The following interview is a conversation we had with Colby Proffitt, VP of Marketing at Shift5, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: From the Pentagon to B2B

Brett
This is marketing from the frontlines, where we speak with B2B marketers who are in the trenches bringing technology to market. Here’s your host, Brett Stapper, CEO of Front Lines Media. Hey, everyone, and thanks for listening. Today we’re speaking with Colby Proffitt, VP of Marketing at Shift5. Colby, how are you? 

Colby Proffitt
I’m doing great. Thanks for having me. How’s it going? 

Brett
I’m doing great. I’m super excited. And I’d love to just begin with the big question of why. Why marketing? What are you doing here? 

Colby Proffitt
Yeah, great question. And I have a very kind of bizarre entry into marketing. I started my career as a marketer very quickly, got back out of it for a variety of reasons, and found myself working as a contractor over at Pentagon and over at the state Department, a few other agencies for a while, and was not doing any marketing specific work. I was an IT project manager, I was an environment analyst, did a lot of governance work. Kind of a bizarre path to start. But I had this observation and sat down with my CEO at the time and kind of laid out the fact that were one company of quite literally thousands who were providing solutions and services back to the DoD and other federal civilian agencies. 

Colby Proffitt
And I said, we’re not really doing anything to differentiate ourselves a lot of opportunities here where we could at ourselves things differently. And long story short, by the end of it she said, well, congratulations. Go fix all those problems. You’re our new marketing director. So didn’t really see the conversation playing out that way. I thought were just having a conversation over lunch, but one thing led to another and, you know, from there, I built out the program over the next couple of years and really cut my teeth on modern marketing practices and dove into the deep end on the PR side as well. And I think the thing that has carried through from that experience and every other marketing role that I’ve had since then is that it’s always something new. 

Colby Proffitt
And that’s very rewarding to me because even if you do everything right, you know, I’m using right the very loose definition here. You build out a great program. There’s always going to be something else that needs to be done. There’s always going to be opportunity for improvement. You’ll have a new competitor that shows up when you least expect it. There’s going to be some economic variable that affects your tam in some way. So it’s really just a constant adventure. And you’re always in this position of putting the puzzle pieces together. And I feel like the puzzle pieces are often there. And the way that I go about it is probably how most people solve a puzzle. You start with the edges, right? 

Colby Proffitt
Establish a product market fit, get that in place, and then you work your way in and maybe fixate one thing that’s specific color and address that area of marketing. So it can be a lot of fun. If you go into it with the right mindset, it can be very rewarding at the same time. 

Brett
Now your background makes a little bit more sense. I noticed that you were director of public sector marketing at two different organizations and I thought, I’ve never seen someone with that title now. 

Colby Proffitt
Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. My time spent over at the Pentagon, a couple of different agencies. I really learned the acquisition and procurement process and some of the challenges that B2B and B 2G SaaS vendors and other companies looking to do business with the government, what exactly they’re up against. And it’s not easy. There’s a lot of nuances to that whole buying cycle. It’s very different from what you run into in the commercial space or other verticals. So learned a lot there and positioning well to really focus in on public sector specifically. 

Brett
I think there’s a lot more founders and just organizations and startups in general that do want to sell to the government. What should they know? If they do want the government to be a customer, how can they best position themselves? What should they know about the process? 

Colby Proffitt
Yeah, it’s interesting. I have a lot of conversations over the last couple of years with CROs and other folks on the executive leadership team of various companies, where they’re enticed by the fact that for cybersecurity in particular, for example, DoD has got something to the tune of $90 billion to dedicate towards bolstering our nation’s cybersecurity posture. And if you’re in that constant up into the right mode, and maybe you’ve saturated your tam or your displacement plays aren’t working, there’s something that’s holding you back, limiting you from achieving those under the right targets. You see that funding that’s there and you say, oh, let’s go after that. That’s money in the bank. And it’s just not that simple. 

Colby Proffitt
From a purely process and timeline perspective, if you’re used to deals that are closing in, maybe it’s 30 days, maybe it’s less than six months, something that’s relatively short. And it’s going to depend on what other vertical you’re used to selling into. When you get to the public sector space, whether that’s fedsev or DoD. You’re talking about a year at a minimum, in many cases 18 months or longer. So there’s that component and the deal size is usually very different. Again, depending on what your average selling prices that you’re accustomed to. It’s probably not the same as what you’re going to be looking at when you get into, you know, much larger deals with the federal government. We’re talking about multimillion dollar deals in many cases, again, depending on what you’re selling specifically. 

