Tell us a bit about you, and your background. How do you think this prepares you for your current role?
My career so far has been eclectic but thematically consistent because I love creating stuff. I started my career at creative ad agencies, AMV BBDO and Grey London, working across many different brands, from Mercedes Benz and BT to The Economist and PepsiCo. It was a lot of fun creating TV ads and integrated ad campaigns.
At Grey London, we pitched and won the News UK account. Six months later, the CMO of News UK poached me and I switched gears to B2C client-side marketing. Advertising is such a small slice of the marketing pie, so it was a great opportunity to take on a new learning curve. However, at the time, I had an entrepreneurial itch. So, it wasn’t long before I left to start my own business with a friend from the advertising industry. It was called Great Little Place — a user-generated little black book of the most charming places to go. I was CEO but, in reality, I spent a lot of my time as the de facto CMO because we were a small team.
I believe start-up marketing is a discipline in and of itself. Building a company from the ground up requires imagination, grit and tenacity. So, I educated myself and read about viral loops and growth hacking and turned my hand to that. As a result, we grew our community to over 1.5 million fans on social media and managed to attract 110,000 founding members’ email addresses before debuting on the app store and being featured as Apple’s No. 1 app of the week.
Working in the start-up world is a great adventure but, in the end, my corporate roots came calling again. The former CMO of News UK, who had previously hired me, had moved on to become president of Dow Jones in New York. So, when the call came to become CMO of Dow Jones across the pond four years ago, I couldn’t say no. It’s at that point that I had to learn B2B marketing from scratch whilst building out a whole new team.
Overall, I think the multifaceted and unusual path I have taken has given me a different, yet highly valuable perspective. I’m enjoying merging the B2C and B2B schools of marketing thought. It’s also in my nature to be experimental and to play with different tools and technologies. From that standpoint, there’s never been a better time to be a B2B marketer.
What is your marketing challenge currently? What are you trying to sell to what audience? Tell us anything you can about the peculiarities of your specific marketing challenge.
We sell several products and solutions, many of which are super complex. Because we are in the business of data and information, we don’t have one singular customer story or use case; our products and services are solutions in search of problems. The use cases are almost infinite as a result, so judging which ones resonate the most for which buyers is a constant challenge.
I think our greatest challenge, or opportunity even, is the vision I’ve just set out for my team at our annual marketing summit, which will serve as our blueprint for the next three years. Dow Jones’ mission is to be the world’s ultimate decision-making partner. So, I’ve made our goal as a marketing team to be Dow Jones’ internal decision-making partner — whether that’s creating data and tools for the sales team to sell more effectively and efficiently, or harnessing the voice of the customer for more informed product development. It’s an exciting nut to crack.
We hear you’re writing a new book dedicated to ABM. Can you tell us a bit about what you want to achieve with this book?
Yes, it’s going to be called Account-Based Mastery. The clue about what I want to achieve is in the value proposition of the name. I’m a big business book reader and I’ve read every book on ABM that’s been published so far, quite literally. There are nine main books on the topic and all of them, without exception, have been written by vendors or consultants in the space. So, I thought there would be value both in writing a book from the perspective of an ABM practitioner and writing something that goes beyond the basics and is more advanced in its educational content.
The book will be split between theory in the front half and then practice for the second half, which will include interviews with different CMOs wherein they explore their experiences and experiments with ABM. Most books are too theoretical without enough practical examples, so I’m harnessing the collective wisdom of the CMO community from world-leading brands to really deliver something of value to the reader. I hope marketers will get a lot out of it.
What was the inspiration for this book? Did you ever have any aspirations to write a book?
I have always wanted to write a business book. The inspiration for the book is a combination of my internal motivation to take on an intellectual challenge, but also to master ABM myself. It’s a great opportunity to learn from other CMOs as well. As a marketer, it’s very dangerous to think you know all the answers. There’s always something more to learn — whether it’s from a book, a conference, an article, an online course, or your peers — as this is the most varied and complex discipline out there. In fact, once a month in one of our weekly team meetings, we now do a fireside with a different CMO from brands we respect in order to learn their top tips of the trade and how they run their marketing teams. External perspectives are critical. It’s too easy to get caught up in your own bubble. In my mind, our team is one big learning experiment and I always encourage them to explore the diversity of marketing, whether that’s behavioural economics or digital marketing or something else.
How, if at all, have metrics for success in ABM campaigns changed due to Covid-19?
