Hello, and, welcome to Converting Talks by Mousefow, the podcast where we try to be honest, with our conversation about conversion growth, GTM, and what's actually working in marketing right now. And today's guest, I'm talking to the lovely George Storm. Thank you for having me. Always a pleasure. Always a pleasure. George, you are the chief revenue officer at N.Rich, which is a B2B ABM advertising platforms, and I would say now even more than just that. But you can tell, and I think it will come very automatically in the conversation over the next thirty minutes, a little bit more detailed about this. But this platform has also been in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for 3 years running, I think. So that's pretty cool. So it's a really good tool. We ourselves at Mouseflow use it, so... And we're really happy to have it. So, George, tell me a little bit about yourself. I know that you are sitting a little bit in the intersection between revenue and marketing, so you kind of see from a daily aspect of how, yeah, the GTM and ABM and marketing is is also functioning. Correct. Thanks for a great intro, first of all, both for myself and for N.Rich. And a few things about myself. My name is George. Obviously, I've been in various sales roles or revenue roles for around, what is it now, twenty three years ish, of which the last twelve or thirteen has been spent in B2B SaaS. And as you said, they've been in both sort of sides of the coin or both sides of the argument, if you wish. So sales and marketing currently at N.Rich, I'm responsible for both functions. And before... I I think we will get into it a bit later, but it's... I have to say to all the marketers listening, coming from the... Us, me coming from the sales side. The last two and a half years that I'm working purely with marketing, I understand a lot more and it's... We have a lot of work to do on sales to make this collaboration better. Just to start on a good note. Yeah. But definitely. And... Yeah. And when it comes to N.Rich, as you said, we are the we are an ABM platform. And we are now developing N.Rich AI, which is even more that you hinted before. And N.Rich AI has to do with business intelligence capabilities, building applications, reporting, and having a lot more visibility on the results of ABM or the ABM programs or marketing activities in general. Yeah. In short. I would also say, I mean, seeing the development of and which, I mean, you're also very much focused in, I would say, as an ABM platform on the whole sales part of it. Right? So not just, you know, making sure to put the right ads, the right places with the right targeting, but actually have developed quite a lot to focus on the whole sales reach that I find really interesting in your product. It is the reason we focused the new the new developments in analytics and being able to create applications within the app is because ABM is usually seen as, lack of a better term, like it's a marketing thing since the abbreviation. But it is essentially, it is a full funnel motion. Yeah. ABM doesn't stop when an opportunity is created or even when a person, when an account becomes interested in the sales person, hopefully interacts. We need to see the funnel in all stages and we need to be able to measure in all stages in order to understand how the funnel is performing. Otherwise, it's quite hard to make decisions on how to improve. Yeah. And yeah, and like so many, I mean, I think that it's classic. It's been there in the books, right? ABM from actually should be called ABMS or ABX, not just marketing. Right? Because it is the full full funnel until, hopefully, a signed contract. So so that's definitely... So just let me rewind a little bit back on the whole ABM approach. I mean, ABM, I think I met it first time, like, really, a couple of years back now. I mean, at least five, ten years back, we kind of started slowly, more on a manual outreach approach. It was also in previous company where we had a more like one to few approach. So it was a big project each time we wanted to hit an account. But now, especially with a digital perspective and AI, it's it's I mean, it's it's more relevant than than ever, not just from targeting. It's always been relevant to target the right companies. But now that ads like is performing more, it's more difficult to perform super well on ads. There's way more algorithms. There's more factors in the market that goes in and makes in some ways your your ads. You really need to have an eye on them all the the freaking time, I wanted to say. So so... And and and could be a little bit, but there's so many things that that have been here. So if you could could have put a couple of words in over the last couple of years, if you look at the evolution, I would say, ABM and why it's more relevant than ever. Could could you put some words on that? Yeah. I would say that ABM has become, I would say, not even more important. The way that they see it currently is it's almost the ones that... It's almost a one way street when it comes to how to reach the audiences that you need. Of course, depending on what type of go to markets motion you're running, but like for higher value sales for larger... If