Colby Proffitt
So that creates some challenges from pipeline predictability and your revenue forecasting and introduces a whole other aspect of lumpiness to the business. So its great when those deals close and you have those things come in, but you get into this waves and troughs scenario where yours makes it hard to really predict sometimes. And theres a lot of things that change. Theres a lot of things that at the end of the day are just out of your control as a vendor or a company trying to sell out to the government. From a marketing perspective, you’ve got a lot of other limitations as well. We’re all coming out of, I think, recovering from the deluge of Amazon gift cards and free wine bottles and bourbon tastings and things like that over the pandemic. And you just can’t do that sort of stuff with the federal government. 

Colby Proffitt
You can’t offer any sort of incentive, financial or otherwise. So you’ve really got to get creative with your approach to how you engage with them. At the end of the day, you’ve just got to accept that it’s a massive investment that will yield returns if you go about it the right way. But it’s going to take a lot longer than any other industry that you’re looking to initially go after. 

Brett
That must really screw up the playbook for most cybersecurity marketers. 

Colby Proffitt
You take them out to steak dinners. 

Brett
Like that whole tricky when you can’t run that playbook. 

Colby Proffitt
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it’s funny, I’ve been asked on a handful of occasions like, do you have a playbook that you use for public sector? And my response is generally something to the effect of, no, I don’t have a playbook because depending on what agency you’re going after, whether they’re civilian or on the DoD side or if they’re state and local or higher ed, and even then, everything is incredibly nuanced. There’s a whole different set of icps that you’re going after. There’s a whole different set of solutions that they’re looking for based on executive orders and other federal mandates that are coming down. So you may have a playbook that works really well. 

Colby Proffitt
You know, three years ago, five years ago, even six months ago in a specific scenario for a specific agency, but you could do everything just like that again now, and it would completely fail, like, totally fall on its face via waste of time, energy, and resources. So there’s some loose guidelines and kind of frameworks that I can recommend to folks. But generally speaking, you’ve really got to do your research. You got to understand what the current challenges that customer is facing and specifically what those mandates are and where the funding is that’s tied to it as well. 

Brett
Well, when you put it that way, I’m sure anyone listening in is going to be thrilled about the idea. 

Colby Proffitt
I can talk anyone out of the idea of going after a public sector. Just give me five minutes. 

Brett
Yeah, I think you convinced me in the couple minutes that we’ve had here, so, yeah, definitely we’ll avoid it. 

Colby Proffitt
Well, that said, though, I will say it is the reason that I’m still here and dedicated to the public sector. It’s different. Like, yeah, there’s a ton of challenges and a ton of red tape, but it can be done. You know, our government wouldn’t be in the position that it is today if it weren’t for folks stepping up to the challenge and figuring out, okay, how do we navigate this process? How do we make our products stand out? How do we win over these various disparate buying Personas, and how do we align the funding to the requirements that the customer actually has, and how do we fit our product into that? How do we work the policy angle and everything else? So, yeah, it’s a ton of work. 

Colby Proffitt
It’s not for the pain of heart, and it’s definitely one of those things that the more you do it, the better you get. But it’s incredibly important work and incredibly rewarding. Not to diminish the importance of any of the other verticals out there, but when you’re talking about national security or ensuring that there’s the proper security in place so that folks are getting their Social Security checks or they’re getting the health care that they need or things like that, there’s a very real allure and value of getting behind that type of mission. And that’s what was instilled in me back in my early days at the Pentagon, where I wasn’t a warfighter. I had a lot of friends who, you know, served on active duty. I was the hands on keyboard, you know, sitting behind a safety of a cubicle. 

Colby Proffitt
But the work that I was doing, the work that my team was doing there, had an impact there. And providing those secure solutions for the warfighter at the end of the day, so it all comes full circle. It’s very meaningful work. 

Brett
Yeah, I can imagine that. Much more meaningful than a marketer who’s in there trying to sell, you know, conversion rate optimization software to. I can see how you probably would wake up a little bit more fired up than people like that. 

