In ABM Segmentation Strategies

Carrie Carroll, Clarabridge

CLARABRIDGE, a customer experience management software company, is expanding its segmentation strategy based on early success. The company started by segmenting accounts within just two vertical industry segments: retail banking and healthcare insurance. Clarabridge now breaks down prospects by the roles stakeholders have within the target accounts.

With this segmentation strategy, and while continuously validating and verifying contacts within target accounts in these segments, the company has influenced 96 deals since January 2017, which represents about $24 million in revenue.

After dividing up the accounts into segments, Susan Ganeshan, CMO at Clarabridge, and her team aligned content and channels to these specific industries to assure relevancy. We had the opportunity to speak with Carrie Carroll, Senior Director of Brand & Design on these efforts.

“We educate all of sales—including the ADRs [Account Development Reps]—with not just a script, but also [with information] to [help them] understand the industry and the lingo they need to [know to] successfully sell,” Carroll said. “We provide marketing collateral and custom pitches for every salesperson.”

“Essentially, it is a playbook for sales,” Carroll said. “We package it all as nicely as possible for [reps] to use. On the other side, the message hopefully touches the prospect and the script is relevant to their needs.”

Clarabridge’s content includes webinars, e-books and white papers, as well as the rep scripts.

Email and telephone are two of the primary channels Clarabridge uses now, but Carroll said the company is testing website personalization to provide relevant, valuable information to visitors depending on their segment.

“When anyone in our Salesforce CRM or any known lead within these [segments] hits our homepage, they see three-to-four custom pages that directs them to the previously mentioned content,” Carroll said. She added that the goal is to provide stakeholders “good knowledge and takeaways about not only our products, but about their industry best practices and customer experience.”

“We educate all of sales—including the ADRs [Account Development Reps]— with not just a script, but also [with information] to [help them] understand the industry and the lingo they need to [know how to] successfully sell.” Carrie Carroll, Clarabridge

Carroll said that the combination of content, sales plays and website optimization work toward accelerating sales conversations. “We know that we’re [nurturing accounts] faster and they’re moving into the pipeline more quickly.”

Leveraging tools such as Triblio, Salesforce and Marketo, The Clarabridge team is able to follow the trail of account engagement, as well as individual prospect engagement to further understand account needs.

“From there, we can see where they are in the pipeline,” Carroll said. “Since we started this, we can tell that accounts are qualifying faster than in the past within these industries. We’re also seeing stronger conversions.”

“In the next quarter, we’ll be targeting two more industries,” said Carroll. She added that the goal is to expand their segmentation strategy by two new segments per quarter.

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