When Paige Gerber joined sales readiness platform Mindtickle as Director of Demand Generation, the company was just starting to implement a new buyer experience solution called Hushly to create personalized experiences for visitors to their content hub. But when Hushly innovated its offerings and released an Account-Based Experience functionality, Mindtickle quickly jumped in as Hushly would be a foundational core technology in its account-based strategy.
“We started working more on ABM because we knew the content hub would be more of a long-term play in terms of generating demand, while developing ABM pages would almost immediately influence SQA and pipeline,” said Gerber. “We decided to focus on ABM while we built out a plan for the rest of the experiences around content.”
The Challenge: Shifting From A Lead-Focused Mindset To ABM-Centric
Mindtickle had a lead-focused (MQL) mindset, so Gerber had to flip the script and shift the teams over to an account-based model where leads still mattered, but in a completely different context. Identifying and targeting in-market accounts, engaging them with unique and personalized experiences and handing off a marketing qualified “account” (MQA) to sales was very new to the organization.
As Gerber shifted the focus of the Hushly implementation delivering account-based experiences. She had to scale a 1:1 ABM approach and a 1:Many approach, which meant dynamically creating experiences for any in-market accounts at a particular buying stage. Sales reps were split on the new system: While some account executives loved the automation features, others were uncomfortable with stage-based ABM on their behalf without them knowing.
“We were trying to shift the organization’s perception of what it means to work in an account-based model and programs,” said Gerber. “We really wanted the team to understand the accounts to pick, leverage the predictive and intent models we built out with 6sense and build off of it to move accounts through the buying stages and engage with sales.”
The Solution: Leveraging Hushly’s ABM Platform To Build Stage-Based Models & Custom LPs
Utilizing Hushly’s ABM platform, Mindtickle built a stage-based model that dynamically put web visitors into personalized experiences with relevant content based on what stage of the buying journey (awareness, consideration, decision, purchase) that company was in. Gerber explained that she was transparent with the sales teams and opened lines of communication so she could understand their likes and dislikes with the new processes and systems. After a lot of “negotiations and give-and-takes,” Gerber ultimately united the team with a “we can do this” mindset by listening to their concerns and working to address them.
“With Hushly operationalizing those predicative and intent signals, my time was now spent focused on the message and refining the look and feel of the experiences,” said Gerber. “I was not worried about whether the technology worked.”
On the account experience side, Hushly enabled the Mindtickle team to present the unique account experience for their 1:1 target accounts and Hushly solved the problem of scaling to thousands of in-market accounts with automation.
“We built a template in Hushly with the target accounts and told our account reps, ‘Here are your accounts; we’re going to give you personalized account links — you need to put whatever headline and description message you want that account to see,’” said Gerber. “Obviously sales reps aren’t the strongest writers, so we had our copy editor go through and ‘massage’ the copy to clean it up. And then we uploaded them all into the system so they could preview it.”
The account-based landing pages customized by the sales reps featured the usual header and description, but also included a section with a video message customized to the account. The page was loaded with relevant content that was aligned to different stages of the account’s journey.
“On an account’s initial visit, the landing page served them more top-of-funnel content such as targeted reports, blog posts and thought leadership videos,” said Gerber. “Once they returned to the page, the content automatically swapped for more targeted content, such as product videos, buyer’s guides and data sheets.”
Along with that, if a visitor showed up from a late-stage account for the first time, the Hushly platform would detect that and change the entire experience from the graphics, all the way down to the content in real-time.
“It’s sort of like a traffic cop saying, ‘This is who you are, here’s what stage you’re in — here’s not only your page, but here’s your content that has multiple dimensions based on the signal we saw,’” Gerber explained. “While we were previously able to do that, we created a better experience with the pages by dropping someone in and out of different pages and experiences, and swapping graphics, texts and imagery based on who the account was and what stage they were in.”
The Results: More Than $2.2M Generated In Pipeline In Under 8 Weeks
Gerber successfully leveraged Hushly to “blow out” Mindtickle’s ABM project. Mindtickle didn’t forget about its content hub, either, as the organization plans on leveraging Hushly’s AI recommendations to serve the right content to visitors while they browse. In fact, the company launched a new website that features embedded content on every solution page to direct visitors and accounts to the appropriate content.
“There were a ton of learnings,” said Gerber. “We learned how clean data has to be to run an account-based model, and that made us realize we had internal data issues. We learned the best ways to track within Hushly when intent insights came from each of the different channels and how we needed to report it to the sales team. We realized that we could make our content better in the long run by analyzing the account and visitor-level activities on the pages at different stages.”
Specific results include:
- An average of two assets consumed per page, with an average page viewing time of 90 seconds to two minutes;
- Out of 100 accounts, sales reps booked 34 meetings, which generated 25 opportunities and more than $2.2 million in pipeline in just under eight weeks; and
- 25% conversion rate with 100 accounts.
“You can only do so much with technology — it can help you build and scale, but you also need to take the time to engage and personalize because technology can’t fully take that off your plate,” said Gerber. “Our Hushly program was successful as a pilot so now we have a model to work off. We have so much more tech; we have chatbots now and Alyce gifting. We took the time and went through the growing pains to figure out what the best way to leverage this technology is.”
