How Marketers Can Use Intent Data To Drive More Pipeline with Auseh Britt of Terminus

– [Chris Mechanic] Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Three Minute Marketing. I’m your man, Chris Mechanic. Three Minute Marketing is all about talking with and exploring the minds of some of the world’s leading growth marketers, and then condensing that into small, micro, snackable, little segments. We’re really excited today to have Miss Auseh Britt on the show with us. Auseh, I’ve known actually for a long time in real life, but she’s now VP marketing at Terminus, who we all are very familiar with, I’m sure. Prior to this, she has a long and celebrated career in B2B SaaS, as well as Bloomberg Industry Group and Business.com. So I’ll say welcome to the show. We’re super excited to have you.

– [Auseh Britt] Thanks Chris. Happy to be here.

– [Chris Mechanic] Yeah and I’m particularly excited about

– today’s episode because you were just like, “Oh yeah, sure. I’ll just talk about how we’re, how we’re doing at Terminus.” Which I think is, you know, an excellent approach. I’m very curious to hear that. And I do have a question for you if you’re ready.

– [Auseh Britt] Yeah, go ahead. Shoot.

– [Chris Mechanic] So the question I’ve got for you today

– is, you know,

– intent data is all the rage, among B2B marketers of course. And so, I wanted to talk a little kind of tactically. So like, what should marketers do tactically, to best use intent data and to, to successfully drive pipeline, and you know, what are some of the keys to success that you’re seeing at Terminus?

– [Auseh Britt] Yeah, so intent data, I think is critical to any kind of successful marketing program and campaign. And it’s used a lot in account-based marketing campaigns. Because you can find accounts that are great fits, but you also need to know, are they showing intent? Are they in the buying cycle right now? And if so, where are they in the buying cycle? Because then you can tailor your messaging and your offers and your content to kind of fit where they are. So at Terminus, we, for our own internal marketing programs, we use both first party data and third party intent data to kind of make sure that we know, you know, who we’re targeting and what we’re saying to them to drive those conversions. So in terms of first party data, we use information like website visits also, how are they interacting with our campaign? And in terms of campaign responses, if they go to a webinar or a virtual event or something like that on a specific topic. So, we can kind of take that information to know these are people who are actually engaging with our brand and our content. So that’s the first party signals. And then the third party signals are, is the data that’s, you know, across the web. And we use third party platforms and partners like Bombora, where you can pick specific keywords and topics that you want to track that are closely aligned to your product. So we use Bombora for that third-party intent signals. And then we also use a lot of G2 data and, you know, there’s other companies like TrustRadius who also have those in signals that we can find out what categories people are interested in, what competitors they may be looking at. And we marry all that information together to make sure that we’re hitting people up at the right time, like I said, with the right messaging and the right content.

– [Chris Mechanic] That’s absolutely brilliant. I have a random question for you. We’ve got one minute left, but in terms of ABM campaigns, like, what’s a good number of target accounts in your position? Like are you targeting thousands of accounts? Hundreds or dozens? Do you have different segments set up for like different types of prospects? It sounds really complicated.

– [Auseh Britt] We do. We have different types of segments and different types of numbers. And it also depends on the types of companies you’re going after. So for like our strategic segment, we run more bespoke one-to-one type of campaigns for those, because these are large global multinational companies that are going to have multiple business units. They’re going to have large buying committees. So it may only be a handful of accounts, but you need to go broad in them and deep. So they, you know, take a lot more resources. And then if you’re looking more on your SMB mid-market size, then we can carry even, you know, we’ll target even more accounts. But it’s definitely not getting up to the thousands, I think that kind of goes against a little bit about the ABM side.

– [Chris Mechanic] I love it. I love it. I have a lot more questions. Guys, Auseh, and I are going to continue talking intent data and ABM. There should be a link to a separate video in the show notes or somewhere around here. But I love that. I love the idea, know who’s in market, get your first party data game in order and then hydrate. I’ve heard that hydrate those records with that third party data.

– [Auseh Britt] Interesting, yeah.

– [Chris Mechanic] So I’d like to get into more detail with you if you have the time, I’d appreciate it. If you guys like this, if you enjoyed it, please give us a thumbs up or a, like, I’ll say we appreciate your time. Look forward to talking with you more right now. Tell the audience how they can learn more about you or Terminus.

– [Auseh Britt] Yeah, sure. You can find me on LinkedIn. Auseh Britt and, and check out Terminus, terminus.com. We are a multi-channel engagement platform for ABM.