you're looking to target larger organizations, given all the noise that exist in the market, plus the fact that stakeholder committees, decision groups have almost tripled in size the last two years. Risk in the markets is... The risk aversion in the market is the highest it has been for at least five, six years, which means that if your brand, if your messaging, if your USBs are not present in front of a committee of at least 13, 14 people, even if you're reaching a person that might come to your website, if you don't have that reach, and if you don't look at how your messaging is performing, then it's... The chances of building pipeline or even moreover later down the line having a chance to win these deals becomes quite small. Yeah. So if we follow the market conditions, working on a, an ICP focused manner, and starting from the top of top of the funnel with awareness, and making sure that your messaging has the right spread is actually... It's not really a choice, the way I see it today. It's the foundation basically. Okay. When it comes to when it comes to contact with ABM, I have a sort of an anecdote I can share. Yep. It's quite funny because my then CEO texted me just before I jumped on to this. So I got in touch with... My first proper crash course on ABM was around four years ago Yeah. When I was at Scribe. And we were just a a new... VC has just come on as majority owner. And we had this project group and for revenue. And the first thing they told us is you guys need to start doing ABM. And to tighten the ISPs and all these things. And we were sitting around the VPs and it's like, yeah, but we're sort of doing that sort of like we're running some, like, clean ads. Yeah. Yeah. We we have some thermographics. And then once we rolled out the first program, it's like, okay. So this is this is a whole this is a whole strategy, this is the whole motion. And when I saw the first results, because I was responsible for enterprise accounts at the time, from there I just thought sort of hooked. On learning more about the motion and is still in this role. It's a lot that goes into it, but it's an incredibly effective tool. Yeah, yeah. So if you had to kind of like look at the experience that you have today, and you came into it a little bit, but what would be the thing that most companies actually get wrong when they actually start ABM? I would say it's two things. One is that a lot of companies see ABM or see ABM as a marketing channel. And it's really a full funnel motion. It's multiple channels. ABM is not only LinkedIn as an example. Yeah. It's a lot of things that matter in this type of motion. And also, it's not a motion since it involves brand building and awareness. It's not a motion that you can judge as much as we all want. Believe me, I am responsible for budgets as well. I would like results in three months too. But unfortunately, this is not how it works. ABM is one of these levers that you realize is working quite well once you turn it off. Yeah. Yeah. If you know what I mean, these type It of is. It is. I mean, is definitely. I mean, the fact that sometimes... And that's the difficult part, right? It's the classic story of you want the numbers behind to kind of showcase that this is working, and sometimes it's actually turning it off to actually showcase it's, well, now we turn it off. Now you can see how, I don't know, it could be the conversion are falling on the visitor to the website is falling. Exactly. I think it's the bottleneck for every market share is that for us, if we could, but especially for the rest of the management group or the board that you're sitting with, the best approach would get that full, okay, could it just be a linear straightforward journey to the customer? Yes, that would be lovely, but that's just not the reality. So what it says, like 70% before they actually convert to something or you can actually see 70% of the journey is actually have already happened before you may actually identify the customer. Exactly. Exactly. This is the concept of the day one battle. I think it was the CMO from Funnel, I think was talking about that concept. I don't want to plagiarize other people's concepts. But they were talking about the fact that it's when decisions are being made in especially in today's market in anything of substance. We're not talking about something that costs maybe, I don't know, €500 per year. But any purchase for companies that is of any substance or strategic importance has a lot to do with trust and has a lot to do with visibility. So even if let's say my end buyer might be CMO or a VP marketing, for that investment to go through in the company, it will pass the CRO's desk, the CFO's desk, potentially the CEO's desk. Am I actively targeting these roles? Maybe on on an awareness level. But like, if they... If... When we're starting to look of a solution... At the solution, the... My brand is nowhere to be found, then when we start with a shortlist and we're not there, even if somebody... Some crazy person from Sweden cold calls them and says, yeah, but we have a really great solution. Maybe we should look at this. At that point, it's a bit too late. Yeah. If we end up in column five. Yeah, it's basically having already the brand in your head before you actually know that you want to use the product or the platform or whatever it Exactly. So because you would... I mean, I can't remember the numbers, but it's a quite high number. Right? That usually the one they end up picking is a a product they, at some level, already know about. Yes. Yeah. And it is at the level that they don't even need to exactly know the value proposition. No. I just heard about it almost. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. That that that's definitely the thing. When we talk about, so logically, I mean, if I compare a little bit N.Rich as a tool and Mouseflow as a tool, we are and we talked about it before we started to click on the the recording button. We are logically in in the same motion of the journey in in... Not the same, but part of of that motion, both our tools, where we could say that the the... In which ABM is the the first, I would say, touch point, what we just mentioned, the reach, the brand awareness, the conversions, the clicking on these ads, seeing... Being actually identified as a company than than do***. Whereas Mouseflow is, of course, a a web behavior analytic tool, so that's more okay. They have identified us. Now they're actually ending up on our website. And and Mouseflow goes in, of course, see... Looks at the the behavior that they have... Potential user have on our website. If you kind of look at that, and I don't know, you mentioned it quite also before, right, with the ICPs and the content, of course, needs to have consistency. But if you if you look at it, the... What is the biggest gap that you see between a target account that sees your ad and what happens when they actually land on the site. What what what have you experienced here? I've... It's the it's the parallel that I can bring is, like, looking at pictures at... Of a restaurant when you when you're looking to go somewhere to book and then actually walking into the restaurant. So you see a very tailored message in a campaign. It's tailored to my kind of persona. It's the right message. I was like, okay. So let's learn more about this. And then I end up in a slider that doesn't work. The first scroll doesn't seem to make any sense. And then I I was interested initially, then I don't understand why I landed in the... Where... What does the website want me to do from there? So what is the next action? Or what is the relevance from there? So content is incredibly important. And for instance, I can tell you since I am looking at marketing reporting, I am looking at Mouseflow analytics as well because if we're investing in campaigns, part of the reason we're running campaigns is because we want to bring people to to the website. Yeah. If we spend a lot of money to bring them there and then to... Only for them to get confused, then not only we're doing the branded disservice, we're also throwing money away. Exactly. Yeah. Don't wanna have a high value. Minus. It's a double minus. Yeah. So it is incredibly important that this messaging is important, creatives are important, but also navigation and how how the experience works. Because it's the same to translate to salespeople from a... As a customer experience from a customer experience perspective. It's not that different of a funnel as it is in the buying journey. The same customer experience should follow from top of funnel to middle of the funnel content to website visits to navigation to... The entire experience should follow. It should be smooth and intuitive in that sense. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that we can all agree that we don't wanna waste our money. Is, yeah, probably the No. In this economy. One thing is testing things that you're aware of testing and experiencing, but you don't wanna waste money on ads that you believe is getting a lot of traffic. But if they don't kinda continue contributing from there, it kind of didn't really make sense. If you I wanted to go a little bit back to the whole ABM approach because I wanted to ask you, and it's a little bit tricky, but many people think that ABM is only for big companies or big sales, big, bigger, you know, yeah, sales licenses or something like that. What would you say? Do you would you actually say that there's a stage or company size that where it doesn't really make sense to run ABM? I mean, it depends on your definitions. Right? If by account based, you mean that you're putting all your efforts for sales and marketing into specific accounts, then yes. Because I would... Then the alternative would be spray and pray and that makes sense for no size of business. When it comes to the size of company you're addressing, the more people that there are in this organization, the more people you'll be able to reach. So from from that perspective, it's in terms of reach, it makes more sense, the higher up market you go. And also in terms of ROI. Right? But I think I'm not fully in order to not answer fairly politically now and say and say it depends, I will ask you to clarify a bit more. What what are we trying to... What what barrier are we trying to to draw in that context? Yeah. I mean, I think that from the hype in in in for a long time is