What’s the smallest company ABM can be effective with?
This week on the If You Market podcast we talk with Lokesh Dave about using ABM to target the SMB market and how you can replicate ABM practices you would use to target enterprise companies to target SMBs. More churn, easier close, lower value, Lokesh covers all the plusses and minuses and how to build an ABM approach for SMBs.
Lokesh Dave is an ex-programmer, he worked at companies such as Microsoft and Zynga for close to 15 years – learning to build large systems that scale to many millions of users. He is now the founder of Enlyft, where he’s looking to leverage the power of big data and AI to transform how B2B companies go-to-market .
Contact : Lokesh Dave
If you have questions about the If You Market podcast or would like to suggest a guest, please email us at info@IfYouMarket.com.
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Transcript:
Sky
00:00:04 – 00:00:52
Good morning marketers. And welcome to the if you market podcast brought to you by Mountaintop data. We are the only podcast that markets the ship out of it. I’m sky Cassidy and today we’ll be talking with low kesh dave of and lift about a B. M. For targeting SMB s a lot of acronyms today. So account based marketing for small to medium businesses, not if you are one, although we’ll get into that as well, but if that’s your target audience. So location is a X. Program and that is location, it’s not dave, his name is located Dave. I know as a data person that’s gonna drive me nuts. So I’m just gonna get out of the way now, rakesh um you are really messing with our
Sky
00:00:52 – 00:01:28
our ai for identifying names with with that name but he’s an ex programmer. He worked at companies like Microsoft and Zynga for for nearly 15 years and uh there he was learning to build large systems that scale the millions of users and he’s now the founder overhead and lift and he’s looking to leverage his um the power basically of big data and ai to transform how B two B companies go to market. So love the B two B all over. And there were all about B two B marketing here. Location. Thanks for coming on the show.
Lokesh Dave
00:01:28 – 00:01:31
Thank you for having me. Sky excited to be here.
Sky
00:01:31 – 00:02:07
So topic today let’s jump right into it. There’s always a lot to talk about with with account based marketing. Account based marketing for targeting SMB. S. It seems counterintuitive in that account based marketing typically is a technique for saying let’s target your your largest, your best, the largest potential client accounts. I guess if someone’s target audience is SMB specifically, um they can’t say now let’s to a B. M. On enterprise. Um but how does this work? What’s the point in the in the SMB focused specifically?
Lokesh Dave
00:02:07 – 00:02:59
Yeah, that’s a great basis Start sky. So I mean if you look at the best sellers throughout the history, um what they do really well is understand the needs of the customers, understand them deeply and then are able to convey value to them in a way which is personalized so that they can sell their products. A. B. M. Is just a fancy way to to sort of term to say something which has been existing forever. Um If you if you look at enterprise sales just historically, as I said, being account base, um it does involve high touch, it involves longer sales cycles. The needs are complex, you have to work with, you know, buyers who are part of a committee. Um And it requires the salesperson to invest time in building a relationship trust and so on. So it’s a hands on approach.
Lokesh Dave
00:02:59 – 00:03:22
Now, why would you not want to use the same approach for SMB going back to the court of being a good salesperson is understanding the needs, being able to convey the value in a way which you know resonates with the buyer. And wouldn’t it be fantastic if you were able to offer the same service at scale for SMB?
Sky
00:03:22 – 00:04:12
It would. But I’m going to jump in and be devil’s advocate and I’m sure this is what kind of the probably your company is based on um overcoming this this idea. But the whole point where the account based marketing is these clients are valuable enough to apply this much attention to them. A small company that’s not going to give you the same return. You don’t have the R. O. I. To do all the account based marketing stuff unless there’s some sort of a technological. I mean that’s kind of what account based marketing is saying. Here’s the thing that used to be done only for extremely large companies. And now technology is allowing you to do it in new ways to other audiences for marketing, not just sales. So so what about overcoming the R. O. I. Gap kind of with small the medium?
Sky
00:04:12 – 00:04:21
How is it economically make sense to to carry out the high cost A. B. M. To them.
Lokesh Dave
00:04:21 – 00:05:16
Yeah. So first of all and that’s a great point as well. But first of all SMBs. Are very large, addressable market. So collectively say you know half of the U. S. Workforce is working for across tens of millions of smbs right? So they represent a tremendous amount of purchasing power buying power in hundreds of billions of dollars. So it’s a market obviously worth going after. There’s great companies like hubspot or into it, you know, so on which have build a large business a lot of value by targeting smes. Um so when you look at the ROI it goes into looking at the collective, you know, the volume which is available to to buy a lot of your product. And the key is can you make some of the approaches you have which work for enterprises work
Lokesh Dave
00:05:16 – 00:05:24
in a more economical way. Can you work them make it scale where you’re not being as much in terms of customer acquisition costs?