– [Chris Mechanic] Well, that was interesting. And it does sound complex on the topic of ABM, but so you have these basically strategic accounts or tier one accounts that you do pretty much manually with a human. And then how many other layers do you have?

– [Auseh Britt] Yeah,

– [Chris Mechanic] Is it just one other layer?

– [Auseh Britt] So we have, so the way my team is kind of split up, I actually have three full-time people that do account-based marketing. We have the one person Tyler, who’s focused on strategic accounts and those account executives have like, five big bet accounts each that they’re focused on for like the second half of the year. So he works with them on really going after those like big bets and doing more one-to-one, one to few type of like marketing programs and campaigns. And then I have someone else who is focused on new logo acquisition, but more for our entity, like our SMB and like growth segments. And so that is a little bit more programmatic and, you know, like a one to many type of ABM campaigns. And then the third person just focuses on customer expansion. So I think that’s,

– [Chris Mechanic] I see.

– [Auseh Britt] That’s an area that some companies, I think don’t take full advantage of, that kind of, you need to have products to upsell and cross-sell. Of course, it depends on like what your offering is. But a lot of companies, I think, focus so much on new business, that there’s usually a really big opportunity for customer expansion. And so we brought somebody on just to do ABM to kind of figure out what’s that white space? What else could we be cross selling to them? And working closely with account managers to put together ABM campaigns focused on expansion.

– [Chris Mechanic] I couldn’t agree with that more. I think, I think far too few people put enough effort into like, marketing toward their own customers. And I actually heard that, it was given to me as advice from, you know, a long time marketing exec. CMO type, and he’s like, “Look, I’ve worked with a lot of agencies before and they do a poor job of keeping you up to date in terms of what their latest and greatest stuff is.” You know, like most agencies change and innovate and do new stuff over time. But you know, if a tree falls in the forest and you’re not telling anybody about it, then,

– [Auseh Britt] Yeah, and they may be going out and getting those services elsewhere without knowing that you’re offering it and what a shame that would be right? So it’s like, you already have the relationship. Yeah. You have to be, I think, constantly marketing to your customers.

– [Chris Mechanic] And there’s other, like inherent values of just having those conversations. Like you could get referrals, you could get five star reviews, you could get ideas for, you know, other things that they would buy or that they are, that they are in market for. You can talk to them about other vendors that they’re using and maybe have some partnership element to it. But either way, I am curious, back to the ABM topic. So what I heard basically was you have, you know, some individuals that are just focused, spend their whole day on these five strategic accounts, and then you have other individuals with larger lists. Do you tend to, like, script and provide all the content and all the messaging for the individual reps that they just kind of pick and choose from their library of stuff? Or are they coming up with angles and coming up with copy themselves on the fly?

– [Auseh Britt] Yeah. So for the strategic ABM, it’s actually, it’s more than five accounts cause that’s per AE. So Tyler’s probably working on more like 20 accounts at any given time. And he is just very close to kind of understanding like their progress, he meets with those AEs weekly. So he does give them, angles and stuff to do. But because our product is pretty robust that you can’t be as I think, as scripted because the AE should also be doing their job. And they’re going after someone like, like Sony, which is one of, someone we’re working with right now. Like they have to really understand what the needs are and what they’re looking for. And so the AEs that are working those larger accounts need to be able to kind of, position the product to their paying points.

– [Chris Mechanic] Yup, so they’re mostly custom writing their own messages.

– [Auseh Britt] For the most part, yeah. And he’ll help, he’ll definitely will help and he’ll review. And he also tells them, don’t make it, don’t send the same email to 10 people, you know? Like do take the time to make it more relevant to them. Then when you get down to like the smaller companies and more on the programmatic side, then those, it just gets harder. Like you can’t write, you know, individual emails for all those people.

– [Chris Mechanic] Right.

– [Auseh Britt] So we do more air cover, programmatic stuff for them. We write outreach sequences and things like that that they can modify. But at least we have, you know, the basic building blocks of the positioning and the value prop and then the content offer. And then they can, kind of massage it as they need it.

– [Chris Mechanic] That’s smart. And this is a very micro and detailed question, but, where do they go to pull that stuff? Like, does that all live in a HubSpot playbook or in a market like, or do they use Google drive? Like if I’m that, that AE or that BDR, like, who am I, where am I going to get this content and assembled email?

