TechBytes with Christopher Golec, CEO, Demandbase

Christopher Golec
CEO, Demandbase

Demandbase recently launched the new-generation ABM platform, enabling B2B marketers to execute Account-Based Marketing effectively and easily. Promoted as a comprehensive, end-to-end ABM platform that lets you easily manage audiences of target accounts, measure the progress of those accounts and act on them across the entire funnel, the next-generation of Demandbase ABM has an Artificial Intelligence (AI) layer, which ensures an improvement in account identification rates. To dive deeper into Demandbase’s AI-powered ABM Platform, we spoke to CEO Christopher Golec, who dove into the nuances of Lead-to-Account matching and how AI/ML capabilities make ABM+CRM a killer-combination for B2B marketers.

MTS: What are the key inclusions in the new Demandbase ABM platform?
Christopher Golec: For marketers, looking to implement an Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategy, it can be challenging to stitch together a program with disparate technologies that don’t use a common data model or measure a business throughout the entire funnel and lifecycle.

• The ABM Platform is the only comprehensive, end-to-end solution for B2B marketers.
• The ABM Platform makes it easy to set up and manage account-based campaigns across the entire funnel.
• It includes a self-service interface that allows marketers to select target accounts, manage audiences across campaigns, integrate account information from a CRM system, and measure the performance of ABM programs based on pipeline and revenue.

MTS: How deep has Demandbase run with leveraging Machine learning and semantic understanding for predictive lead scoring and segmentation?
Christopher: Demandbase has the most extensive AI technology in B2B, which grows by billions of B2B interactions every month. We currently have 25 employees on our data science team dedicated to pairing AI and machine learning algorithms with our B2B data to provide ABM solutions that can identify every B2B company in the world, map relationships between companies, generate useful insights, and deliver the right content to the right companies.

Most recently, we introduced Real-Time Intent, an AI technology that analyzes and tracks billions of B2B interactions every month to identify the first moment of a potential buyer’s interest. And now, with our ABM Platform, AI is integrated throughout the platform to enable a 100 per cent improvement in account identification rates for users. AI is part of our DNA and will continue to play an important role in how we innovate.

Also Read: Dreamforce TechBytes with Scott Brinker, VP Platform Ecosystem, HubSpot

MTS: Do you agree that B2B marketers still get entangled with “Lead-to-Account” matching? To what extent would the new ABM platform help such marketers?
Christopher: Yes, lead-to-account matching is still an area that trips up B2B marketers. At Demandbase, we have the largest B2B data asset along with sophisticated matching techniques that connect leads and accounts across advertising and martech ecosystems to your CRM, so that ROI can be measured across the funnel.

The ABM Platform offers a fully integrated targeting, engagement, and sales conversion solution, and serves as a single source for managing audiences of target accounts and measuring the progress of those accounts across the entire funnel.

MTS: In the battle of “Volume versus Quality”, how do you see the new ABM platform doing a balancing act for an effective CRM operation?
Christopher: For sales and marketing to be aligned, you always prioritize quality. The new ABM Platform provides sales and marketing with visibility into what’s working and what’s not, and which accounts are the highest priority.

Our ABM Platform offers an easy-to-use interface that builds target accounts directly from CRM data, making the process of building an account list and having an effective CRM operation even easier. Marketers can upload a preexisting account list from their CRM solution, or they can leverage buyer intent signals generated from our AI-powered platform, which learns from 50 billion B2B interactions every month. With these capabilities, marketers can further segment and manage audiences by a number of firmographic variables such as industry, size, location, and others.

Also Read: Dreamforce TechBytes with Vinod Muthukrishnan, CEO, Cloudcherry

MTS: What’s the magical potion for ABM users while they build lifelong advocacy in a highly competitive MarTech ecosystem?
Christopher: The key to ABM is to align sales and marketing teams, including alignment on measurement. With ABM, it’s important to measure success at the account level from initial targeting all the way through to a closed deal. You can then have the flexibility to roll up those results up by territory, audience, and campaign.

Brandee Sanders, Director of Digital Marketing & Analytics at Blackline said, “Account-Based Marketing is focused on alignment and joined targeting efforts, so when you have multiple point solutions that don’t integrate intelligently, it can create unneeded complexity or holes in our Sales and Marketing strategy. Demandbase’s ABM Platform gives us an easy-to-use, integrated view into who we’re reaching, why we’re reaching them and how we’re engaging them, allowing us to quantitatively measure results and answer to core KPIs.”

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us, Christopher.
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