Sky
00:05:24 – 00:05:38
So, if you can execute, if you can execute a BM at half the cost, then you can target accounts. You can target companies that would have half the customer lifetime value effectively.
Lokesh Dave
00:05:38 – 00:05:51
I think that’s a good way to put it out. Except I would say probably it will be not even half, it would have to be 1/10 of the cost in many cases because of the volume you you see within sMB.
Sky
00:05:51 – 00:06:08
All right. So, I mean, is that the the answer here too, how can you execute high cost, typically account based marketing to SMBs profitably, is that it it’s not as high cost. We’ve reduced the cost on it.
Lokesh Dave
00:06:08 – 00:06:44
I wouldn’t say it’s just that, but I think it’s a it’s a good way to sort of start, which is how can you replicate the effects of A B. M. Or how can you replicate, you know, the the impact of what an A B. M. Based approach can be for SMB. But at the margin of that cost, that doesn’t mean you just replay everything and make it work for cheap. Because I think the the audience is different when you’re selling to enterprise versus SMB. There are certain inherent differences where the processes that tactics, the tooling needs to be different as well.
Sky
00:06:44 – 00:07:02
I suppose it might be simpler sometimes to target SMB because you’re not having to target as many decision makers, like there’s not as many, you might just have one person that you contact and they make the decision versus the whole chain, A whole group of people that you have to juggle.
Lokesh Dave
00:07:02 – 00:07:34
Yeah, I mean, that’s I would say one of the reasons where SMB s in terms of the differences, uh typically the owner is going to be involved or, you know, it’s easy to find the purchasing decision. The decision making is simpler, is faster. The sale cycles are shorter as well. On the other hand, as you’re highlighting, they don’t buy as much uh you see more shown on the SMB side as well. Right? So there are definitely a lot of sort of pros and cons available, but in my mind, it’s a very undersold market,
Sky
00:07:34 – 00:07:54
um is this so the kind of account based marketing you’re talking about, Is this like an A. B. M. Light, is it a different version of account based marketing for SMB. S, like what’s different and and how are we pulling this off?
Lokesh Dave
00:09:01 – 00:09:46
Yeah. And and that kind of starts going into the maybe the guts of what approach we have, how we think about it. Um And uh yeah, so one of the things I was highlighting was I think we were talking about the pros and cons of going after SMB s. You were highlighting that, you know, the decision maker uh typically is is more more accessible, which is true and there’s some other differences which are important to understand when you think about building an approach around a B M for SMB So, as I was mentioning that while the decision makers in the line of decision making it simpler, you still have to sell to an organization, it is different than selling to consumers
Lokesh Dave
00:09:46 – 00:10:34
sky. Before I answer your question, maybe one thing I want to share is, you know, we talked about enterprise right, which is well understood. You know, it’s it’s this sales approach which works really well there On the other hand, there’s also consumers when you’re selling B2C I would say there’s a high degree of sophistication there as well. That’s also very well understood. You know, you can have programmatic ways, low touch ways, either using, you know, solutions like google adwords or facebook or using the power of a brand to get consumers to buy your product. Um And what I’d highlight is that it’s um while both of these extremes are well understood, Smb mid market is just not a mix of both. It’s not like you can take the best of both worlds and apply them
Lokesh Dave
00:10:34 – 00:11:12
with sMB. You’re since focusing on an organization, you can’t target individuals. Organizations are just more complex than individuals. So you you still have to kind of go through some of the things that you do when you target enterprises, um and so one of the players ways I think you can really help you and I know that your company have seen that, you know, you focus on providing data and intelligence and companies and I think that’s a really good starting point being able to differentiate between within the SMB role by having more facets, more information on them.
Sky
00:11:12 – 00:11:56
You know, we have a a B. M. Data checklist um for for people looking to do a B. M. And one of the things that always jumps out to me is in the data industry, people will sometimes ask for one contact per company because they don’t want a bunch of contacts. And I used to to train and manage our sales team and I remember telling them all the time like look, yes, we want people to buy more data, but we actually want it to be good for them. So this isn’t just a self serving. Do you want to supersize this? It’s if you get one contact at the company, the odds, it’s the right person. The odds there’ll be responsive the odds. It’s like you really should have as many of the right type of contacts as possible.
