He recognized the shortcomings with marketing automation platforms after a few years in the B2B market, which planted the seed for carving a new path to an improved MarTech industry. His mentor at the time put some money forward and urged Eric Spett to start a company on the basis of fixing these problems, which evolved into ABM as we know it today.
While Eric Spett jumped right into entrepreneurship in the technology startup world after college, his journey was not without failures. Those early challenges guided him to his greatest success to date: establishing the Terminus Account Based Marketing (ABM) Platform and championing the ABM revolution for thousands of organizations.
In this episode of the Inside Intent podcast, join Eric Spett and Mike Burton in their discussion about creating a technology that allows marketers to engage specific key buyers at their target accounts. A more focused approach drives both customer and employee happiness. The framework is built upon quality growth and has thus created the Account Based Marketing category.
Addressing an underserved market that had flawed solutions
In the beginning days of Terminus, “digital advertising in B2B was completely underserved,” as Eric Spett describes it. Trends showed that B2B buying was changing from being led by a single decision maker, to committees of people identified as buying centers. The current solutions simply weren’t adapting to that; “with emails and marketing automation, there wasn’t really a good way to get in front of all of them.”
Consequently, Eric saw, “a big opportunity to provide B2B marketers with a great account-based advertising product that was software-first and automated—just like marketing automation—a transparent business model, and most importantly, had the ability to penetrate and engage buying centers at their target accounts.” Lo and behold, Terminus.
Building a focus on ‘quality growth’
At the crux of all elements at Terminus, including its brand promise, mission statement, operating guidelines, etc. is the concept of driving quality growth.
What that means, Eric explains that “It’s not about just driving growth. Because there are many successful B2B companies that have grown. We just think that there is a better way to drive growth, which means that it’s better for us as vendors. Healthier businesses, healthier unit economics, better alignment between sales and marketing. More focus, more enjoyment out of what we do for a living. More importantly, it’s also just a better experience for the buyer.”
Applying Intent data to achieve quality growth
Intent data and ABM go hand-in-hand, ergo the Bombora and Terminus relationship since the early days of Eric’s business. Early on, Eric noted, “once we gave marketers the power to advertise only to the specific decision makers at specific accounts, we realized that most B2B marketers didn’t deeply understand how to prioritize their target account list. And once they drove the engagement, they didn’t deeply understand how to activate their sales team without a lead coming in. And they certainly [did not know how] to properly measure this new type of business process. And of course Intent data comes in here in multiple areas.”
While ABM began taking many customers by storm, allowing them to create a one-to-one approach with an unprecedented technique, Intent data helped the platform and Terminus customers, “activate the sales team, not just with the signal that you’re generating through ads, but through third-party data in the market,” said Eric.
Terminus sales and marketing teams are also utilizing the power duo internally, through the Fit + Intent + Engagement model. “Once we started using that model internally, the lives of our SDRs and AEs just started getting better, like, no longer are they trying to get someone in a headlock to take a demo,” Eric quipped.
What exactly changed for the sales teams? Ultimately, Eric says, “they’re calling people who have interest or are in market, know a little bit about the brand, and genuinely want to learn more and have a conversation. And I know first-hand that it’s had a profound impact on our business.”
Bottom line is, “it’s a complete revolution in the way that B2B companies market, sell, and support their products,” Eric praised.
Taking ABM “from project into practice”
Eric warns listeners that building a full strategy from bottom-up won’t happen overnight, or even simply. But it’s important to see the efficiency and revolutionized operations as a light at the end of the tunnel.
He also suggests taking a page from the book of organizations that have reached success with ABM go to market business models and are paving the way for the rest of the market to follow suit. It usually starts with a test or running pilots for these teams, followed by a roller coaster of success. One organization that is through that trough as an ABM early adopter, is Bombora-Terminus shared client, Snowflake.
Eric applauds Snowflake ABM practitioner Daniel Day, for articulating what the ABM revolution truly is, “ABM is not about complete automation. ABM is about one-to-one, account-to-account personalization done as efficiently as possible.” Eric continues, “I think the best way to describe practice it is that you have software behind it that helps you do what’s never going to be fully automated work, but you are going to be able to do the personalization with enough efficiency for it to make business sense.”
Listen to the full episode of Inside Intent to learn more about the exact process and framework that Terminus implements for its customers to power end-to-end ABM platform.