that the ABM approach is more like a a very much, you know, one to few and not necessarily one to many. And I've heard like, oh, no. No. But we have, like, ourself, we are not doing ABM as a strategy one to few in that sense. It's, it's focused on a specific enterprise's accounts, but it's not because we don't have a license structure where it makes sense to just pick 10 companies and say, if we get So these I was more like that. So I've heard a lot of people like, no, but we have two small licenses, but but ABM is not just one to few. No. But but I I've never really and I would love if anyone listening to this can DM me explain But this to I have never understood why it has to be either or in so one to many to one to few. If we just close, I don't think that there are any businesses anymore that say that if we can just do business with these 10 companies, because from these 10 companies, maybe one and a half technically will be in market that year. And then if you base your targets on that one and a half company, then I'm getting stressed on your behalf. But I see... I think that one to many should always be a foundation and the main the main baseline when you when you run your marketing and sales efforts. So... And since each motion has its cost and we were talking about not wasting money. Of course, if you... While running one to many approach, you see that there are companies that are getting more and more interested. Then of course, for these companies, can ramp up efforts. And to starting from webinar invitation to dinner invites to outreach, to... I don't know, fruit baskets that we used to do again. I'm showing my ears. To wine and dine, to whatever else. But it's not a binary thing. It's it's the same it's the same motion as it works with... In in a sales process, in my opinion. There are different steps for different stages. But I think one to one or one to few is quite limited and very high risk approach in that sense. Yeah. Yeah. It's basically also building a bit the funnel, right? So you might start higher up, as you say, with one too many approach. As they kind of go down through the funnel, and maybe you've seen the first couple of ads, you kind of go in and shrink the size of the people that you're hitting with the ads that are maybe that are more focused on a harder conversion than than the previous one. So, yeah, it's building. But it it also depends. We have this tendency, especially for the ones of us that have been in SaaS businesses for a long time. We have this tendency of doing magical math in a Where we say we wanna target a 100 companies. If we could only close 30 of these companies then we make our year. So within twelve months, the probability of all of these 30 companies, A, having the problem you're solving, B, having the budget to pay for it, C, haven't it solved it already with another vendor that they're not happy with and their contract is something. So for the circumstances to be opportune quarter over quarter, the more you limit yourself, the harder it will be to A, build pipeline, and B, close business, and C, close business in time to make your targets. So this is why it is important to have different touch points in different stages. And awareness is value of brand awareness that I can also attest. I... As a sales... As a career salesperson, it took me a few years to fully grasp, is still super important. You can't just ramp up and do hyper personalized messaging to a person that has never heard of you, your company, or your category before and expected. But it was so customs, like, It's great, but it doesn't mean a lot. No. Okay. Fair enough. Yeah. It makes sense. It makes sense. I wanted to use the last couple of minutes here because I wanted to ask you a little bit logically. I mean, we can't get over AI, of course. And especially over even... I mean, it's been here for a while now, but especially over the last little year here. How do you... If you had any kind of suggestions or thoughts or wanted to share to the audience about the the changes that AI have done for an ABM strategy. What would you kind of say... What is the biggest or one of the the greatest thing... I I will say greatest, but, you know, how you can suddenly work with your ABM approach differently that you just could maybe not do two, three, four years back. I mean, there are so many things, anything from internal productivity and routines to content creation, to testing, to analytics, to looking at different interpretations of data. This is also what we started doing both ourselves in marketing and also in the product for our customers, which is to analyze step by step what's happening in all in all our efforts. Because again, ABM is not just campaigns. It's trying to... For me, the biggest thing that AI has helped me with as... In my role the last year is to have a full understanding on what's happening to the funnel from the first touch point down to renewal. Because these were so isolated numbers before in many different systems that were very hard to connect. And even if you were managed by some miracle to connect them, it's very hard to analyze or keep current, which then can give you the ability to make strategic decisions based on based on