Welcome to another episode of 7-Minute Marketing with Pam. My name is Pam Didner. I love sharing a little dose of B2B, digital, content marketing and sales enablement, seven minutes at a time.
I was listening to Kyle Porter, CEO of Salesloft, deliver his keynote at SaaStock17.
It was a great keynote. The key takeaway: let’s not forget that sales is about building human-to-human connections. He was saying that AI and technology are not here to replace salespeople. If AI or technology is done right, it’s about bringing more humanity to the overall sales experience. It’s about giving insights so that you can better serve your customers. That’s the irony of AI. Using artificial intelligence to augment real human connections. Build that 1:1 experience with empathy and caring.
I love the way he thinks and approaches AI and other technologies. I understand that AI and technology are about automation and scalability. That’s how I think about it as well. When I talk about AI, I tend to focus on what AI can do to automate processes and predict customers’ behaviors to increase conversions. While we automate as many activities as possible, let’s not lose sight of the key objective, does it improve the customer experience and build personalized connections to solve customers’ problems? That should also be a question that we ask when we inject AI or new technology into our workflows.
Another thing he touches on is the 3-tiers of account-based marketing.
When I talk about ABM, I touched on a one-to-one, one-to-few, and one-to-many approaches.
On the sales side, he approaches account-based selling from ICP, MCP and NCP perspective. ICP is the Ideal Customer Profile. He defines ICP as your strategic accounts, the accounts that you want to get and close. For these accounts, sales have customized game plans and tailored messaging with a very specific cadence of emails, phone calls, and other activities that sales will do to focus on these accounts.
The next tier is MCP, which is Minimal Customer Profile. There are your tier-2 accounts. They’re important and should be on sales’ radar. The outreach uses a less personalized approach, say, follow-up with phone calls, email, and some select social activities.
Next is NCP which stands for New Customer Profile. This may be a new industry segment that you want to pursue. Sales’ approach is likely to be a standard email with a specific frequency.
For all the tiers, it’s important that you codify the processes so that it’s repeatable and scalable in ICP, MCP, and NCP.
I am fairly familiar with ICP. MCP and NCP remind me of the different tiers of marketing support that I created for different product families. I allocated a marketing budget to the different product families based on the revenue and business priorities.
Another thing I learned is that tiered account-based selling should also align with ABM. Whatever tiers that sales is using should be closely tied to the marketing strategy.
If you have any questions about ABM, sales, and customer experience, you know where to reach me. Just google Pam Didner.
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Keep hustling, my friends. You got this.
What can Pam Didner do for you?
Being in the corporate world for 20+ years and having held various positions from accounting and supply chain management, and marketing to sales enablement, she knows how corporations work. She can make you and your team a rock star by identifying areas to shine and do better. She does that through private coaching, keynote speaking, workshop training, and hands-on consulting. Contact her or find her on LinkedIn and Twitter. A quick note: Check out her new 90-Day Revenue Reboot, if you are struggling with marketing.