Colby Proffitt
Yeah, there’s the time and a place for everything at the end of the day. And I think what’s cool about all the different industries that are out there is that every one of them is unique and different with its own set of challenges and breakthroughs that occur at varying paces. And when you have the ability to connect with those folks in different industries, much like you and I are doing now, right, you can learn something there, and you can learn about a challenge that they had and then carry it over to your specific industry and improve upon it. So it’s important, you know, across the board and just happy to have a role in moving things forward there. 

Brett
Have you ever been tempted to go into a completely different industry? The reason I ask is I had a marketer on two weeks ago, and they had spent 1015 years in enterprise B2B, and then they moved basically consumer, and they talked about how it was a big Shift5, but it was awesome. And they were having fun. They kind of describe it as they just got a bit bored. The playbooks they were running for. 

Colby Proffitt
It was boring. 

Brett
Have you ever been tempted to do a totally fresh start like that? 

Colby Proffitt
Yeah. And honestly, that’s actually one of the reasons that I made the decision to come over to where I’m at currently at Shift5. So not to talk advising about the cool product that we have or anything like that, but the company is interesting because we are very much DoD first. So very different from most of the B2B SaaS companies that you see out there today, where it’s okay. We’re going to go after this other commercial vertical or this other industry, fencer, retail manufacturing, what have you. Get ourselves established there where things are, I don’t want to say easier, but a little bit more maybe predictable. There are those playbooks were talking about that you can lean on to a certain extent. 

Colby Proffitt
And then once they get their feet on rope and they get comfortable, then they can make investments in going after public sector. Trey Shift5 is just the opposite of that. Our co-founders started the company back in 2019, came out of cyber command largely because the security problems that they were not only realizing but facing while they were in uniform, they realized that these are really important and that there was a need for a technology, a solution to better position the warfighter to deal with some of these cybersecurity challenges, these predictive maintenance challenges and that sort of thing. So that’s where our first focus is. But we’re also serving customers across commercial aviation, maritime and braille as well. So theres some interesting parallels between some of those industries. 

Colby Proffitt
Again, to my earlier point, I feel like some of our lessons learned both for me and my team on the marketing side, but for the rest of our business as well, across product, across engineering, across the sales.org, theres lessons learned that we can apply from our experiences with our DoD customers and carry those over to the commercial verticals as well. So long winded way of saying, yeah, its tempting. And Im kind of doing that now. And its really interesting. And again, it goes back to that puzzle analogy. Right. There’s other puzzle pieces on the board for commercial. We just got to figure out where exactly they go. 

Brett
Makes a lot of sense. Now, let’s dive deeper into the topic at hand here. And that topic is ABM. So when it comes to ABM, how would you describe that the state of today? 

Colby Proffitt
I would say it’s kind of like every other buzzword that crops up, whether you’re in marketing or whatever you wake up and do in the morning, there’s something that’s being talked about. Zero trust from a technology standpoint. I feel like that bubble has popped this point and everybody’s talked it to death. ABM, I would say, is that same situation where everybody was talking about it. Everybody got really excited about it, and there’s very few companies out there, I would say, that are actually doing it really well. I think there’s a lot of different flavors of ABM, which is part of what makes it a challenge to measure, okay, who’s doing it well and who needs to improve. And theres different budgets that you can allocate towards ABM depending on the size and stage of your company. 

Colby Proffitt
And theres a lot of variability, too, with the ICPs that you’re going after as well. If its public sector, thats going to be a different flavor of ABM. If you’re going after the commercial space. 

Brett
Now, obviously, todays theme is ABM. Thats where we go deep on. So id love to begin with the question of whats the state of ABM today? 

Colby Proffitt
Yeah. So I would say theres a lot of buzzwords that get thrown around in the marketing space and in the technology space in general. Zero trust is the old half buzzword. The bubbles popped, I think, in my mind, on the technology side of things, ABM is, I think, in that same boat right now where a lot of people talking about it. You’ve got a fair amount of folks who are doing ABM, or at least claiming that they’re doing it, but you’ve got a much smaller instead of the population thats actually really doing it well and seeing the ROI that was promised there. So its tough to even compare how well an ABM implementation is going juxtaposed to another because theres so many different ways to go about it. 

Colby Proffitt
It depends on the size of your company, the stage of the company, the amount of budget that youve got to work with. Just how big can you make your tech stack, just how many resources, hands on keyboards can you actually have to support your ABM program? How big is your sales team? What is your icp? What’s your average deal size? There’s just a ton of variables that go into it. You know, an ABM program at one company might look entirely different from an ABM program elsewhere. So I think there’s a lot of promise in it. 

