Speaker 1: 0:00Hey guys, this is Kevin Kerner with Tech Marketing Rewired. I had a lot of fun in this next episode, where I sat down with Bolton Graham, who is the head of marketing for Journey. Bolton and I have known each other for a long time and have worked on literally dozens of ABM campaigns over the years together, and we got really deep into what it takes to really succeed in ABM today, from why great ABM marketers need to think more like sales reps to why the golden age of ABM might actually be behind us. This one is packed with honest, tactical and some fun insight from a great tech marketing leader. Let's get into it. This is Tech Marketing Rewired.Speaker 2: 0:42

Hello Bolton, how are you doing? I am doing great. I'm very excited to be here. Kevin, Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1: 0:46

This one will be an easy one for me, because we know each other so well and have worked together, so much it's like a reunion. Yeah, this is the reunion call. Why don't you go ahead and just introduce yourself to the viewers here?

Speaker 2: 0:56

Yeah, my name is Bolton Graham. I'm head of marketing at Journey, so we do really exciting things around customer interaction, appointment scheduling, queue management and experiential events in one platform. So it's been an awesome journey, pardon the pun, to be kind of a one-person show, setting the foundations of a growth marketing engine and expanding just from my ABM roots into a more just mini hat-wearing wearing marker, which has been a lot of fun.

Speaker 1: 1:26

I know you from your Blue Yonder days too, where you guys were doing you know ABM at scale like crazy scale, and so the one reason I wanted to have you on was to talk about. You've got a lot of historical knowledge of ABM, all the way from just getting it built all the way to where you are now. So you know, starting small, getting really big and then going back to. You know things you can control.

Speaker 2: 1:51

I'm just wondering to start off, like what do you think the state of ABM is in right now? It's a great question and I think you know, going back, like you said, I was at Bleander and really helped stand up the account based marketing team there from it was it was three people and it was two and it was one for just by itself for a little bit. Then we grew back out to five, six, seven headcount. Before then I was at ukg, which was kronos at the time, and that was just when the rumblings of account-based marketing were were coming to fruition. So my last year there so it was hey, we really got to get a handle on this account-based marketing thing. How do we start start doing this? That was really pre like Sixth Sense dominance. That it wasn't even in the vernacular Blue Yonder was really when Sixth Sense came into power and the dark funnel was revealed and they really energized people around that.

Speaker 2: 2:35

Now I really think the golden age, looking back, the golden age of account-based marketing was that kind of 2020-esque. Sixth Sense was really young and it was truly focused around micro-accounts and I think we're kind of in this dark age now and people may totally disagree, but we're actually in this dark age now of account-based marketing, where everything is ABM, everything is account-based marketing. Oh so we have this great segmented list and we know that there's some intent behind it. It is account-based marketing. Oh so you, totally. We have this great segmented list and we know that there's some intent behind it. It's account-based marketing. We're launching this LinkedIn program to 2,000 accounts, but we know that they've shown some kind of signs of life and they're named accounts for our sales reps. It's account-based marketing. We're doing it, we're doing it, but it we're doing it.

Speaker 2: 3:26

Um, but I think that the golden age was 2020, when it was hey, we have to get into this one whale, we have to get into these five, these 10 accounts. Here you go, you have, you have your budget. It's the wild west. No one knows what tools work yet, right? So I I think we're in a transition period where everyone in marketing is becoming account-based marketing, but I would argue that's actually account-based targeting. Yeah, so I'll pause there.

Speaker 1: 3:49

Well, I wonder if it's because LinkedIn makes it so easy to have account targeting. Now you can load the account target, you can load the context, but it's really just targeted marketing. At this point, if you load in 2,000 accounts, I think you're exactly right. It's not the same thing.

Speaker 2: 4:07

It's. Modern marketing is what it is, and I think Sixth Sense has done a great job taking charge of the verbiage and the words and the dark funnel and everything and kind of brought everyone to that account-based targeting foundation. But I do think that there's still so much potential for true account-based marketing, if you can even call it that anymore. I've thought of some of the names for it.

Speaker 1: 4:29

Yeah, yeah, there's got to be. We should coin another term. Right, we can just ask Jeff GPT to coin it for us after the end of this call.