Sky
00:11:56 – 00:12:08
Uh and this is kind of pre a B. M. But it’s the same general concept of you need to be touching everybody, you can within the decision making group in your general marketing even.
Lokesh Dave
00:12:08 – 00:12:55
Yeah. Um and so for us, the sky where we start, in terms of supporting a BMX scale is at the top of the final the use cases are on account selection. Either for running campaigns or you know it could be many things and within that the starting point is understanding the ideal customer profile. How can you describe the ideal customer profile? Let us allow you to connect with them at scale. If you were targeting tech companies in SMB, there’s a million of them in us only which will describe themselves as being in computer software. You can go into any I. C. S. And so on but they’re within tech that’s too big of a market to go after. It would be literally spray and pray.
Lokesh Dave
00:12:55 – 00:13:13
Um and so but then we come to you and we talked to you about, let’s understand your ideal customer profile um in a better way. And this is where we start bringing in machine learning ai and appropriate. If you have enough history, we can learn from your existing customers to to to look like modeling and find as well. Are you saying
Sky
00:13:13 – 00:13:40
to people okay, you’re doing a B. M now. What about doing it too? Not just enterprise but SMB also or is this topic a BM for targeting us and be more of a, if your ideal target audience is SMB, here’s how A B. M. Fits for that audience or is this kind of a both situations thing?
Sky
00:13:40 – 00:13:45
Oh,
Sky
00:13:45 – 00:13:54
we lost you again.
Sky
00:13:54 – 00:14:02
Good mm hmm. I think you’re back. You’re back. Glad you’re back. So
Lokesh Dave
00:14:02 – 00:14:03
let’s try
Sky
00:14:03 – 00:14:25
this. Um turn off your video, We’ll use a static image for you. Um, in, in any video clips we make in that way. Yeah. You know what I’ve been doing double video here anyway. Um, that usually gives us more, um,
Sky
00:14:25 – 00:14:27
bandwidth.
Lokesh Dave
00:14:27 – 00:14:34
Yeah. I’m not sure what’s going on. I usually don’t have a problem with the bandwidth.
Sky
00:14:34 – 00:14:36
When you jump on. The show is when it always pops up.
Lokesh Dave
00:14:36 – 00:14:39
Yeah, there’s some law around it. I think
Sky
00:14:39 – 00:14:43
- Did you get the question about? Yes. Excellent. Okay.
Lokesh Dave
00:14:43 – 00:15:27
Yes. So I think your question was, is our customer typically trying to go from enterprise to SMB or they already have a product for SMB and they want to use sort of, you know, a B. M. Type approaches and it’s more of the latter. Although we, we do have a mix of board, we do have customers who are going downstream from selling to enterprises, but a lot of them actually are going the other direction where they have had very strong product led growth. Uh, it’s very organic. It’s inbound. Um, and now they are looking to go and run outbound, create an outbound engine at scale still within SMB segment.
Sky
00:15:27 – 00:16:03
Right. I always feel like inbound means you’ve gotten lucky and you’re not really marketing yet. Um, or you made a great product and I wouldn’t say got lucky, but uh, you know, when, when people show up and you don’t have to do anything that’s you’ve got something nice going on. But you’re also not actually marketing then typically. Okay, so it kind of fits both of those models, I guess. Let’s get into the nuts and bolts of it. Like what’s different, what is the, when you say a B M for targeting Smb? Is it just saying, hey, why not do this? Also, are there some key differences in the A B M for SMB versus a larger enterprise audience?
Lokesh Dave
00:16:03 – 00:16:56
Yeah, so one of the key, the difference is that you really have to apply an approach which works with a cohort or a cluster. So, you know, if you are going after an enterprise, you’re bob, you know, and you’re selling to large enterprise, you know, your choice. It could be american express Nike siskel, you will go and understand all the stakeholders, you’ll meet with them, you’ll understand their needs and so on. Now dig bob was targeting SMB that really doesn’t scale it and that’s not an option. What you want to be able to do is within this and be market, see if you can find clusters or segments of companies which how common patterns or characteristics it could be that they are using a competition of yours or they have certain workloads they are using and they’re getting ready to
Lokesh Dave
00:16:56 – 00:17:11
move out of them because those are legacy work clothes and making up these examples, right? But you you want to be able to apply the standard patterns across groups and then you want to have a scalable ways of engaging with them throughout the sales process.