data instead of trying to a b test your way out of forecasting. Yeah. So I would say practically for me, this is the biggest is the biggest effect. Yeah, yeah. I've seen it too, and I completely agree with you. And as we actually started a little bit the recording with, it's not a linear line. You can't just kind of go from A to Z. You go A, B, C, D, and then you go maybe to MN, and then you go back to GH. So it is and then you maybe also have another Arabic alphabet running under It's our tongue, it's it's completely impossible to kind of get a 100% of full January, and and some of it is not... Doesn't necessarily have a digital print either. Right? So so it can be. But definitely that's also what I've experienced in general, is that being able to put different platforms and tools in one view. I mean, that's just extraordinary for me. And then also then actually having an assistant who can help you on the analytic part and the focus part and creating agents. Yeah. That's a whole another talk we can talk about. Oh, we can be here for a good two hours more easily. Yeah. Exactly. Want to just... If we are... For the ones listening, if I would say anyone keeps one thing when it comes to AI implementations because there is so many cooler things that I see on LinkedIn, that I see on conferences, that I see people sending me, that are really cool and we couldn't do them before, but it's... The value sort of stops that it's a cool thing. Look, if I couldn't do this before, now I can do this thing. Yeah. That I will probably never do again. But like, we as professionals and as an industry, we always had a data problem. Which is why I think that tools like yours is very, very important because what AI allows you to do is not only aggregate, but also crunch huge amounts of numbers and make correlations, either direct correlations or even calculate probabilities. So if you were to focus as a marketer or as revenue responsible into one larger AI project, I would say look at harmonizing analytics in the entire... In your entire funnel, which is before you needed to go to, I don't know, some fancy CRM consultancy, pay them for six months, get depressed, and and then and then end up in Excel again. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. I would say that. Yeah. Yeah. That's, again, that's a whole other conversation also about these kind of how you you suddenly allocate your budget differently than you used to and what you prioritize to pay for as both consulting, but also platforms and so on. Yeah. It's changing, that's for sure. On that note, George, do you have a last thing you want to kind of share that you really feel passionate about right now that's going on in the ABM world, if it's AI or not, that you see here end of 26 slowly that that you think is a a big and trending focus? I I see, and I don't... I I... Okay. I don't wanna close on on not negative, but like concerning predictions. But like anyone that has been on commercial role this year has experienced a very rough markets. The prediction for '27 is not gonna look any better. If anything, it's probably gonna look worse. That being said, in every turbulent situation there is opportunity. And to follow-up the previous point, people that are managing now to focus and isolate efforts into starting with ISP, then going into data and progression, and making tailored and database decisions, and having a really good understanding how much the market has changed, how how much risk their buyers are carrying on those shoulders, and be able to adapt. And the only way to adapt is to understand the markets. And to understand the markets, you need to understand your data. That's for sure. That is something that you, I mean, you can't avoid. You need to understand the data or understand the market to understand data, and you need to understand the data to understand the market. You could say both ways, but that's for sure. Data is relevant. And as you also mentioned, with AI today, crunching the data is, I would say, easier than ever. So... It is, but I have to also say that I've also been in the... I was lucky enough to be a part of the golden years of SaaS as well. Where, yes, every year we spoke about data accuracy and efficiency of operations and things like that. You still saw results off the charts. The market was great. Interest rates were next to nothing. Money was cheap. Now it is instead of getting super distracted about all the cool things that you can do and the board saying, yeah, let's do more AI stuff, whatever that means. Focusing in efforts on business fundamentals, using AI to help with those fundamentals and understanding of our business will be where the path, the safest path is, in my opinion. Yeah, I love that. I will leave those last wisdom words for this podcast here. George, thank you for joining me for well, it's late morning hours or depending on where you live in the world. For some, it's still morning. For some, it's lunchtime. I'm in Copenhagen, so it's definitely lunchtime for me now. But thank you for spending some time with me. It's always a joy to have these conversations with you, and I look forward to our next talk. Thank you very much for having me in. Always a pleasure.