Speaker 2: 4:37

Yeah, can we do it for us?

Speaker 1: 4:39

Yeah. So you've seen firsthand the beginning of ABM, starting ABM, and then you've seen it scale. You've probably seen it take off at a company. Well, you did see it take off at Blew Under, and now I'm sure you're doing it. If you're doing it at a journey. I think it would be interesting for you to talk a little bit about what happens when you first launch and then what happens when it starts to scale Absolutely and what happens when it starts to scale?

Speaker 2: 5:05

Absolutely yeah. So when you first launch it, it usually begins or at least what I've lived is it begins in the proper account-based marketing format of okay, here are five whale accounts that will be absolute needle movers. How do we get into them? What tactics are we going to use? The world is your oyster and that's really how it started at Blue Yonder.

Speaker 2: 5:24

You guys are a kind of special green beret force within marketing. You're not really lead gen, you're not field marketing, you guys are account-based marketing. This is the account-based marketing team. So you try new things, you experiment and there's no guardrails, right? So there's no branding saying hey, don't modify our brand to match theirs, we got to stay within our own branding. It's really kind of the Wild West.

Speaker 2: 5:50

So you can spend a lot of time getting to know your accounts, getting to know the contacts within your accounts and really building a relationship with sales to say, hey, I'm not your BDR, but I'm your marketing development rep. I'm going to go out and drive business for your key accounts, and that's going to be day in and day out. And when we win, we're going to celebrate together and we'll celebrate every small engagement victory, every yes to a webinar, every hand raise. So it starts out small and personal. What happens is eventually you will see success.

Speaker 2: 6:23

And then that's when you get asked to scale right. So you say, hey, wow, this helped land this massive company X. We got to do this for all of our accounts. Why would we not do this for all accounts? And that's when you start to blur the lines of well, if I'm juggling, if I'm going from juggling five to 10 accounts to 100 accounts, and then 500 accounts and 1000, the actual time that I have to execute on a one-to-one level is almost zero. You morph as you try to scale account-based marketing. You morph into account-based targeting and targeted marketing, which just becomes another lead gen department in your company. So it's really that spot of of. How can you maintain the, the personalization required and the attention to detail required for account-based marketing, while not just saying, all right, we're gonna, we're gonna slap a logo on a page and call that a personalized?

Speaker 1: 7:17

page personalization at scale right. So how do you so? I I've seen it happen firsthand with you guys uh, with your, your, our past work where it starts to catch fire and you want more and more. I think you did a really good job of trying to contain it into the one-to-one to maybe one-to-few space a few, being like some little subgroup of accounts. How did you find a way to keep it focused versus having it explode into these massive campaigns?

Speaker 2: 7:49

Right, you really you have to keep it within an agreement. You have to lay foundation early to say no, this is not an account-based marketing account, this is not an ABM account, and you have to be able to articulate that and you have to be able to defend that, because everyone, once you hit success, is going to want a slice of the pie. So you're going to have sales leaders coming to you saying we need to do this to our top 500 accounts. So if you have that the kind of agreement in place before that, you can then defend your space and say, well, no, actually we're just going to do these 100 and here's why. So, whether that's, you know, it's a certain ARR, that they have to be above, no, we're only running this to 1 billion and above accounts, or they have to have. If you have an intent platform perhaps you have intent scoring they must be above a certain intent score before we go full into it. So, yes, we'll nurture them with our field marketing teams, our lead gen teams. As soon as that score hits something, yes, then we'll make the one-to-one. You have to be in a certain place in the funnel, right? So if a deal is already kind of set to close but sales are saying no, we need to guarantee the close.

Speaker 2: 9:00

We really need an ABM program for this. That's way too late to engage. You don't have enough runway to really generate any difference. In that you really need an agreement. And as you start to find success you need to think about. Every company is different in terms of what is your ACV or your contract value, what is the sales cycle length. All of that has to be kind of decided by you and the team. But your parameters should be tight enough where you can say, now that we apply this to our total addressable market, there's about 100 accounts, maybe 200. And that all depends on, again, the headcount of your team. So if you're a one person ABM team, I really am old school and say no more than 50. And that's a lot to me.