– [Auseh Britt] Yeah, we have a tool called HighSpot. Have you ever heard of Highspot? It’s kind of like an enablement. Our, we have a whole enablement team that does sales enablement. So they kind of manage our HubSpot tool, but, marketing will create a lot of, you know, our first call deck or our day in the life decks and all these kinds of things, our competitive analysis and stuff. And we, but everything is housed in Highspot. So that’s the tool that they, that we try to push everyone towards, like to go look for things that will have the latest information. And then we just also just use outreach for any kind of like, more, for followups. Like if it’s kind of a customer, I mean, a sales nurture stream that we create for them to use for very specific campaigns though, like they’re going after someone for a specific reason.

– [Chris Mechanic] And Highspot is just H I G H S P O t.com?

– [Auseh Britt] Yup.

– [Chris Mechanic] Cool. Nice. Well, that’s really interesting and useful. I’m curious. So you’re kind of here, overseeing this like massive amount of activity. What do you, what metrics do you look at for the most part in ABM?

– [Auseh Britt] For ABM? So we have different types of campaigns. So we have new logo acquisition, we have pipeline acceleration and we have customer expansion. So for new logo acquisition, I mean, at the end, we’re trying to drive revenue. So like for all of the, it’s about driving, you know, pipeline and close one revenue. But for like, we also look at other metrics, like, account engagement. So that’s really big, especially for new logo acquisition. These are new customers that we’ve identified that we’re going after and we need to engage them first. So we set metrics of, you know, have they visited the website in the last 30 days? Are we driving them there? Have they responded to any of our campaigns, like a webinar or an event or content asset download? We’re trying to drive account engagement,

– [Chris Mechanic] So you look at that at the company level basically,

– [Auseh Britt] At the company not the contact level. Right.

– [Chris Mechanic] Okay.

– [Auseh Britt] And then opportunities, opportunities generated, pipeline, closed one revenue. And then for pipeline acceleration, those are already open opportunities. So for those, we’re looking at deal velocity and like win rate. So we want to make sure we’re impacting that.

– [Chris Mechanic] And those are prospects that are enrolled in a sequence or in a campaign during the sales process to help close the deal faster?

– [Auseh Britt] Yeah. So those are open opportunities that we try to do different. We’re trying to engage, keep them engaged and give them more like case studies and testimonials and, and continue to prove our value because we already know there’s an opportunity there, that the AEs working, we just want, we need to convince them why we’re the best one and why they need to kind of have that urgency to buy us now. So.

– [Chris Mechanic] So it sort of swings alongside the AE throughout the sales process?

– [Auseh Britt] It does. It does.

– [Chris Mechanic] Interesting. That’s new. I’ve never heard of that. I’ve heard of, certainly new logo and customer expansion, but the idea of acceleration campaigns is interesting. Is there any criteria for when they are enrolled into that or is it just like as soon as a deal is created, they’re automatically enrolled and then unenrolled when closed, when they close?

– [Auseh Britt] Yeah, so for pipeline acceleration campaigns, the nice thing is with our Terminus platform, because it’s hooked into your CRM, which ours is Salesforce, that we move, we set up ad tactics, which are targeted display ads, that are based on the different opportunity stages that account is in. So, it gets started when it’s in our first stage, which is a suspect stage. And then, it goes to discovery and then evaluation. And then, I think proposal and planning and the negotiation. But because it’s hooked up to our CRM, as that account moves in Salesforce, it automatically moves from ad tactic to ad tactic in Terminus. So,

– [Chris Mechanic] That’s brilliant.

– [Auseh Britt] then we change the ads they’re seeing based on where they are in the sales cycle.

– [Chris Mechanic] Brilliant. So ad tactics as a term is Terminus lingo. I love that. Now, out of curiosity, cause what I’m currently obsessed with with is algorithm training. Basically like helping LinkedIn or helping, you know, Google better identify prospects. And one way to do that is by firing back down funnel signals. So, you know, anytime a client has Salesforce, I’m excited because you can, it links in easily with Google or Facebook or LinkedIn. So when, when that deal gets added to pipe, you know, the ad gets attribution and it will also ping back to the platform to say, hey, find me more of those. Does Terminus, send those signals? Like is Terminus integrated with Google ads and LinkedIn ads, for instance? Which I bet you, it probably is.

– [Auseh Britt] Yeah, well LinkedIn. We have a partnership with LinkedIn, so, I know, we have full access to all the LinkedIn ad types and you serve them based on your account set up in Terminus. So you all, you manage it like from one place, you add your account list of say a hundred accounts and you can run your target display stuff through Terminus, but then, you can also run everything that LinkedIn has to offer to those same accounts through it. But does it ping back and say, look for more accounts like this? No, cause we already have our set of accounts that we’re going after, versus it being per net new.

