We compare organisations leading the way in ABM to identify what the leaders are doing differently, approaches to accelerate top and bottom line growth, and create win-win for you and your customers. Plus, a look at how organizations making use of tools to support their ABM efforts, and a dive into how they are leveraging GenAI.

The webinar will share insights on how organizations are segmenting and prioritising their accounts and orientating more of their marketing efforts behind priority accounts.

The post ABM Benchmark Report Webinar appeared first on Demandbase.

Meet Hardeep Kaur, the Director of People at Demandbase India. With 17+ years in HR, she’s all about making things happen. Whether it’s influencing leaders, spurring teams into action, or crafting tailored solutions, Hardeep’s got it covered. She’s passionate about solving challenges and works hand-in-hand with colleagues to drive meaningful change. In short, Hardeep is the driving force behind people-centric success at Demandbase India.

Connect with Hardeep Kaur

Key takeaways

• Overcome imposter syndrome through self-awareness, self-compassion, and recognizing accomplishments
• Advocate for your career through effective communication, finding mentors, and understanding different perspectives 
• Address unconscious biases through open discussions with senior leaders to create an inclusive environment
• Maintain work-life balance by prioritizing both equally, setting boundaries, and not feeling guilty about priorities
• Networking is an ongoing process – find common ground and stay in touch with new connections

Quotes

“Networking is about being in constant touch, whatever the frequency. It’s not a one-time task.”

-Hardeep Kaur

Highlights from this episode

Can you tell us about what challenges you have encountered in advocating for your career advancement? And how did you overcome them?

Some of the key challenges Hardeep mentioned in advocating for her career advancement included facing resistance from a male boss who seemed intimidated by her. She felt he had an unconscious bias against her as a woman. To overcome this, she made an effort to understand the situation objectively by speaking to mentors. She worked on improving her communication style and involving her male manager more so he didn’t feel as intimidated. Having supportive conversations with trusted mentors helped her design strategies to navigate the situation more effectively.

What advice would you give to someone who is just starting in their career or has a few years of experience in the industry?

Some of the key advice Hardeep provided for those starting or early in their careers includes:

• Be authentic to yourself – understand your strengths, weaknesses, and what gives you confidence or makes you insecure. Do what you say and say what you do. 
• Be thorough in your work from day one. Read, research, and reach out to people to do your job well. This will give you satisfaction and confidence.
• Find a mentor you can trust to reach out to when you’re stuck or unsure of the right approach. Having someone experienced to provide guidance makes a big difference.

Have you ever experienced imposter syndrome in your career? And how did you overcome that?

Hardeep shared that she often feels imposter syndrome. She recalled a time when receiving a promotion, and instead of feeling proud, she wondered what work she did to deserve it. To overcome this, Hardeep worked on self-awareness by recognizing her harsh self-criticism. She combated this by being kinder to herself and accepting compliments rather than brushing them off. Hardeep also learned that perfectionism exacerbated her feelings of inadequacy, so she adopted a balanced perspective of recognizing when good enough is sufficient. This shift in self-talk helped boost her confidence and reduce imposter syndrome over time.

What can companies implement to retain and support women throughout their careers, especially when there is progression into leadership opportunities?

Some things Hardeep suggested companies can implement to better retain and support women throughout their careers include:

• Ensure commitment and support from senior leadership on diversity initiatives. 
• Provide mentoring opportunities for women, both as mentors and mentees.
• Create awareness around unconscious biases through training programs. 
• Closely examine pay gaps during compensation cycles and ensure equal pay.
• Develop inclusive strategies tailored to different regions/cultures. 
• Encourage women to participate and provide a comfortable space for diverse perspectives.  
• Invest in targeted leadership programs and continuous learning opportunities.
• Regularly assess engagement scores and initiatives around diversity and inclusion.

Have you ever faced challenges in maintaining a work-life balance? And how have you navigated through them?

Hardeep shared that maintaining a work-life balance has always been a challenge for her. As someone with a big workload and a tendency to take on too many tasks, she found herself often working on weekends. The blurred lines of hybrid working also made it difficult to separate work and personal time. 

To better navigate this, Hardeep started blocking out dedicated non-work hours on her calendar. She also prioritized either work or personal life at different times to balance both aspects. While she still felt guilt around her priorities at times, Hardeep learned to be kinder to herself and recognize that it’s okay to focus on one domain over the other depending on needs. Setting boundaries and not being too hard on herself for imbalances helped Hardeep better maintain her work-life balance.

What are the strategies you found most effective for networking, especially in male-dominated industries?

Some of the strategies Hardeep found effective for networking, especially in male-dominated industries, include:

• Finding common ground or shared interests as a way to start meaningful conversations. This helps make initial connections.
• Attending industry conferences, seminars, and meetups even if just as a participant, to put herself out there and meet new people. 
• Making an effort to approach strangers and start conversations by looking for common links between them. 
• Staying in touch with the people she meets consistently through follow-ups, rather than seeing networking as a one-time thing. 
• Pushing herself outside of her comfort zone to participate in group settings and engage with others, even if networking does not come naturally to her.

Shout-outs

–Deepti Gelli, Head of Demandbase India.

The post Hardeep’s Tips on Overcoming Imposter Syndrome & Work-Life Balance appeared first on Demandbase.