Colby Proffitt
I just think that there’s a lot of confusion around the lack of clarity and a little bit of it’s, you know, I hate to even mention the term AI, but it’s almost like that where all this promise and folks are a little bit intimidated by it, and there’s just this onslaught, absolute deluge of information about, oh, you should use AI for this, you should use AR for that. Here’s this, does this, here’s this tool that does that. It’s almost the same thing with ABM. So the challenge to marketers is, I would say, twofold. It’s one right sizing, figuring out, okay, what’s the actual objective that we’re driving towards? 

Colby Proffitt
Why are we even thinking about this thing called account based marketing and getting clear direction on that, not just within the marketing organization, but aligning with your sales team, aligning with your CRO, aligning with your CEO and the rest of your executive leadership team, and then backing into it. And you may very well reach the conclusion that AVM just doesn’t actually make sense for your particular situation that you’re in now. If it does make sense, then you’ve got to do a whole nother layer of diligence there, and you’re going to have to take a whole lot of demos with, you know, just the different tools that are available out there on the tech stack side of things. 

Colby Proffitt
I personally think that maybe you can do a flavor of ABM without a massive investment in your tech stack, but it sure is a heck of a lot easier if you’ve got at least a handful of the right tools in place. So much of ABM is based on data and insights within context. So, you know, in my mind, gone are the days where you’ve got to spray and pray and say, okay, we’re just going to take a volume based approach. We’ve got 10,000 contacts in our database. We’ve got a hunch that maybe this particular topic is going to resonate with them, so we’re just going to blast it out there. With ABM, you can actually dissect that database and understand what exactly they care about. 

Colby Proffitt
You can get to the point where you can see, okay, where were they coming before they got to our website? Once they got to our website, did they hang out there for 3 seconds and leave? Did they stay there for five or ten minutes and actually engage with some of our content? Did they leave for a week? They come back a month later, and now all of a sudden they’re really interested. They’re downloading a ton of different white papers and solution briefs. It’s that ability to understand that otherwise kind of dark side of the buying experience that really gives you the upper hand and the ability to tailor your messaging and your outreach to those folks. So the last part of it that in my mind is really important gets into this idea of the human centric side of ABM. 

Colby Proffitt
I see a lot of marketers who get the data, they get the insights, but they are still just operating out of the spreadsheet. And they’re really focused on their lead gen targets. They’re really focused on their pipe gen targets. And those are all fine and, well, really important things that you’ve got to focus on as well. But the human centric side of ABM sometimes means taking a step back and saying, okay, got all this data. Like let’s actually just laser focus in on what this actually means. We had this person who we had identified as this specific Persona within one of our target accounts and they came in through, let’s say it was event lead at a trade show or something. Well, based on all of their activity, they are actually the polar opposite of what we thought. 

Colby Proffitt
They’re not interested in cybersecurity at all. They’re actually really interested in what we call at my company predictive maintenance. Well, now you’re able to change where that person is, what list they’re in, change up your segmentation and then serve up more appropriate content to them. So it’s not just looking at the data, but thinking about the fact that it’s not just the lead on the other end of the screen, the other end of that email, the other end of that phone call. It’s actually a person. And that person has pain points just like you do. And I’ll give a shout out to my friends over at user evidence. Peter and Trinity, Im not a current customer of theirs, but I was absolutely blown away by how well they are doing account based marketing. 

Colby Proffitt
I had a job description that I posted and it was a major pain point because Im looking for that unicorn who can do this laundry list of really tough things. And Peters outreach to me, actually his jumping off point was around that job description. And one of the specific things that I talked about was getting customer referrals and testimonials and things like that. All the things that his company of course, can help with. But it struck me in such a way where in the litany of the other 500 pitches I was getting in my inbox that morning, his stood out. Not only did I forward it to the rest of my team, I also took a call with him. Now, like I said, we’re not customers currently, but hoping to potentially change that down the line here. 

Colby Proffitt
But that’s the example and that’s what I think. Good. ABM looks like he did a ton of research ahead of time. But it wasn’t just because he had a hunch and said, oh, looks like these guys are hiring. No, he had insights where he had seen that I’ve been to the website and then he did his own research based on that and kind of pulled all those, going back to that puzzle piece analogy, pulled all those pieces together to create a picture of what my pain point was and how to get me to engage. And it worked really well. 