Speaker 2: 9:44

With every headcount you add. You do add the capability to do more. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 9:49

So it's a better. It's a better scenario for you to have a lot of one-to-ones than have a few targeted marketing campaigns. As an ABM marketer right, you definitely could have done targeted marketing but, you're really focused on the, on the one-to-one or maybe one-to-a-couple. Do you think that's a skill? I would imagine that. I mean, I know you're a broader marketer than this, but I know you like the ABM side of things. Do you think the skill set of an account-based marketer is different than a just general targeted marketer?

Speaker 2: 10:26

Great question. I do. Yeah, I think, and I always say account based marketing is somewhere in between sales and marketing. It's a really interesting. It's the sales enablement side of the house where your lead generation team, your field team, can be awesome at planning events, throwing events, can be great at balancing the perfect marketing mix of top of funnel, mid funnel programs. That's very programmatic.

Speaker 2: 10:51

Abm at its fundamental is less programmatic and more feel, and you really need to be involved in every single lead for your accounts that you're supporting. You need to be just joined at the hip with sales to understand okay, this is working, this is not working. Why don't we buy a billboard outside of their headquarters and say, hey, company X, it's time to talk. Right, this is the kind of agility that you need. You kind of need the hunger of a salesperson to stay interested in your five to 10 to 50 accounts at any given time. So I really find you know, thinking of like college students, if you're oscillating between, oh, should I do marketing, should I do sales? There's a fusion in between account-based marketing or whatever we change the name to. It's kind of a bit of both, and we can come back to that point, because one of my hot takes is I think true account-based marketing headcount should be somewhat commission-based.

Speaker 1: 11:50

I think you're exactly right. I never really thought of it that way. It's kind of like a sales position. It's kind of like, you know, bdr support sales. A really good account based people are probably closer to sales than they are the communications department or the comms thing they're like. They're like sale. They're like salespeople that are scientists, like marketing scientists. I love it. They're salespeople without the schmooze. You know.

Speaker 2: 12:15

They're more of the scientist side of things Exactly Instead of schmooze, we have puns, that's right. You really get a puns for account-based marketing.

Speaker 1: 12:22

Yeah they're very punny salespeople. That is interesting, though, like the sales side of things and commission, I never really thought of that. But yeah, the sales side of things and commission, I never really thought of that. But yeah, talk like why. I think I can see why, but have you ever seen that happen anywhere, is it? I haven't.

Speaker 2: 12:39

So maybe that's a a new LinkedIn article. I'm about to go right. When we're done with this.

Speaker 1: 12:43

Should they report? Should ABM? I don't know. Should ABM report into the sales organization somehow? Or are they still a marketing function in your opinion?

Speaker 2: 12:50

I think it's still a marketing function. I don't know that I'd go that far, but at the same time I need your cause, like, well, why not? I do think it is this kind of department outside of marketing and outside of sales it's it's kind of floats. And you know, joining Blue Yonder we were kind of this new department even and yeah, we rolled up to marketing for sure, but we had this really nice autonomy to say we have some allowance to break some rules here, to break some branding rules, to do what we can. Of course, eventually that will be cracked down on as you scale, but I have not seen a commission-based thing, I haven't seen it even floated.

Speaker 2: 13:27

But thinking about it, if you're doing true account-based marketing, let's call it key account marketing or enterprise pursuit marketing. I think is another one that I've kind of ideated, where you okay, you Bolton, you Kevin, you have these five to 10 accounts that you're going to work for the year and, yeah, there is maybe some ebb and flow. We learned that a contract has been lost so we need to replace that account. Fine, but let's say, for the sake of your 5% accounts, you could lower the base salary a little bit. So, say, a marketing manager is making $90K, lower it to $80K, but you have a 2% commission on whatever closed one deals occur. So I'm not talking 10% commission, 15% we're not SaaS software salespeople but if you incentivize, even call it 1%. If you close a 1.2 million ACB deal because of all of your awesome marketing efforts and you get 1% to 2% of that, that's okay, it's okay. And then you're getting if there's no cap, you're getting way more salary than you would get if you were just a standard marketer.