Sky
00:17:11 – 00:17:28
So you’re really saying we’re not going to do all of SMB or all of your SMB target audience. The first step is going to be to look for a segment that’s particularly good to focus V A B M on within a particularly likely to to buy. It sounds like,
Lokesh Dave
00:17:28 – 00:17:42
yes, I think it is key to be able to find, I would say not a single segment, but the segments, the, the ones where you see higher propensity for a fit because a lot of a B M within smb is a needle in a haystack type problem.
Sky
00:17:42 – 00:17:58
There’s so many of them, you have plenty to throw out your, basically saying, hey, let’s get rid of the ones that are less likely to close, that will increase the value of our A B M and make it again more economical to, to carry this technique out to this audience.
Lokesh Dave
00:17:58 – 00:18:45
Exactly. So I would say that’s like, you know, the foundational layer, the pillar there. And then the second, um, the, you know, area. The second principle we apply is that when you’re reaching out to them, you, you already want to have reasonable understanding of their needs because this is where it’s not scalable. If you have to go and have a series of meetings to understand what’s going on, it doesn’t work, but if you have intelligence on those accounts, if you know, they are using the cloud, are they using google or AWS or Azure or are they using Salesforce or hubspot? Since when they are using it to the house and an integration in place will have certain people in certain roles, having that at your sort of fingertips allows you to get a head start, you can qualify or disqualify a lot more efficiently.
Sky
00:18:45 – 00:19:20
Okay, Okay. Now something I’m gonna want to get into here, we’re gonna we’re gonna take a break in just a minute, but um let’s pre load what we’re gonna talk about after the break, we’re gonna talk about you location, we’re going to get deeper into your name and why you intentionally had such a database breaking name. But um and what your company does there, and I think this will be a good transition into kind of correct me if I’m wrong, but you guys do a lot of ai um type work around identifying these target companies for this, this type of marketing, is that correct?
Lokesh Dave
00:19:20 – 00:19:22
That’s right.
Sky
00:19:22 – 00:20:01
Okay, excellent. So after the break will be a lot of ai talk and it sounds like a lot of my probing questions early on trying to understand how does this work, How does this work? Um could have been answered probably by we use ai to do this stuff at scale because with the SMB is you’re dealing with a ton more companies. Right. So there’s um to have a human filter through it, like you might with enterprise account based marketing is just, it’s there’s too much data to filter through to narrow down to the target audience. You guys come in with A I. And help narrow down and find that premium section of the audience, is that correct?
Lokesh Dave
00:20:01 – 00:20:02
That is correct.
Sky
00:20:02 – 00:20:41
Okay, awesome. I feel like um I feel like that saturday and lives get where I’m just feeding you things like remember that time you did that thing. That was awesome, wasn’t it? Like what I’m saying is my interview skills are terrible right now. We’d better get to break before I get any worse. So after the break we’re going to talk about uh and lift and and kind of what you guys do and how you execute ai to to pull off this account based marketing for small and medium businesses. Okay,
Sky
00:20:41 – 00:20:47
okay. I’ll give it a quick pop according.
Sky
00:20:47 – 00:21:19
Alright, here we go. 321. Welcome back to the if you market podcast, we got low caste dave here, founder and ceo at and lift and location. I want to jump into you your story um where you came from, how you got here, your background working with companies like Microsoft, um all that kind of stuff. But let’s go way back first back to where does the name? Location come from? Where are you from? Originally
Lokesh Dave
00:21:19 – 00:21:21
originally from India?
Sky
00:21:21 – 00:21:25
And how did you get the name? Dave.
Lokesh Dave
00:21:25 – 00:21:43
So to make things even a little bit more confusing for you. Uh this is a name, which is pronounced as w back in India, I don’t know why this spell it as there, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the first day was born before the first day of that sounds
Sky
00:21:43 – 00:21:54
when you say that it’s actually pronounced Davide, it sounds like a pretentious person here in California would say that actually I’m not Dave smith. It’s Dave smith, thank you.
