Effective ABM Execution for Startups with Aaron Cort of Craft Ventures

Transcript

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening wherever you are watching from. My name is Ron Dawson. I head a brand and content strategy for HubSpot for startups, and, I have with me my partner in crime again, Ruby James from LinkedIn. Hey, Ruby. How are you doing?
 
Hi, Ron. I'm good. Happy Friday.
 
Happy Friday for sure. I think this is the third one we've done. We're on a a little roll. It's great.
 
Yeah.
 
Yeah. We are. I'm really enjoying these. And so what we've been doing, we've been having these conversations.

Ruby and I, collaborated on this, benchmark report for sales and marketing metrics for start ups from essentially like c to series c, And we were able to get some really great insights and quotes from people, and we've been interviewing some of them to dive a little bit deeper. And one of those people we have today is Aaron Cort. Hi, Aaron. How are you doing?
 
Hey, Ron. How's it going? How's it going, Ruby?
 
Hi.
 
I'm glad she could be here.
 
So, Aaron, I just wanted you to, like, introduce yourself, say what it is that you do. You head up growth and marketing for, and GTM for, Craft Ventures. Right? Mhmm.
 
Maybe dive a little bit into specifically what does Craft Ventures do and then what you do specifically at Craft.
 
Yeah. For sure. Craft Ventures is a venture venture capital firm. We're based in San Francisco.
 
We specialize in SaaS marketplaces, and those are probably the two primary focuses. We invested a lot of different stages, early stage, growth stage, a mixed bag. In my role at Kraft, I get to work with our entire portfolio on, like you mentioned, Ron, all areas of marketing growth and go to market. And, yeah, that that gets to vary.
 
I I get to spend a lot of time with pretty much every motion you can think of in the portfolio. A big one, of course, for a lot of the sales led companies, but also with, product led sales and PLG product led growth companies is account based marketing, ABM. So excited to talk about that. ForeCraft, I was the, head of marketing and VP of operations at a company called ClickUp, a project management software.
 
Was the twentieth person there. Got to see that grow from, four to a hundred fifty million ARR in, you know, about three and a half years, and the company's doing amazing. And I got to join Craft after that. So it's been an awesome ride. Craft was our first investors at ClickUp.
 
They did our our series a and b, and I got to know the team really well. So it's been awesome joining and getting to work with, some great folks that I was really lucky to partner with when I was at ClickUp as well. And, yeah, frankly, it's, one of the best, engagements I've had working with a VC firm when I was an operator. So now I'm kind of on the other side, but I still get to do the stuff I love. So that's, a little bit of a background.
 
Oh, wow. Yeah. I'm a huge fan of ClickUp. That's quite a platform. And they've just I I just felt like they've just, really hit the ground running, and, they're doing some amazing things. So it's an impressive background.
 
And the, in the quote you gave, you talked about ABM, and you alluded to it here a bit.

How do you define ABM, and how do you see sales and marketing teams, especially those at startup companies, effectively utilizing it in their go to market?
 
Yeah. It's a great question, Ron. I'm a big fan of, like, simple buying things. So ABM really is just choosing the companies that you think are a best fit for your business, and it can be a a long list, a short list.
 
It really varies based on on your product and your business.
 
But starting there and then figuring out a methodical way, you wanna go about engaging the company and communicating with them to to get them into a process that makes sense both for them and then also for for you guys as someone that would like them as a customer. And then sometimes ABM can can can range, I'd say, within, you know, expansion versus land instances. Landing is, of course, getting, the contract, you know, one off. You've never worked with them before.
 
They've never been a customer. And then there's another component where they're already a customer, but you're trying to get them to basically have the opportunity to use the product more, get more value out of it, and potentially pay a larger contract value in association. And sometimes that can be a a multithreaded effort. But, yeah, multi ABM really is the foundation of all of that.
 
It's the lifeblood for how you go about engaging with companies and, ideally, companies that you've got on some sort of a list where you're you can be thoughtful with how you communicate them communicate with them.

So,
 
we drill down a little bit more, when you think about the the the functions and the role of, like, a sales team and a marketing team, are there specific things related to a ABMs, either strategies or tactics that each team might do differently with regards to having, more effective overall ABM strategy for a startup?
 
Yeah. Well, so talking about the splits between sales and marketing, there first has to be, like, alignment and agreement on, like, who are we going after. Right? Because, if marketing's like, yeah, we should go after all these logos, and those aren't the people that sales have been talking to or feel like we have the best collateral for or can sell to today.
 
