would have people that actually know the contents used to be making decision because they've been working in the organization for a longer period of time. People tend to keep their job for longer, they tend to have better relationship with their colleague, they tend to make decision together because if it's a group making a decision you get less chance to get sacked for making the wrong decision. It's the group that make a decision. So that's the reason why people stay longer in their job is because they take less risk in their job, okay, which is an interesting concept. And what I like about the approach we've got is that okay, we've got the signals, then we go and grind, then we deliver the meeting, then we get the feedback from the salesperson and then we go back and grind a little bit further to go and dig. And the beauty of it is that each goto account strategy is pretty much unique because it's not a product where you've got just one buyer and as that guy would just always buy it because he's responsible for it. The title change from one company to the other, then you've got the subtilities of the different languages. So people call themselves different things in different countries. And that's the beauty of it. The beauty of it is almost like every single account is unique, which I think is fascinating. Right? And that's the piece that I think will be more difficult to be replaced by. You mentioned about the human touch. That's why I think the human touch is super important.
Everybody moving in the same direction. If you were to say, okay, my account based approach is very straightforward. Here is the personnel, here are the five emails, here is the sequence that I'm pushing. We'll try to do a couple of calls. You can get a robot to do that. You can get AI to do that, right?
[00:34:00] Speaker C: Right.
[00:34:01] Speaker B: But that actual, okay, we'll have a conversation, we've been listening to the signals before the conversation, then we led to that conversation. Then we look at the emotional intelligence, the finite are being discussed, then we go and try to find the other people that can influence that and we go to the people who are potentially against it. So you all do sort of psychology of pulling it together is very interesting and that's what I think makes the ABM campaign fascinating. And the way people deploy their Btsdr team to achieve engaging with the right people I think is super important. And I want to go back to one thing in terms of how you incentivize those teams. So if it was you and not just the clients and what would be the KPIs or the measure of success that you would look for? And I just want to focus on the Bdisdr because I appreciate we could focus on absolutely everything and also understand it will be a case by case because you'll have some very top end ABM, very specific, very limited number of accounts, super big tickets of sales, and some stuff that are a bit more like volume based. But where do you think this KPI should be and how do you think we should incentivize our BDR SDR so we can drive the right attitude in an ABM approach?
[00:35:16] Speaker C: That has got to be like one of the most complicated questions to answer because nothing will drive activity faster than an incentive program and nothing will burn your BDR faster than getting shorted on an incentive program.
That's just how people are in general. And you tell someone this is how you're going to make money and they go do it and you don't deliver on it, they're gone. If you give them a set of KPIs and incentives that aren't dialed in for exactly what you want, you're not going to get what you want. And I think people sometimes try to shortcut incentive programs and don't really think it through and you end up with bad incentives. So the main rule of thumb is what you incent is what will happen. And you have to really think very carefully about it because people will do whatever the path of least resistance is to hit that incentive. So if you incent touches, you're going to get a million touches, but they might not be good if you incent meetings, you might get a ton of meetings, but they might not be good. If you incent occurs, well, that might be great, but occur is not necessarily up to the BDR, so that's not necessarily fair. So it's really hard. And I think the main message would just be depending on what your emotion is and what role the BDR is playing, you've got to incent to make sure they're doing those things. And there are some productivity numbers that people just need to hit. But comping someone on productivity can be a bad idea because you can get the wrong kind of productivity.
It's not really something I can answer easily, except to say that if you read an incentive program somewhere and you think that's great because there's a case study on it, that might not actually be the right one for you, you really have to think about, what do I need these people to do? And what's going to be fair to them in terms of what's in their control? And dial in for that. There's definitely a productivity component, there's definitely a quality component, but it's really hard to answer that in the abstract.
[00:37:27] Speaker B: I try to push you over the edge.
For us, it's a 50 50. The step we take is 50 50. You want 50% productivity, 50% quality, right? 50% we want you to do things and 50% quality. However, the real measure of success and probably you could put like a quarterly incentive or a team incentive, because that's the other thing you've got individual and team, right?