Lokesh Dave
00:21:54 – 00:21:58
But I’m very comfortable with Dave and I’m used to being Conrad,
Sky
00:21:58 – 00:22:36
I’m used to being called scott because people can’t wrap their heads around a guy named Sky. So I get it. Okay, so that’s interesting. I mean it looks just like the standard name kind of and I’ve had people that I work with from India and they’ll have their Americanized name and they’ll tell me and then eventually we worked together for a while and like can I call you your own name? I feel weird calling you. I know everybody can’t pronounce your name so you just eventually, it’s like can we use your real name? I feel strange with the stage name. Um I’m sure some people think this is strange, the guy has a stage last name but not first name.
Sky
00:22:36 – 00:22:57
Um that’s uh okay, okay. Dave. I’ll have to work with my database. People on how to identify how to not swap your name around when our, when our system sees it and and think it’s supposed to be Dave location. So you came, you come from India. That’s right, let’s let’s jump into your story.
Lokesh Dave
00:22:57 – 00:23:23
So by training I was an engineer, I was engineer sort of electronics, you know more on the hardware side. Um and when I was about to graduate I got into software, I really liked programming. Um when you graduate school here in us actually in L. A. And um got my degree in in you know, program income. Their software, I ended up joining Microsoft out of school.
Sky
00:23:23 – 00:23:25
What year are we talking about there?
Lokesh Dave
00:23:25 – 00:23:27
Uh close to 2000
Sky
00:23:27 – 00:23:31
- Okay, great time for that. Excellent.
Lokesh Dave
00:23:31 – 00:24:17
It’s the perfect time. It was, I think a lot of innovation happening and you know, well it’s been a great time the last, you know, 20 years. Um and so I joined Microsoft as an intern went back there going from L. A. To Seattle, I just love the change in scenery, the mountains, the lakes here and it’s been home for me since then. But going back to my background, I got very lucky working with some incredibly sort of smart people at Microsoft very early on. I was part of the team within you know, the Windows operating system that was building the first version of the back end which would keep all the machines updated. You know, it’s Windows update. This is hundreds of millions of species on the planet. All I was
Sky
00:24:17 – 00:24:22
worried you were going to say you’re involved in Windows paperclip and then the audience was gonna hate you, you’re done,
Lokesh Dave
00:24:22 – 00:24:24
you’re talking about that was a great thought,
Sky
00:24:24 – 00:24:25
like it was way ahead
Lokesh Dave
00:24:25 – 00:24:32
of its time. Maybe too far ahead though. It’s become a joke. Yeah, it was I was joking there as well,
Sky
00:24:32 – 00:24:42
although it’s come up before we talk about Windows paperclip on the show and half the listeners probably don’t listen. What’s, what are you talking about? Windows? It’s before their time. So
Lokesh Dave
00:24:42 – 00:25:30
yeah, it failed miserably having said that it was as a concept, something which, you know, it was clearly ahead of its time and you you see that now with Ai and things like Siri and Alexa, you know, a a system which can understand and respond to your needs. Um Yeah, but going back to myself, I, they said I was able to be part of teams where I was able to see and learn how they built systems at scale and I really got intrigued by that. I started um liking that, I did that over a few groups teams, um and I got a kick out of seeing how you build some complex systems, but it can help solve needs in simple ways and specifically, I really enjoyed when I saw the impact to end users
Lokesh Dave
00:25:30 – 00:25:38
and so at some point I just knew I had to build my own company um and then a few years back, I just took the plunge,
Sky
00:25:38 – 00:25:49
did you know, you had to build your own company before you knew you had an idea or did you have the idea? And you know eventually you’re going to have to do this.
Lokesh Dave
00:25:49 – 00:26:13
Ah Now it was, I just knew I had to build a company and I did something which I would not recommend to anyone. I I left my job one day, came home and said you know I kind of, my wife knew uh this has been you know, I had to sit for a while so and I had her support but I said I’m going to do something and I’m not sure what
Sky
00:26:13 – 00:26:17
you locked yourself in your room until you had an idea.
Lokesh Dave
00:26:17 – 00:26:42
Um Well it took a year actually I had a couple of things. I tried, each one of them went up to a certain point and then didn’t work out. The first one didn’t go far. The second one we ended up actually building a product, having some early customers and sales. But I starting to realize that that’s not what I wanted. And in the end it was more than a year, year and a half before I really started what is now and lived
Sky
00:26:42 – 00:26:54
okay. And then for the customers um for the customers, wow, jumping ahead. But listeners um what does it lift do, what do you guys do there?
Lokesh Dave
00:26:54 – 00:27:14
Yeah, at a very high level. We help b two B. Sales and marketing be more efficient. Um It’s very high level. but what we really help you do is discover accounts that are more likely to buy a product and give you insights on why are they more likely to buy your product so that you can go to them with a better pitch and have higher chance of converting them.