That's obviously a problem. So there has to be that foundational alignment between the two just in terms of like, okay. Why are we going after these people? And does it make sense?
 
And will they get value out of talking with us, learning more about the product?
 
And then really how it works, marketing's job within an account based marketing strategy, I like to call it air cover for for most of it to be candid, because sales does do a lot of the heavy lifting here. But it's marketing's job to build that awareness engine within the account at almost every stage. They'll typically do more heavy lifting on the entry point for a land instance, when basically you're trying to basically get into a a net new logo on your list, let's say, and they've never heard of you before. You know they'd be a great customer.
 
You get customers like them. Marketing does a lot of work with collateral, promotion, going to a specific event, and how how you sponsor that event. But then that's where sales comes in. Of course, sales will typically be, like, people on the ground at the event.
 
They'll also be the people that should they get engaged in the process with a piece of content or within some capacity in the product depending on the motion.
 
It's sales job to be really, really thoughtful and methodical and personal. Right? And so marketing's job is to have that same approach with, like, valuable content that, like, builds trust and awareness.
 
And sales job is basically following up with that and keeping that, like, high level of trust and also, like, attention going and not, like, diluting it when you get into the process.
 
there any, like, specific, like, anecdotes that you have from your maybe your experience at ClickUp and where you saw that kind of implemented?
 
Yeah. Well, so a lot of this, I I work with a portfolio, and I ClickUp's a a PLG company. Right? So ClickUp's got tons of people signing up for the product every single day.
 
In ClickUp's example, you would have, let's say, like, ten people using the product from a really good company that that we all like. And then so, ultimately, from there, the framework for ABM is coordinating that with, like, okay. Is that company on a list that we care about? A lot of times with PLG, you don't really start there.
 
You start with just, like, trying to, to field, like, all the the volume that's coming in and organize it in a way that makes sense. But once you've done that, you can choose a list. But in many examples, you'll have what's called, like, a product qualify account. That would be some account that meets a criteria of someone that sales should talk with.
 
And from there, they would either start a sales conversation. The other way with ClickUp we would have would be, basically what's a PQL, but it can be defined different in every company. But, like, a lot of times, these are just called hand raisers for for PLG companies. These are people that sign up for the product, or they just go direct to a contact sales form.
 
But a lot of times, people sign up for the product before that.
 
ABM is, like, two, three steps down sometimes for PLG companies, whereas with, like, sales led businesses and even product led sales companies in our in our portfolio that I work with and companies I've worked with on my own, before both as a founder and then also as, like, a head of marketing and growth. You actually have to start there with, like, basically what you're selling. But a lot of times, it's based on the ACV. So higher ACV products, you wanna be much more thoughtful and methodical about about that approach. And that's typically where ABB will also start is when you're, of course, sales led, maybe product led sales, but you've got a pretty high ACV, and you wanna also, like, justify that for the customer in the process, if that makes sense.
 
All super great insights, and I know you and I work closely together. So, things that I've heard and we've talked about before, again, at a high level.

But I think one of the things I'm curious about, and I know we'll go into challenges and examples in in a moment. But, obviously, in the report, we published some pretty interesting research that shows over time, we've seen more and more startups implement ABM sooner in their maturity.
 
So, historically, it's around seventy five percent of startups on LinkedIn were using ABM, and now it's in the nineties at the seed and series a stage, which is just really interesting, again, to see that progression.
 
I'm curious your perspective on that.
 
Like, why are you considAarong that? It's a great call out, Ruby. I think that's shifted because there's so much noise in the market right now, and there's a lot of companies that do a lot of things. Right?
 
So the only way to really be different than somebody else in some capacity is by, like, choosing, okay, who are we going after and what do they care about? And it ends up putting a lot of focus from, at least from a marketing standpoint on, like, product marketing, for example. Like, how are you actually, like, defining your ICP, and then what do people care about? I I realized that, Ron, you mentioned the acronyms.
 
ACV is obviously average contract value, ICP, ideal customer persona. But, yeah, that's what I've seen as a shift, Ruby, is mostly just this there's so much noise in the market. So, ultimately, people have to shift to this approach, especially if they're b two b and especially if they're doing some form of direct selling, through sales led or basically even a product led sales approach where, like, the product is just like an integral part of the sales process, but it's not necessarily PLG. You have to, like, figure out how do we get people in and how do we build trust in, like, a really noisy market. So that's that's my personal observation on that.
 
there, like, specific challenges? You talked about, like, figuring out who the ICP is.
 