– [Chris Mechanic] That makes sense. That makes sense.

– [Auseh Britt] Yeah. That’s more on demand. More of, I would think of like an inbound demand gen.

– [Chris Mechanic] Yup. I’m actually really interested to see what LinkedIn does, because Facebook and Google are like, well ahead of LinkedIn in terms of machine learning. And I totally hear you and you’re totally right in terms of like, it doesn’t really apply to any ABM cause you have this defined field of play. But LinkedIn is currently the, you know, the dumbest of all the algorithms, but you can see them like making moves toward that. So I’m interested to see how that starts working in terms of net new or in terms of acquisition and prospecting campaigns. Very cool. Well, this has been awesome and enlightening. I am curious, cause we have a couple more minutes here, so if you, let’s say that you have a thousand accounts that you’re targeting, what do you consider to be a good engagement rate? Like do you expect to have half of those being engaged at anytime? 75%? 25%?

– [Auseh Britt] Yeah. At least 50%. If it’s net new, you know, logos, we tried to go more towards like that 60% engagement.

– [Chris Mechanic] And then so of those thousand accounts, like, if you can close or if you can get into pipeline, you know or actually have some kind of deal created with like, like I guess what’s your target? Like do you aim to have 10% engaged in a deal or 20%?

– [Auseh Britt] Yeah. I mean we, I mean 10% opportunity creation.

– [Chris Mechanic] That’d be good?

– [Auseh Britt] Yeah.

– [Chris Mechanic] Sounds pretty good.

– [Auseh Britt] We don’t always get fair. Yeah. And then it’s different too. I mean that’s net new, so we’ll also do close loss. So it all depends on who you’re targeting. Like who’s in your target list. So these are just, accounts that have never engaged with you that are high fit. You know, you set lower thresholds versus accounts that were say, close loss a year ago. So those close loss opportunities we already know there are some awareness, they took a look at you before, whatever reason they didn’t go with you. I would expect a higher, you know, engagement and a higher opportunity creation from it because, you’re not starting from scratch. You’re building on a relationship you’ve already had.

– [Chris Mechanic] So you kind of can have goals and targets by the different campaign types.

– [Auseh Britt] Yeah. And we do that every time we set a new campaign, but, but they’re generally in the same range. Like, we’re not going to all of a sudden go from 10% to 80% opportunity creation goal, you know, it’s usually like within a range, but some will be higher than others.

– [Chris Mechanic] Now are there different attribution models for the different campaigns? Like for instance, with the, you know, the new logo, is it first touch only? Or last touch doesn’t count?

– [Auseh Britt] No, I mean for us, we do multi touch, we’d look at everything across the board. Yeah. Because my experience with first, like first touch and last touch is, some channels just get heavily weighted, on it. So, if you do first touch, for me, rarely is like an email channel, you know, emails a lot of nurturing cause oftentimes they don’t get into your database, until they came from somewhere else. Right? You converted them through an event, you converted them through paid search, you converted something. But email still has an impact.

– [Chris Mechanic] A hundred percent.

– [Auseh Britt] Yeah, cause you’re, continuously having that communication. You’re inviting them to more stuff. You’re sharing your content, you know? So, it’s critical, but it’s often not the first touch.

– [Chris Mechanic] Hundred percent. So you guys use like a fractional model where you, give fractional credit to each of the different touches?

– [Auseh Britt] Yeah.

– [Chris Mechanic] Interesting. Do you use a tool for that? Or is that all just within sales force campaigns?.

– [Auseh Britt] Our tool! So within the Terminus platform.

– [Chris Mechanic] Oh, there’s attribution?

– [Auseh Britt] Yeah, well we bought BrightFunnel, Do you know BrightFunnel?

– [Chris Mechanic] I do know BrightFunnel. Yeah. I didn’t even realize that. Man, you guys are making moves.

– [Auseh Britt] That was a few years ago. So that was probably like, that was before Sixter. So we do have that.

– [Chris Mechanic] Well, I’m going to have to check out Terminus again, because I, last time, last time I jumped in, I don’t think it was as cool as it sounds right now.

– [Auseh Britt] It’s grown a lot.

– [Chris Mechanic] You, obviously are very busy. You’ve got a lot of people and various campaigns live, probably right now. So I’m going to let you go, but I really really appreciate the time here today. I think it was an excellent episode.