Sky
00:27:14 – 00:27:21
Is that specifically for account based marketing or for anything in account based marketing is just kind of one of the applications.
Lokesh Dave
00:27:21 – 00:27:59
It’s uh for anything, if you go to our website and you look at our homepage, I don’t think we talk about account based marketing anywhere on the homepage or so on. It is a bit of a buzzword but as an approach we feel it’s a it’s a great way to think about sales and marketing and as I was highlighting earlier feel that that’s an approach which is hard to make it work on SMB when you’re going after an sMB audience. So that is where I would say we have a very strong fit but we don’t go and and position ourselves as we are in a BM solution. You know, we help you in general with your sales and marketing efforts, right?
Sky
00:27:59 – 00:28:29
But your particular technique with the ai we mentioned this before the break seems to then enable A. M. B. Basically taking this large SMB market that you’re trying to target and distilling it down to the target accounts. That account based marketing would be useful for or practical at that level to an account based marketing size, target audience.
Lokesh Dave
00:28:29 – 00:29:19
That is correct. Um and so Sky, if I can elaborate there, there’s like three use cases of the platform we have. Um and the first one is more of the top of the funnel. It’s a typical marketing use case which is finding accounts accounts, election discovery, you might call it targeting. Uh and what we have is a proprietary database is a real time database. We call it and lift company graph. This is really rich information on global organizations which we see as having me to be buying power uh and not just basic demographic information, but we understand them in terms of what’s the technology adoption, are they moving to the cloud, are they’re deprecating certain workloads, how much is the usage and so on. So all of that information goes into serving the first use case which is,
Lokesh Dave
00:29:19 – 00:29:25
let’s help you find your ideal customer profile, um 2nd you find the profile
Sky
00:29:25 – 00:29:45
but find the companies within the profile because some people say, oh I know who my ideal customer profile is now, I just don’t know who they are, like I know what they look like. Now I have to go out and find them. You guys are kind of doing both. You’re saying, we can not only help you narrow it down um but also then say, and here are the exact companies that, that are within that audience.
Lokesh Dave
00:29:45 – 00:30:38
That’s exactly right. It is the objective is to find the companies which matched the profile, not just help you understand the profile, but the second, you know, think of it as a model or the scenario we support is to use the machine learning ai based approach where the fundamental premise is that your ideal customer profile is not the static, you know, set of criteria, it is evolving, it is changing and you need a learning based system which can help refine and understand it better over time, you’re sending to more and more customers every quarter, every month, I look at my profile is changing, your product’s changing the market’s changing, so instead of just having one, you know, static view and finding companies which matched that we have a system where this is where the machine learning and the feedback loop comes in,
Lokesh Dave
00:30:38 – 00:31:23
that we we anchor to your crm to wherever your system of record is and we automatically sync information from there based on that. The machine learning models are finding patterns, predicting who’s likely to buy, you know, your product and that system keeps improving over time. Um and then I would say the third module is it’s not just enough to be able to, this is where sales and marketing alignment really comes in, you could say here’s companies which match your ideal customer profile, but why is that the case? If you give it in the hands of a seller, how is bob gonna know why is this a good fit? What should I have? You know, what’s my conversation with them? We also provide these rich insights on every account. Is they’re buying intent?
Lokesh Dave
00:31:23 – 00:31:28
Do they help presence of a certain technology? Is it a competition and so on? So I’m kind of going very deep.
Sky
00:31:28 – 00:31:41
You say here’s the companies that each company you can look at it and it will tell you here’s here’s why for this, which may be different from why for this and this and this and this. They each have their own kind of reason. They, they should be a good target.
Lokesh Dave
00:31:41 – 00:31:43
That’s right. That’s correct.
Sky
00:31:43 – 00:32:04
Okay. And that’s, I mean, I guess in a nutshell that’s what in life does those three, you said there’s those three services do those work I mean is that like a cascading service are they going to, is it a menu where you say I want to use and lift for this but not that um what’s, how does that work?
Lokesh Dave
00:32:04 – 00:32:53
Yeah, they are consolidated together. It is, there is a typically a progression in terms of how you use it but they’re not different add ons or they’re just bundled as a service where you have a marketing persona or sales operation. Somebody who’s looking at scales, somebody is looking at the market um and they’ll they’ll build top of the funnel and the same solution then allows you to have it extended in segments to your sales team leader to integration to the platform. So we have various ways and then the seller within the same platform can get the insights. Now we have certain customers who use us more for the sales use case which is getting deep insights. We have some customers who you know get more value from the marketing use case but it’s the same platform which is available to everyone.