Right? But, you know, beyond that, we we in the process of actually executing on your ABM, and you start rolling along. Are there what kind of challenges come up and and whether you're what's your advice in terms of how to address those challenges? You
 
ABM is like any marketing campaign. It's like building a house. Right?
 
So if you don't have the foundation for the house, it's gonna be a really, like, bad house. It might not be the best one to live in, or if you wanted to sell it, it wouldn't be great. So in this case, the foundation for ABM a lot of times is, like, the ICP stuff, but it's also just, like, content. Does your website even make sense for this?
 
Right? Do you have case studies that, like, someone could find easily? Do you call out, like, the industries and company sizes you work with? Are you saying that on your home page?
 
Because the website is the front door for, like, anyone thinking about you. Right? So you can have a bunch of stuff that they're looking at in the ethers that you're promoting or sharing or trying to get them attentive to.
 
But they'll eventually, hopefully, land on the website. And by that point, that's kind of your your hub. A lot of times, companies are not, like, prepared on that side with, like, collateral on the site, external content. That's, like, a big one.
 
But and then before that, you can only do that stuff if you know who your customer is, right, and who you wanna go after. So, typically, a lot of the times with the the portfolio, a lot of the stuff I spend a lot of early time on is, like, the ICP, like, product marketing stuff around, like, really understanding that. What's their pain points? Why would they consider you guys?
 
At what point in their life cycle of going through something would they actually consider you guys? Is it at any point? What's the urgency around that? What's, like, what's driving these decisions?
 
Who's the stakeholder? Right? That's the big stuff to, like, really understand. And then once you do that, you can build content for them, and that should start with the website.
 
So it's a mix of understanding and, like, structuring the customer in a way that can then be translated into content, that live typically on the site as, like, the front door of the of the customer experience, if that makes sense. Those are the two biggest things I see. Everything else is, like, follow on, typically.
 
I, you know, I think we see a lot across our customers, a misconception around what ABM is and is not.
 
Obviously, you know, I've seen the one side of the spectrum where they're just, like, picking their wish list of accounts and hoping for the best. And, I think you do a really nice job, obviously, Aaron, of explaining and, obviously, advising your portfolio on, like, what it actually is and how it can't just be us using a Zoom info or, again, like, picking what we think we want versus, like, being really intentional about who our ICP is and and synchronizing everything else around that. But I guess, you know, with that context, I'm curious, you know, what you see in regards to maybe that, like, trap or any other common traps that startups might fall into to avoid.

Yeah. Absolutely. Well, I mean, Ron asked a little bit of this too about, like, sales and marketing teams and, like, how that progresses over time. I think the trap of just, like, saying, yeah, we're gonna target these folks.
 
Like, ignore the foundation stuff I talked about. Just pretend like it's a thing. It's basically, you know, just every one of those. So you you're gonna wanna really get methodical with, like, your groupings and, like, who's going through what types of pain and, like, what stages.
 
I'd say the one thing that ends up being pretty relevant, I found, is, like, intent. And there's a lot of intent data products out there. But when I when I say intent, it's actually just, like, you're able to be there at the time that the person is feeling the pain the most. And oftentimes, that'll either be like, oh, a salesperson just happened to send them an email after, like, months of them being in a campaign.
 
And so, like, part of it is, is honestly that that it's it's also the patience of, like, these programs. Right? So, like, doing an ABM program, right, it's not gonna like, you might see some, like, MQLs, marketing qualified leads through running an ebook you do in, like, your first month.
 
But getting those people further along in the process could be, like, a six to twelve month process. Right? Maybe sooner, but it really depends. And that's the one thing you'll have to gauge is, like, how long are our sales cycles?
 
But not even just that. How long, like, are we willing to bet on this from an entry standpoint, and how important is that is that account? And then how are sales and marketing aligned for a long period of time on on frankly keeping keeping the message aligned, but just being on the same page with, like, hey. When that person is ready at that company, we're we're there.
 
But in the meantime, like, we we need to be high value, and we need to, frankly, come off, like, very thoughtfully in that process, if that makes sense. So it's the time, it takes and then also the consistency of the messaging, throughout typically what I would consider a longer duration of time based on your ACV or based on the account type that you're trying to get into, if that makes sense.