Carol is the CMO at Exclaimer, an email signature software platform. She is a senior leader backed by over 15 years in the digital and technology space for established businesses and start-ups. Coming from a background in product marketing, brand development, and demand generation. Carol is hugely passionate about building strategy, storytelling, bringing products to life for consumers, and driving growth.

From building the first intelligent customer journeys at a global hotel brand to scaling the business marketing function from zero to hero for a Skyscanner, managing global demand for a leading pre-IPO software giant, Carol has a proven track record in engaging with the business, developing key stakeholder relationships, managing budgets and leading teams to realize their potential.

Connect with Carol Howley

Key takeaways

• Prioritize customer experiences and align business processes to meet customer needs
• Cross-departmental alignment is key to achieving customer-centric growth
• Balance investments in brand awareness and demand generation for business growth
• Measure brand awareness impact through metrics like NPS, engagement, sentiment
• Personalization, AI, ABM, and video are areas of focus for future marketing strategy
• Building trust through the brand is important for long-term visibility and sales opportunities

Quotes

“How do we focus on what’s in the market, tailor our message to those particular verticals, or those types of or groups of people, and start to be really intelligent about where we spend our money? Because if we did spend on every possible industry vertical and company size would be very, very poor very quickly.

-Carol Howley

Highlights from this episode

Could you share how you initially got interested in marketing as a profession and what attracted you to your current role?

Carol shared that she’s always been fascinated by the psychology behind marketing and why people buy things. In university, her dissertation focused on the use of persuasion and tactics within marketing. This sparked her interest in wanting to understand how these techniques can and should be used. She enjoyed the blend of creativity, strategy, and data-driven decision-making that marketing offers. In her current role as CMO, she’s responsible for the overall growth of the business and gets involved in every stage of the customer journey, as well as employer branding and internal/external communications. This variety of responsibilities within marketing is very appealing to her.

What were some of the key challenges you experienced in transitioning to a more customer-centric approach? How have you been able to overcome these?

Some of the key challenges Carol experienced in transitioning to a more customer-centric approach included:

• Making customer experience a core business belief that the whole company buys into, requires a significant cultural shift.
• Breaking down silos between departments as customers don’t care which team handles their needs.
• Prioritizing technical changes to better support customers over legacy systems.

To overcome these challenges, Carol emphasized the importance of aligning processes, systems, and mindsets and collaborating across departments. She also highlighted measuring customer sentiment through NPS scores and feedback to continually improve the experience. Launching an advisory board provided valuable insights directly from customers on how the company can better serve their needs.

How are you able to balance investing in brand awareness while also driving demand through your marketing funnel?

Carol explained that she aims to invest 60% of her budget and team’s time/focus on demand generation activities like content creation that create and capture demand by targeting specific personas and pain points. The remaining 30-40% goes towards brand awareness efforts to bring new potential customers into the top of the funnel for the future. This balanced approach allows them to operate in the current market while also building long-term brand recognition. She emphasized the importance of both brand and demand generation investments for business growth, especially as buyers do more research before engaging with brands.

From your perspective, what metrics are you finding most useful in measuring the impact of your brand-building efforts?

Carol shared that she looks at a “brand impact score” that incorporates various metrics:

• Brand awareness metrics like share of voice and social channel traffic/engagement 
• Sentiment analysis of what people say about the brand online and in reviews
• NPS scores from customers and those who interact with the company
• Web traffic and engagement with digital content
• Employee satisfaction ratings as employees represent the brand
• Trends in these metrics to see the impact of campaigns and make improvements

She finds tracking metrics across awareness, engagement, sentiment, and business results provides a holistic view of how brand-building efforts are translating to the bottom line over the long term.

Looking ahead, what are you most excited about in terms of expanding or improving your marketing strategy?

Carol shared a few areas she’s most excited about expanding in their marketing strategy:

• Leveraging AI through tools like Jasper to scale operations while maintaining a human touch, such as generating content in her voice.  
• Advancing their ABM efforts and personalizing the customer experience through tools that can pre-populate webpages.
• Disseminating video content more effectively using their in-house video editing capabilities.

How do you plan to continue nurturing your customer relationships at scale?

Carol plans to continue nurturing customer relationships at scale by taking personalization further such as building web pages customers land on that are pre-populated with their specific brand and experience. She also aims to bring customers more into the journey by featuring them and their stories to help others understand how Exclaimer solves similar problems. This personalized approach across the customer experience will help nurture relationships at a larger scale.

Resource recommendations

Books

–Radical Candor for learning about effective communication within teams.

–No Forms. No Spam. No Cold Calls for insights into how the buyer’s world is changing.

Blogs

–The Account-Based Revolution: From Origins to AI-Driven Futures by Jon Miller.

Newsletters

–The Reeder

–MKT1

Podcasts

–Marketing Against The Grain

–Exit Five- B2B Marketing with Dave Gerhardt

–The Diary Of A CEO

Shout-outs

–Alina Vandenberghe, Co-founder & Co-CEO at Chili Piper

–Cathy McPhillips, Chief Growth Officer at Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute

–Trinity Nguyen, VP of Marketing at UserGems

The post How to Build Your Brand Through Customer Relationships appeared first on Demandbase.