Sky
00:32:53 – 00:33:36
Nice. So you so you guys have when we here have this A. B. M. Data checklist saying here’s for all the levels of your data, your internal data, you already have collecting your data you guys have bringing connecting this back to account based marketing because you’re not an A. B. M. Company. It’s just your process tends to enable it specifically for sMB you make it practical to target the SMB and I’m getting something wrong, correct me, I’m kind of recapping for the audience. Um you get your it’s really about the targeting the right companies that we’re working on here and it seems you have a process kind of like our our checklist for people looking to do account based marketing for for creating an identifying
Sky
00:33:36 – 00:33:43
these are the companies for them and then the account based marketing part is up to them. You guys aren’t providing those specific services, is that right?
Lokesh Dave
00:33:43 – 00:34:26
Yeah. Yeah. So what we also have, I mean the way we offer our services through its assads product, it’s got front and you log in, it’s different personas. Um And one clarification I would say highlight is that the targeting use case the discovery of companies matching your profile. We have a stronger fit when you’re targeting SMB but we have also many customers which are focusing on enterprises which Do use us for getting deep account insights. So you might be just targeting 1400 companies but each of the company we can tell you the I. T. Stack the maturity and the I. T. Spend and so on. So we have customers who use us for that. So it’s the enterprise accounting, marketing use case.
Sky
00:34:26 – 00:34:39
Are you saying better fit for SMB companies? Is that just because when you’re talking about ai you need so many data points and you’re just more likely to have enough data points on a much larger audience like that.
Lokesh Dave
00:34:39 – 00:35:00
That’s right. When you’re targeting a very large audience you need more data, more insights to create separation. Right? Going back to the point I think you were making earlier you want to avoid the ones which are unlikely to buy when you have such a large audience and you want to find the right clusters where there is a need and that’s where the the insights and the Ai and the loan incomes and.
Sky
00:35:00 – 00:35:52
Alright and then um brings me back to kind of one of my original thoughts on this topic. Is there a size for the listeners here where um is there a size where it doesn’t make sense for a company to use this type of services there? Like, I mean, we’re talking about everything from somebody selling hot dogs from a street cart, you know, through to now, we’re talking about B two B marketing here. So maybe that’s not quite a great example, but through to the very large company that targets SMB s with their product. Is there a space where people shouldn’t be looking to do this, where it doesn’t make sense to do this kind of process?
Lokesh Dave
00:35:52 – 00:36:32
And I would say that a B M in general as a principle. Oh, predominantly makes sense in most guesses whether you needed to like and lift or not. I think there are certain cases where it it is not needed. It’s overkill. And so let’s take two examples if you’re selling a making up a contract management system for just financial firms Which are in Fortune 100 companies. Right. Very specific needs. You don’t need a solution, like, and left to figure out who those are. There’s ways to just go and be able to find that you don’t need an ai to tell you
Sky
00:36:32 – 00:36:38
basically, your target audience has already narrowed down enough. That
Lokesh Dave
00:36:38 – 00:37:24
that’s right. Um and it is just over optimization to try to get a system to tell you that or you can just go and figure that out. On the other hand, if you’re selling a solution, like some of our customers, they sell Crm for assembly or they said an email solution or a backup solution, every company which has some technology footprint probably could get value from an antivirus solution or backup or security solution. How do you go about doing that? If you want to go and offer an antivirus and anti spam solution? Every dentist office, every company which has a few computers, every restaurant, which has a system probably might be a good fit. Right. Just a very, very large number of companies will go after.
Lokesh Dave
00:37:24 – 00:37:50
And this is where you can log into our system. If you have a history of companies which are using their products, we can narrow it down to the ones which are more likely to, you know, by if typically once you use email and the database, you are more likely to use that, your backup solution, we can loan that and understand that and figure out companies which are in the journey and the maturity of needing a solution like that.