Speaker 2: 14:31

I think that it's important because you're so focused on this small account group that it really incentivizes and kind of de-risks you being like, oh well, I'm just going to throw some of these leads and see what happens, like no, you're going to be in it, you're going to be in Sales Navigator. You're going to be following every single contact, every single lead in sales navigator. You're going to be in, like following every single contact, every single lead, and I would say, make them closer to a BDR or an SDR role and yeah, jesus got me thinking.

Speaker 1: 14:58

I mean, I think that's. I never really thought of it this way, but you just got me thinking that maybe a good place for uh to find a really good um account based marketer is is as a BDR like a person that was a BDR and make them an account-based person Because they get the relationship with sales, they're heavy into messaging and they talk to customers all day. So they're probably the closest I talked to. I can't remember who it was, maybe it was Katie Penner at Sendoso, who was a former SDR and I started my career as a BDR. You don't know the customer that well until you do, like you know 100 dialings a day and then you're definitely going to know. So it'd be a really fertile ground for it's kind of like that and that's the mind of an account-based marketer. You just don't find those ninjas as much anymore.

Speaker 2: 15:49

I agree the industry's changed a bit to where it's more, and I think it's a skill set thing too, but it's also an interest thing where a lot of folks their passion lies in the dashboards and driving the numbers and driving brand and creating brand In account-based marketing. It's much closer to sales. You have to be able to pour over your lead patch and say, oh, he was at that webinar two months ago and I sent him the cool custom shoes or whatever. There's Sendoza, shout out to Sendoza and he received that really well, okay, and now he's filled out a demo. I need to communicate this to my salespeople, because the sales folks are doing their own job. They're doing contracting work or contracts work and everything. They don't have the time to be able to say, oh, this awesome ABM campaign has produced this many leads for me and this has been the messaging that they've been going after this one contact for six months with.

Speaker 2: 16:48

And then, all of a sudden, you have dissonance, because this lead has been nurtured from an ABM standpoint over some messaging of oh, let's go with appointment scheduling. Every time that you force someone to fill out a form and wait for a call, you're losing business, right? So we've been nurturing them on that messaging. And then they get on the call and you say, yep, our queue management's the best, and it kind of goes wait what we're having. We've been talking back and forth for months about appointment scheduling and so you get that, that kind of dissonance, and all of a sudden you're, you're in danger. So if you can bring the abm people into the, you bring them into the calls. Right, they don't have to say anything. But they could say, oh well, remember the white socks game two months ago? They go, yeah, that's right, that's right, that fun time. Now you've you've humanized the call and now sales hasn't even used your time.

Speaker 1: 17:33

Yeah, this is great. I mean that's a really good nugget, but I don't think it's. It's nuanced, but I don't think it's talked about enough. Just the skill set, the sales skill set of the AV marketer. Okay, I want to switch lanes here a little and talk about the one-to-one side of things. You've done a ton of one-to-ones. I don't know how many we did together, but it was a lot I wanted. I want you to talk about your system like one of the most important parts of that process, from beginning to end. Let's say, pick out a few of the, the main tactics you can give people some advice on through that stream of that, through that work stream yeah, again, it Again.

Speaker 2: 18:12

It's going to seem obvious, but the most important part of the process is the beginning and it's the actual building your account-based marketing list. So that goes back to what I was talking about, with the standard agreement of yes, this is an account-based marketing account or no, it is not, and sticking to that and really defining why is this an account-based marketing target. So that's first and foremost. And then it really is. Account-based marketing is its own microcosm of a marketing department where you're going to be using the entire mix of tactics. There's not one tactic that is an ABM tactic. You're going to be using social paid ads focused just at that account. You're going to be using customized landing pages, direct mail, surveys, buying billboards in front of their HQ, helping to fund charity events that are important to them. There is a lot of stuff that you can do, but what matters most is giving it the time for the personalization, because you want to communicate.

Speaker 2: 19:07

Clearly. I am entirely invested in our solution and how it's going to help you, and I'm going to spend all my time to over-communicate and over-personalize. I know you play the cross at UML. I know you want to almost creep them out. Right, you don't want to go so far, but the thing that account-based marketing is for is standing out Like in a world of noise. Abm is able to take the time to cut through, and when a custom golf head cover comes in with their college or alma mater with a note that says hey, I know that you graduated from XYZ, would love a chance to talk. I really think our solution would help. One, two, three.

