ABM Technology, Skills and Lessons Learned: FlipMyFunnel Festival Comes to Austin

The FlipMyFunnel festival makes its way to TrustRadius home base Austin, Texas next month for a day of ABM-themed sessions, including high-level thought leadership and practical case studies to help attendees “challenge the status quo of B2B marketing and sales.”

What is #FlipMyFunnel?

#FlipMyFunnel is a movement started by Sangram Vajre, the co-founder and CMO of Terminus, which is an ABM tool that serves ads via mobile, social, display, video and direct mail and provides account-level revenue attribution. The movement, which has gained support from vendors and practitioners across multiple software categories, proposes to reverse the traditional marketing funnel that passes a large volume of leads through various stages of education before a narrow slice of them purchases the product. The flipped funnel concept says you should instead identify the right set of target customers, find more like them, engage them with personalized content, and turn them into loyal fans that stick around, spend more, and advocate for you to a broader base of prospects. The implication is a greater focus on finding the right customers and making them happy.

What’s new in ABM?

As TrustRadius has observed before, Account-based Marketing is not necessarily a new concept. We talked to a couple of speakers for the Austin show who said that what’s perhaps changed is the technology available to enable it:

“What you didn’t have 20 years ago was the amount and depth of account and contact information available today, or the platforms to target and deploy personalization strategies. We can understand more about our accounts and people to develop or fine-tune our messaging. The notion of ABM is not new, but how we’re doing it today is turning from a more manual process to a more automated process.”
—Matt Senatore, Service Director, Account-Based Marketing Practice at SiriusDecisions

“We’ve seen a lot of incredible technologies, underpinning why ABM is new. It’s been around a long time, but it’s also new because of the technologies that exist to power these programs at scale in a highly efficient and effective way. It might be size, industry, competitive product, etc., and based on that we can deliver targeted programs to known and unknown contacts. And we can track what’s working and what’s not.”
—Tyler Lessard, CMO at Vidyard

The #FlipMyFunnel festival is indeed technology-centric. In addition to presentations from ABM practitioners, vendors will be presenting on how their technology platforms can enable ABM. For example, Lessard will be presenting his own case study of how Vidyard and one of their customers have been leveraging ABM practices to drive growth, particularly by using personalized, relevant messaging. (Vidyard’s platform enables personalized videos.)

A lot of technology vendors talk about supporting ABM, but it’s important not to forget the human side of it. Matt Senatore will be presenting on the skills your team needs to succeed at ABM.

“ABM marketers need to have a broad set of skills including the ability to think strategically and work very closely with sales, leadership and other internal constituents.  They can’t be reactive doers; they have to be more like mini-CMOs. So we’ll talk about the kind of competencies needed to be a leading ABM marketer, and share examples of what one of our clients did to enable his team to excel in Account-based marketing [co-presenter, SiriusDecisions client, Joe Quinn, ABM Section Manager at National Instruments].”
—Matt Senatore, Service Director, Account-Based Marketing Practice at SiriusDecisions

Lessard said the FlipMyFunnel audience is usually a cross-functional mix of attendees, from demand generation, digital marketing, practitioners, marketing thought leaders, etc., all within different industries and B2B markets. “There’s top-level ideas to think about, but also good practical sessions talking very transparently about how they’re doing things and what they’re learning,” Lessard explained.

What’s in store for the Austin show?

In Austin, we’ll hear ABM case studies from high-level B2B marketers Julia Stead, Director of Demand Generation of call tracking platform Invoca, Kevin Bobowski, CMO of marketing automation platform Act-On, and Maria Pergonlino, SVP of Global Marketing at Apttus, a quote-to-cash product.

Thought leaders speaking in Austin include:

• Craig Rosenberg, Co-founder and Chief Analyst at sales consulting firm TOPO, who will be talking about Account-based Everything (since ABM isn’t just about marketing).

• David Raab, MarTech thought leader, who will be talking about building your ABM tech stack.

• Matt Heinz, President at Heinz Marketing, who will be talking about using ABM to integrate Sales and Marketing.

• Matt Senatore, Service Director, ABM practice at SiriusDecisions, who will talk about the ABM skills your team needs to succeed.

Planning to go?

You can view the speaker list and schedule, and register for the event, here. TrustRadius is a sponsor: use our promo code TR50 to get a 50% discount when you register.

If you attend, say hi to TrustRadius and check our website for insights after the show – we’ll be talking to thought leaders, practitioners and vendors, and posting articles. If you plan on talking to any ABM vendors while there, make sure to check out their reviews on TrustRadius to see what real customers are saying about their products.