Sky
00:37:50 – 00:38:32
So it seems like you’re saying, um, it seems like you’re saying really if you have a very large audience, but maybe your product is difficult to sell where it’s not an impulse buy, you’re not going to have a software as a service funnel where you just put it in front of the percentage are going to buy, but it’s gonna take a little more sales almost like an enterprise sale, there’s some sort of hurdle to overcome. Maybe it’s a um, you know, trust in your industry or something like that, so you need this more involved sales process, but you have this very large audience, so going in and, and doing it involves sales process on each one is a waste of time and you don’t,
Sky
00:38:32 – 00:38:45
you really need to narrow it down with a BM or you really need a B. M, but the audience is too large to be practical and you want to somehow narrow that down.
Lokesh Dave
00:38:45 – 00:39:20
I would say sky, that I wouldn’t say that is a requirement, that it’s, it’s not necessarily that your sales process is very complicated, that is there’s just inherent friction in there. You could have a and easy, somebody could go to the website and sign up very quickly type of a product as well, but as you are saying, you have to be very lucky to get somebody to visit your website, you still need to create a way for them to get our eyeballs on your product and once they get to your website you have a simpler funnel, right? Like they can, would, but who do you reach out to, so that you can get the eyeballs, what is the message you send to them?
Lokesh Dave
00:39:20 – 00:39:29
It’s still super expensive to go to each and every company with an smb and say, hey, check out my product, you want to still find the right segments,
Sky
00:39:29 – 00:40:16
yep awesome. Um so we’re coming up on the end here, I want to give a chance for anything that we’ve missed basically that you want to make sure the audience knows about this particular technique for targeting and really because it’s so relevant to the topic about your company um what you guys do and how people can check you out, this will be in the show notes and I’ll mention all where they can go in a minute, but for people wondering, okay if I want to check out and lift um you know, how how does this even start? Do you guys have just a simple page where people can go and see what this, what this does and wrap their head around and sign up and and try it a trial, that kind of stuff.
Lokesh Dave
00:40:16 – 00:40:57
Yeah, we we, you know, if you check us out and lift dot com. E N L Y F D dot com. Um we give you a good idea about what our platform can do, which needs, we can meet, we do have a free plug in available to start if you want to just start getting a sense of flavor of what we have to offer, you want to start checking out what kind of information we have on some accounts, you can go to the chrome web store or the edge web store and you know social and lift and you can see certain tools which are available for free. Um and we’d love to hear from you, if you have a large addressable market and have specific needs. My team would love to be able to talk to you and
Lokesh Dave
00:40:57 – 00:40:59
see if there is a way for us to help you.
Sky
00:40:59 – 00:41:23
So saying the final step of of the three things you guys do there was pushing the information and listeners are saying. Yeah, but what information obviously you’re having things like company name and domain, basic company information, but you’re saying you guys have beyond information intelligence there on why this company that can also be pushed and they can kind of see some examples of that.
Lokesh Dave
00:41:23 – 00:41:41
That’s correct. Yeah. We have more than 15,000 technologies and products and growing uh and the usage and adoption of those technologies uh and when and where and so on. So a lot of depth there we are funding information. We are buying intent are these companies in the buying cycle and and a lot more.
Sky
00:41:41 – 00:41:56
There’s a lot of techno graphics intent, data and other kinds of magical stuff to help people know if a company is a good target for them. Sounds like not just in general, it’s not a static target, it’s it’s a good target for them right now.
Lokesh Dave
00:41:56 – 00:42:11
That’s right. It’s a good target for them right now. And as their needs change as their business changes, the product has more adoption, how does how does the targeting change it automatically adapts to that as well.
Sky
00:42:11 – 00:42:25
Excellent. Alright, so that’s uh in lift dot com. That’ll be in the show notes. E N L Y F T dot com also have uh we’ll give a link to your linkedin profile. Is that the best place for people to find you if they want to reach out to you location?
Lokesh Dave
00:42:25 – 00:42:33
Yeah. Either my linkedin profile or they can reach me at location. L Okay. Shh. And then lift dot com.
Sky
00:42:33 – 00:43:08
We won’t put the email in the show notes so people don’t scrape it and you know, start getting, have to change your email but you’ve got you’ve got his email there as well and uh hey, thanks for listening to the show. Thank you for coming on location and uh the show notes for the show of course on if you market dot com and please keep spreading the word about the show to your colleagues and friends and on behalf of the market team and locations. Dave of and lift weight. I got to get that right at least once. Come on. And Locusts. Dave, is that right?
Lokesh Dave
00:43:08 – 00:43:09
Okay. And
Sky
00:43:09 – 00:43:19
locate and lift. Thank you for listening to the if you market podcast where we believe if you market the ship out of it with a B. M. They will come