Brett
How do you think about the Line between good research and being creepy? I’ve had that experience a couple of times where sometimes I go on a website and then I get an email from them right after and I don’t know, doesn’t make me feel good necessarily like kind of depends on the problem. 

Colby Proffitt
Yeah. Oh man I can empathize with that. Like so many different levels. 

Brett
I love the ability so I’m like conflicted there. 

Colby Proffitt
Right right yeah. You know the whole concept of speed delete I think is ingrained in anyone with a marketing degree or an MBA in marketing. And again, depends on the vertical. Right. And in some cases there’s research out there about, you know, the first person to reach out and make contact has a higher likelihood of actually closing that deal compared to their competitors. So I get it. Theres a time and a place for that. But there is definitely a fine line between effective, thoughtful, intentional research and the general creepiness factor. Ive got a lot of examples of the creepiness factor of what not to do, stalking folks on social media and showing up at an event where someone knew that particular target was going to be and they actually had a gift for their kid because they saw on social media that their birthday. 

Colby Proffitt
It just happened. Yeah. It’s like next level capabilities nowadays. So I think the main thing there is, when I say be intentional, show up without making an automatic ask. There’s this concept of the 95 five rule out there, which is essentially way oversimplifying this. But 95% of your total addressable market isn’t actually interested in talking to you. They’re not interested in making the buying decision only about give or take 5% thats actually in market at that time. So if you’re going after that other 95% and taking that volume based approach and just blasting their inbox and hitting up their cell phone and everything, its not going to work. You’re going to come off as a nuisance or you’re going to come off as being creepy. Instead. 

Colby Proffitt
If you do the research that I talked about, Peter did, and you serve up something without making any sort of request where it’s like, hey, here’s this topic that I know you’re really interested in. Here’s some research that maybe my company did or maybe that a third party did that. Seems like it might be really relevant to the thing that you’re grappling with right now and just leave it at that. This might be controversial, but I’m going to put it out there. If you don’t have a good call to action, if your call to action is book a demo or schedule a meeting and that’s all you’ve got, forget it. You’re wasting your time. You would be far better served. And I know this because we tried it. 

Colby Proffitt
We do a lot of micro experiments on my team and this is part of what we did was let’s just kill those altogether. The open rates aren’t very good anyways. Let’s take that out and just serve up some sort of whether it’s thought leadership, content, original research, some sort of survey results, anything that doesn’t require making a request of the person on the receiving end. And lets say you’ve got a cadence of ten touches. Do it from 90% of your touches. By the time you get to that last touch, you’ve earned the right to make a request because at that point they’ve gotten enough value for free thats been really tailor made for what they are. After that, they might actually answer the phone when you call the next time or they might actually respond to your email and just ask a question. 

Colby Proffitt
Its about taking those little human centric steps along the way, remembering that there’s a person that you’re dealing with, not just a lead, not just a figure in a database or a person in a spreadsheet. And taking it to that next level of personalization and keeping it focused on that. 

Brett
Jeff, it’s amazing to me how many marketers seem to forget that there is a human on the receiving emails. In my consumer life. When I sign up for things, I just get bombarded like I had for my electricity company. It’s like spanning my email with webinars and all these things. And like guys, I don’t want to hear from you. I don’t want these insights from you. And like they were doing it like five times a week, something crazy like that. 

Colby Proffitt
And I said answer. 

Brett
But I said like, there are human receiving end of this. Like keep that in mind. But yeah, constantly on my line as. 

Colby Proffitt
Marketers, I feel like we’re just constantly in this massive pressure cooker right where we’ve got to hit those targets. We’ve got to make sure we’re maintaining pipeline coverage current quarter, next quarter, you know, all the way into next year. And it’s easy to just focus in on that data. And again, I don’t want to diminish it incredibly important to make sure that you’re hitting those targets. But you’ve got to have balance of reality. You’re dealing with a person who puts their pants on in the morning just like you do. Right. And you’ve got to put yourself in their shoes sometimes. Say, okay, I just wrote this email and I’m super proud of. I know that it’s going to get the attention of this target Persona. Put it in a desk drawer for a couple hours and come back to it and reread it. 