[00:37:49] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:37:50] Speaker B: So if you could then look at an incentive between Das and the Bdisdr, so just as like a sales incentive, that could also be quite interesting if something happened people could get, because that's the problem with incentive. As you mentioned, they can drive individual performance. However, what you want to do is to drive a group performance. Like a team sport, right? It's like a team sport. And I'm not too familiar with baseball or American football, but I know about soccer. In soccer, you could be the best striker in the world if nobody gives you the ball, if the midfield don't do what they are supposed to do and you don't get the ball, you're not going to score goals, right? You can be the best defense in the world, but if your midfield player and your striker don't come and help you and there is a corner kick, something like that, you're likely to be more exposed and expose yourself to take goals.
And it's difficult to not overcomplicify it. But I think a mix of agreeing the SLA at the beginning and SLA do moves, right? SLA may move from time to time because a company that is six months old. Twelve months old. So you probably need to have a quarterly review of hey, actually, guys, we need to review the way we incentivize you. Because you started from nothing. Now you're getting there. Now it's a question of how is the pipeline progressing? What are we doing to move this deal along? Right?
[00:39:09] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:39:10] Speaker B: And that's that motion, it's very difficult and you are right and there is not a one size fit all.
[00:39:15] Speaker C: But hey, if I could just add to that because you said something really got me thinking. By far the biggest driver of success of the BDR motion is motivation. Like, you hire the right people, you got to hire the right people. But if you have the right people and you have the right management of those people, then the BDR itself, the BDR motion itself, the most productivity you're going to get is going to come when they're motivated and they're having fun. And the inverse is doubly. True. If they're not motivated or it's not fun, it will sink your program every time. Because it's a hard job and it's a grueling job. So I would say building an incentive program that's comping your managers to make sure that they're productive, but incentivizing the BDRs to have fun and stay motivated is probably where I would start to draw that line. Because good programs crush it. When everyone's motivated, the best BDRs can just totally tank if they get demotivated. It happens every time. But anyway, I know we're out of time.
[00:40:19] Speaker B: No, that's good. This is great insight. And lots of people forget the psychology, right? Lots of people forget the psychology. It's very easy to crack the whip. It's actually very difficult to get someone to understand why they are doing what they are doing and why they are important. Why are you such an important cog in the process? I think it's very harsh when people are saying that BDR should be incentivized purely on deal close. Or they tell you, I'm going to give you a percentage of the deal close. This is fantastic. If you work with a great Ie all day long, you take that. If you work with a shit ie. Sorry for my language.
And we know that there is some out there. There is some out there that probably will churn every 18 months and move to the next job. And that can be tough on the Bdrsdr because technically, all the work they do, you could be producing golden nuggets, but you drop them into like a black hole. So that's also a frustration. And that psychology part, I think is so important. And this is where sometimes incentivize that are not just a check, but incentivize that are a bit more of, hey, a shout out on the company update about the BDS created that meeting and went to do this and as part of an ABM, went to get another five, six meetings to help Dae. And we eventually 18 months later closed the deal, right? Which is all done to the work of that guy. Those things go a long way with people. So I think mixing for the psychology element, having a little bit of psychological social recognition is super important.
And then you're right, there is the manager, there is a bunch of things to consider and it's not straightforward. Look, we're still trying to figure it out and those things evolve as well. It's not like static, so that makes it a little bit difficult. But I want to thank you for your time. Daniel, I want to thank you for coming on the show. If anyone wants to carry on the conversation with you or engage with Kronos to discuss about their IBM strategy and how Kronos could support them, what's the best way to get hold of you?
[00:42:17] Speaker C: I mean, you can definitely come to our website at Kronos agency, or you can hit me up on LinkedIn and I can convey you the right direction, but either way, it works for me.
[00:42:25] Speaker B: Perfect. Well, I want to thank you so much for your time and thank you for coming on the show today.
[00:42:29] Speaker C: Yeah, thank I appreciate it.
[00:42:31] Speaker A: You've been listening to B two B revenue acceleration. To ensure that you never miss an episode, subscribe to the show in your favorite podcast player. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time.
