Scaling an ABM Strategy

About the Guest

Brooke Melia recently joined Matterport as an ABM Director, bringing 15 years of experience in marketing strategy and event planning. Brooke is a driven digital marketer that thrives by merging her data-loving left brain with her creative obsessed right brain. She traded in traditional science experiments for product roadmaps and brand strategy campaigns. Her research now involves testing channels and optimizing funnels to nurture relationships that strengthen brand values. 

Connect with Brooke Melia

Key Takeaways

• The account-based marketing approach is essential for understanding the buyer’s journey and communicating with all relevant stakeholders.
• In longer-term sales cycles, consider tapping into a variety of channels to effectively reach buyers.
• It can be difficult to focus on early steps in ABM due to the excitement of launching campaigns, but it’s important to keep focused on aligning on target accounts and ICP.

Quote

“When we get to that personalization level, it’s talking to people, figuring out what resonates, knowing your customers. And then, of course, analyzing and then that final step is optimizing.” – Brooke Melia

Highlights from the Episode

Can you share a bit about your background and how you were able to make that transition into Marketing within the tech space?  

Brooke’s background in biology requiring communication skills for sales and marketing led her to switch to marketing, and she believes that marketing is not the first choice for everyone. She credits her previous roles at a division of the American Chemical Society with teaching her how to sell and market to a wide range of buyers.

What was the driving force that motivated you to adopt an Account-Based approach to your marketing methodology? 

ABM campaigns aim to act as a “quarterback” and ensure that all team members are marching down the field together. In longer-term sales cycles, Matterport relies on different channels to reach buyers, including direct mail, events, and email.

How does your science background influence your approach to ABM? 

Just like in science, the way to solve a problem is by first identifying the problem and coming up with a hypothesis. Today in ABM, the answer is executing a targeted campaign. The key is personalization, which includes knowing the buyer’s family and life situation and then providing unique gifts tailored to their needs. This method allows for more impact to get the buyer’s attention. The next steps would be to analyze the data and, finally, optimize.

ABM is a scalable journey, that we often refer to as “crawl, walk, run.” Where would you say you are right now in your journey with ABM in terms of maturity? 

It started by crawling and now walking at a fast pace. In ABM, it is critical to ensure alignment between sales and marketing. It can take a while to get senior leadership on board with ABM, and it’s important to build a team before starting. Launching campaigns is fun, but it is critical to do the boring parts and take baby steps to figure out your audience and find out what resonates.

What does your ABM team look like? In other words, how many people are focused on ABM in your organization, and what are they generally responsible for?

The team is comprised of four members with the available people in the salesforce. The organization will not hire an exclusive ABM or inside sales representative for the team. There are eight different verticals and layers of horizontals to work with in between.