Colby Proffitt
Was it really that compelling? Did you really do an off account research? I am always a fan of quality work over quantity. I tell my BDR team, I really don’t care how many phone calls you make. I really don’t care how many emails you send. What I care about the other day is conversion. Because if the conversion is where it’s supposed to be, then volume is not really an issue for us. If you’ve got the right folks and you’re sending the right message, not only are you going to hit those targets organically, just by doing better human centric work, but you’re also going to be able to have more that you can rinse and repeat and then scale from there. 

Brett
Do you oversee that PDR team? 

Colby Proffitt
I do. In total honesty. We have one BDR. 

Brett
Can you see them all? 

Colby Proffitt
Yeah, I oversee all of them. All one? Yeah. We didn’t have any BDRs when I got here. And I would say in hindsight, it is one of the best decisions that we’ve made. When I got to the company, the vast majority of our leads were coming in from events and trade shows, which is fine and great. We had a lot of referrals that were coming in as well. And that’s not uncommon in the public sector business. But since then, in combination of building out the ABM program, bringing on a really great BDR, who has been able to not just do the day to day BDR work, but also kind of lay the foundation from a process standpoint. We’ve gotten to a point where now it’s no longer like that. 

Colby Proffitt
90% from leads, it’s closer to, you know, 70, 35, 65, where we’ve got more and more leads that are coming in from our website. And again, that’s tied back into quality content, pretty good volume of content that we’re able to maintain as well. But really it’s just getting it tailor made for the folks we’re targeting. And a lot of that is because of insights we get from our BDR. So he gets the insights from our tech stack. He then has the interactions with those targets. He then funnels that information back to the rest of the marketing team, to the product marketing team, to our content team, and it just turns into this beautiful cycle where it’s just constantly improving. 

Brett
Something you mentioned, but I want to go back to just a brief second here. You mentioned experiments and that you love to run micro experiments. What’s an example experiment you ran in the last twelve months that it just blew you away with the results and ended up being scaled into a much bigger program? 

Colby Proffitt
Yeah, I’d say the one that comes to mind. Channel is critical, and there’s the usual suspects. Right? Okay. It’s going to be something on social media, or depending on the ICP, it’s probably going to be LinkedIn the big professional network. And were doing fine. We were hitting our targets and everything there. But we had this hypothesis that if we really took a hard look at just the demographic information alone for our icps, and I’ll share a little bit about them. So two of the specific Personas we care about because of the work that we do are actually pilots and what we call maintainers, folks who are responsible for the maintenance and operations of aircraft, of weapons systems, of other big platforms like that. 

Colby Proffitt
And when you look at the specific demographic of those folks, we had this hypothesis that there might be some alternative platforms other than just the traditional LinkedIn channel. And so we took a gamble and we put some of our budget towards some advertising on Reddit, of all places. And I, I don’t know your personal sentiment towards Reddit, there’s some interesting rat holes. You can go down there for sure. But turns out, in fact, that is where a lot of, you know, those specific Personas were hanging out. They were talking about challenges they were facing from a maintenance perspective about this one part that was really hard to find for this one specific aircraft, some of the other challenges that they were just faced with on a regular basis. 

Colby Proffitt
So we had a surprising but really positive response to some of our initial ads there, made some adjustments to some of the ads, changed around some of our messaging, put a little bit more money behind it as a stretching out that micro experiment, and the results just kept getting better. So things like that, I’m a big fan of where it’s like, okay, we’ve got ten different kind of wild haired ideas, and when I say micro investments, I’m talking like hundreds of dollars, maybe $1,000. Stop. Like, you don’t have to go big here and just try it out, see if it works. And if it works, great, keep doing it, keep feeding it, keep driving those results. If it doesn’t work, don’t just throw it out. Like take a moment, stop and say, okay, well, why didn’t it work? Is it the channel? 

Colby Proffitt
Is it the message? Is it the imagery behind the message? Was it the time of day? Ask all those hard questions and really drill into the why? Because it might be that you have the right channel. There’s just something else about your messaging or about your general approach that isn’t quite right. So big fan of micro experiments across the board. We make it a habit of doing those as often as we can. 

Brett
Yeah, I know you mentioned Reddit there, but if you had to choose what one channel you would be doubling down on in the next twelve months and then what’s one channel that you’d be scaling back on or just not pursuing? 

