Meet Dan

Dan Cafiero, Senior Program Manager, ABM at Seagate Technology, wasted no time launching his career in B2B marketing and advertising. He interned at a few startups while still at Franklin & Marshall College, then worked for several ad agencies fresh out of school, including Grey Healthcare Group, part of renowned Grey Advertising Global. His agency work taught him the ropes of digital marketing and advertising, and took him across the country from the streets of NYC to the golden gates of San Francisco. 

Dan’s portfolio of clients has included some impressive brands in healthcare and tech: Allergan, Aqua Pharmaceuticals, Novartis Oncology, Intel, Lego Coding for Kids/Robotics, Citrix, DropBox, FireEye, and the list goes on. He’s partnered with Deon Sanders and Botox Cosmetic, produced a video featuring Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and won an award for a video series about learning coding through play for client, Lego Coding for Kids. Life is never boring for Dan.

Like the day he got a call from London from the president of the Americas Office of Transmission, now a full-service B2B agency in San Francisco, saying, “I’m moving to San Francisco next week. I want you on my team. I’ll teach you everything I know about account based marketing.” Dan didn’t even know what ABM was. 

Flash forward four years and Dan’s building his second ABM program from the ground up — this time it’s a global program at Seagate, spanning North America, EMEA, and Asia/Pacific. Through these experiences, he’s become an ABM subject matter expert. And he attributes much of his success to his supportive leadership team at Seagate that gives him the latitude to be bold and try new things, and his colleagues who execute alongside him day after day.

When Dan’s not setting the ABM world on fire, he turns into an explorer of art history, good food, and world travel. He also enjoys yoga and working out — a fitting yin to his food-loving yang. 

“Dan is diligent, hardworking, passionate, and proactive,” remarked Alyssa Opella, VP of Customer Experience at Demandbase. “He’s built an impressive global ABM program. We’ve collaborated as true partners, developing best practices that we’ll be able to share with other enterprise customers going forward.” 

What are Dan’s super powers?

Dan describes his super power as empathy. He’s done a lot of the jobs his colleagues do and he knows what it’s like to walk in their shoes. He likes to understand what they’re trying to accomplish and either help them get it done or teach them how to figure it out on their own.

He’s committed to ensuring everyone has a seat at the table and often asks the person in the room who hasn’t spoken, “What do you think about this? Do you have any input?” He says it’s always the quiet ones that have the best ideas.

Dan’s ABM success secrets

Dan is super organized (and a little neurotic), by his own admission. He double and triple checks everything, and follows up. With so much going on and so many stakeholders, he makes a point about “extreme ownership,” keeping everyone accountable and holding each group responsible as they collectively drive their ABM programs forward — both internally and externally.  

He drives the team to be the best they can be and readily shares information he gleans from doing personal research. He asks questions and digs into each subject to ensure 100% alignment on what they need to accomplish, and how they’re going to get there. 

He also takes full advantage of the resources Demandbase offers, like long form content, webinars, Marketer-to-Marketer recordings, and such. He leans on his Demandbase team and loves the way they support his “crazy ideas,” always following up and bringing in internal partners for specialty questions and requests. And, he participates actively in the Demandbase Community to learn from and share ideas with other smart marketing leaders. 

How Dan makes Demandbase sing

It sounds like a cliche, but Dan uses Demandbase to market to the right accounts at the right time, with the right messaging. Then surfaces those actively engaged accounts to sales.

Peeling back the layers, he uses the platform’s insights to know which accounts are engaged and showing intent. He launches ads through the campaign manager to build awareness and push engaged accounts further down the funnel, increasing velocity. Then he raises those accounts to sales letting them know, “Hey, here’s a highly engaged account, or here’s an account that’s had no sales activity now showing high intent. Go after them.” 

How can you be an ABM superstar like Dan?

Dan has five bits of advice for ABM practitioners — whether just starting out or wanting to be more successful:

• Be an advocate for your program. “Building a successful ABM program takes time and persistence. Talk about what you’re going to do. Set expectations early and often,” advises Dan.
• Make sure you have a good support system. ABM is a team sport. You need a strong leader who can orchestrate all the parts, but it’s equally important to be surrounded by a talented team — marketing operations to manage the platform and your campaign team to cover creative.

• Have the right data & technology  

• Target & personalize 
• Measure, learn & optimize — always!

Career Highlights

• Award for video work at Doremus for client, LEGO 
• ABM Gold Award earned at Transmission for work on the Citrix account
• Working on a virtual reality video for Aqua Pharma 
• Being recognized as a subject matter expert by the Forrester Wave industry Leader, Demandbase