I think the metrics for success always remain the same and relate to the following three business questions that we hold ourselves accountable to: Are we driving acquisition? Are we accelerating deals? Are we helping to drive expansion within our existing customer base? The latter is of particular importance to Dow Jones because we have so many products and services, which means that cross-selling and upselling are significant growth areas for us. So much so that my team built a prescriptive analytics dashboard for the sales team last year to identify the ‘next best cross-selling action to take’ based on groupings of similar customers and the purchasing paths they have taken. Finally, retention and customer engagement metrics become even more important in this environment.
In the context of Covid-19, what advice do you have for marketers who want to start using an ABM-based approach?
At its core, marketing is about caring: caring about customers, caring about your craft, caring about the impact you are having on your business. I think Covid-19 accelerates the need for marketers to think beyond ‘top of the funnel’ marketing. In an environment like this, it’s time to remember who matters most: your current customers. Retention is critical and the core foundation of all growth. It’s too easy to chase shiny new things. Now is a time to batten down the hatches and help your customers through a difficult period. That is what matters most. Instead of focusing solely on revenue, I first ask my team, “How can we generate positive word of mouth?” Start from your current customers then move outward and you’ll do well. ABM can be applied just as effectively to the customer’s journey as to the buyer’s journey. Make it an enjoyable and enriching journey and experience for your customers and they’ll stay loyal to you. For insights to guide your efforts, you need to look holistically at account engagement post sale, unifying your marketing, product and sales engagement metrics. This is an area we’re trying to crack currently.
It’s no secret that ABM requires a lot of insight and data. Are you finding that ABM is harder to execute due to current data being out of date?
It’s true that with everyone working from home, you will find ‘point in time’ website visitor IP recognition to be somewhat compromised — although it still is possible to leverage cookies to some degree. For example, if we aren’t able to successfully resolve a visitor’s IP on a particular day when they are working from home, but they then come back to the site on another day when they are at the office, we can trace both visits back to the right IP or company. Moreover, our intent data from Bombora is based on log-ins and deterministic data, so that helps to mitigate the issue. However, undoubtedly there is an impact. Nevertheless, what I often remind my team is that we’re all in the same boat. Our competition is suffering from the same issues; we’re not at a greater disadvantage than anyone else. We’re lucky at least that we have already looked at hundreds of attributes and done a lot of advanced modelling with regard to our best-fit companies, so we at least know where to fish in the immediate future.
What would you say to anyone who thinks ‘ABM can wait. We can’t afford to try something different in a time like this’?
I don’t think companies can afford not to try something different in a time like this. Sangram Vajre, the co-founder of Terminus, says ABM is B2B. I think that eloquently sums it up. It’s not a new concept. It’s always been the concept. ABM is really just another way of writing ‘business-to-business marketing’— it’s a go-to-the-right-market approach. If you are not account-based in your approach, you are spraying and praying. Inbound always will play a complementary role, in my mind, because you need serendipity in the model, which is what inbound provides; it’s not a mutually exclusive concept but part of the ‘learning model.’ I would urge everyone to think strategically about what accounts are the highest priority and to be engaging and personalised in your approach and outreach. Finally, it is critical to remember that ABM is a misnomer. It’s not just about marketing. It’s about having a joined up, collaborative approach with your sales team. Alignment isn’t enough, you need to run in parallel, communicate constantly and collaborate.
What advice do you have for marketers that have just started their ABM journey, and are looking to move from a one-to-one model to a one-to-few model?
You often hear about the different ‘tiers’ of ABM, e.g. one-to-one, one-to-few and one-to-many. I don’t like to think in tiers, but rather in terms of a continuum of personalisation, value creation and resource allocation. At its core, ABM is about being targeted, joined up with your sales team and about being as personalised as possible (within reason). I also don’t mean personalisation for personalisation’s sake. Personalisation is about adding value by adding relevance, not just mentioning a company’s name in your ads or an email subject line. If you can layer in intent data to perfect the timing of your outreach as well, all the better.
From a Dow Jones perspective, to answer the question directly, we cannot rely on one-to-one as a model to achieve our goals because we need to attract lots of companies as customers to hit our financial goals each year. And it’s impossible from a time and resource standpoint to do a true one-to-one approach each time at enough scale to hit that customer goal – even with all the technology that now exists.
I will end with a word of caution: ABM is difficult and time-intensive, but the rewards will follow your efforts, as they almost always do. At the very least, you’ll become a lot closer to your sales team and that’s a really positive outcome.
For more ABM content, stay tuned for our summer issue of our magazine coming soon! Until then, check out our past issue here!