Colby Proffitt
Oh man, that’s tough. I mean, LinkedIn is definitely still our tried and true just given the general Personas that we’re pursuing because of the nature of public sector work. There’s also a lot of folks we wish were on LinkedIn and they’re not. So I think that’s one that’s kind of, we got to keep feeding and just get continually creative and again, do some more experiments with their messaging and figure out what’s going to land. Well, there one that I would probably do away with and we’re really not doing much. There already is around Facebook. Our Persona just doesn’t hang out there. I think that’s probably generally true across the board, though. I don’t know, maybe there’s other verticals where it is more relevant. 

Brett
Now, final question for you. Let’s imagine that you sit down for lunch with a CMO or a marketing leader and they say, colby, what’s your number one piece of advice for an ABM program to be successful? What would you tell them? 

Colby Proffitt
So ABm is a long term investment and I think that’s where I see the most folks who dabble with the idea of ABM get frustrated or not see the results that they’re after or just flat out fail. And you have to have that comprehensive understanding that this is not a silver bullet. It’s not going to make all my other marketing problems go away. It’s not going to fix my alignment problems. Its not going to just bring people banging down the door. This is a long term strategy and theres going to be some short term wins and some longer term wins. The second piece of that is once you come to that own realization yourself. 

Colby Proffitt
You absolutely have to get not just your own marketing team on board with that idea, but also your sales team, your product team, all the other functional groups, even your engineering teams, folks that marketing may not even normally have a lot of engagement with and definitely with your other executive stakeholders and even with your board. And you’ve got to be real about that. And the best way to do that is look at the numbers. And if you’ve got an understanding and alignment on what your targets are for the year, and you can take a data driven approach that says, okay, were either hitting our numbers or were not, this is what reality looks like today. If we make this investment in ABM, this is what it can look like in the long term, and maybe it’s staying the same in the short term. 

Colby Proffitt
And then things are increasing in the long term, things are getting more effective. Your CPL is coming down, you’re unlocking new capabilities. You are creating so much demand that you’re going to have to hire more bdrs. You’re going to have to hire more sales reps. But be realistic about what the art of the possible is. But what that journey is going to take to get from where you are today to the top of that albumen, in some cases, that means that some of your metrics are actually going to suffer for a little bit. One of the conversations I had to have with my executive team before we started down our ABM journey twelve plus months ago now was its not about lead volume. And we have been kind of wrapped around the axle on that. 

Colby Proffitt
And what I told him, I said our lead volume is going to stay the same. But what I really care about are conversion rates or NQLs. And I said, our MQL volume that’s going to go down or lead volume is probably going to stay about the same initially. Maybe it’s going to go up, maybe it’s going to go down. I don’t know. We’re going to do some experiment and see how it goes and adjust from there. What I can guarantee you is that our volume of MQLs is going to go down. And that was met with wide eyes. And just like, what do you mean? Like, you’re a marketer. Aren’t you supposed to be driving those up? And yes, that happens over time. But the beauty of ABM is that even though those numbers may drop, you may have fewer MQLs. 

Colby Proffitt
The end result of all that is higher conversion, higher number of SQLs, and higher average deal size associated with each one of those. And faster progression through all the stages as well. So when you take all those different variables and package them together, you end up with a much less expensive marketing mechanism and a much more effective one at the same time. But you’ve got to be open and honest about those different milestones you’re going to hit as you’re going through that APM journey. And don’t try to sugarcoat it. And sometimes you’re going to make some decisions that you think are really good because they’re all rooted in data and they’re totally going to fall flat. You just got to be honest about it and own that and try those micro experiments. 

Brett
Amazing. I love it. All right, we’re over on time and you are 3 hours ahead of me, so I’m not going to keep you. Before we wrap up, if there’s any marketers, any founders, just anyone that wants to follow along with you, where should they go? 

Colby Proffitt
Yeah, check me out on LinkedIn. Colby Proffitt, VP marketing at Shift5. And by all means, connect with me. Shoot me a note. Happy to chat about ABM, happy to chat about content, happy to talk about public sector marketing, you name it. I love connecting with people and make it a point to try to get to every message that comes through. I love meeting up for coffee if you’re in the DC metro area and thinking about going down the ABM path, happy to find some time to meet up over coffee or lunch and chat through it. Amazing. Love it. 

Brett
Thanks so much for taking the time, Mandy. 

Colby Proffitt
Likewise. Thanks, Brett. I appreciate it. 

Brett
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