Speaker 1: 19:51

What about the sales relationship? How do you manage that effectively?

Speaker 2: 19:54

Regular meetings and over communication. So I really think you, for the accounts where there's obviously most of them would be named accounts, but you have to have a huddle with all of your sales people individually at least once a week, maybe even multiple times a week. You need to open the channels of communication. If you're using Slack, if you're using Teams every day, hey, just want to let you know that so-and-so opened this email. We're going to nurture them, we're working on it. Let me know if you see anything from your end.

Speaker 2: 20:23

And then every Friday or wherever it is, you have a call. You say, okay, this is how the intent scores moved. If you don't have an intent platform, you can build your own signals saying, okay, this is who opened and clicked emails, this is cookie people on our site. You can kind of make your own signals, right If you don't have the budget for a Rolls Royce six cents kind of thing. So you really need it goes back to the BDR and SDR thing. You're almost like a marketing development rep where you need to be a tight at the hip.

Speaker 1: 20:50

Yeah, yeah, totally. Now what about the? What about outside of the outside of the sales relationship? Now you've got marketing and, let's say, executive leadership team. How do you sell the value of this investment, cause you're making a pretty big investment to go one-to-one ABM Like how do you, what do you do, to sell the value to that? How do you message them at the beginning stages, when it's you know you don't have the, the cred yet, and how do you message them over time such that they have confidence that they're spending in the right way?

Speaker 2: 21:18

Yeah, it's a fantastic question and it's one that I know people contend with all the time, because they they want ABN departments. But it's you want how, how much?

Speaker 2: 21:26

money per account. That's crazy. That's going to double our headcount or whatever it is. So you just have to communicate what is the price if we don't do it right. So, yes, we can keep doing what we're doing and hope that some of our kind of traditional lead generation metrics or tactics make it through and we slowly grow our process base. Yes, but if and 5% of people are ready to buy at any given time. But what if, through ABM, we can make that 5% ready to buy at any time, 10% or 15%, because we're giving them a compelling event delivered straight to their door, delivered straight in front of them, with this very carefully crafted message that's going to cut through all that kind of standard marketing.

Speaker 2: 22:12

So it's not a replacement for a marketing department. I would never say that. It's in conjunction with it and it's, like I said, this kind of hybrid sales enablement role. So you have to say, trust me, let's give it a shot. What if we close this $1.2 million deal? The salary is X, y, it's 80K, it's 90K, whatever it is. Maybe you follow the commission model. So worst case, it's 200K. Right, it's absolutely killing it.

Speaker 2: 22:41

But if, after that first year, give it two years, if you've closed that mammoth account that now has all the upsell and cross-sell opportunity for all your other solutions. That program has paid for itself for the next seven years. So it is a bit of a. It's a bit of a leap out of the out of the gate. But if you can prove the, prove the breadcrumbs as you build it, so prove that you're driving increased engagement in the account. Show that you're getting more engaged contacts that can then be remarketed to and nurtured. Show that you're increasing event attendance at these accounts by people at those accounts and then kind of build your believability that way until finally you get that close one you can say, see, and then you're doomed because everyone is going to want one.

Speaker 1: 23:27

Yeah, yeah, right, and then you can measure, you know, customer acquisition cost and it's going to pay off. I think it's interesting you say engagement, because we're having conversations right now with a few marketing leaders that are having a really hard time selling just the value of marketing in general. But that journey you have to take an executive on, like a CEO, or the executive leadership team, and that the idea of engagement it's, you know, it's something that they sort of get in the ELT. They're like, okay, yeah, I guess yeah, but until they actually see the closed deal and the cost relative to that closed deal and they're like, oh, okay, that makes sense.

Speaker 1: 24:06

It's a really hard sell for marketing leaders. So you almost have to have the patience to stick it through and it's scary. It's probably more scary now for a lot of our customers because they're they're under so much pressure for immediate performance and that's probably what drives the the not you're not the one-to-one route, but the you know, targeted marketing route, cause it's like, well, I'm under all this pressure, it's cheaper to do this one, so I gotta get this one done, because I can't get the one-to-one thing done no, that's exactly it and I think um, abm or true abm whatever we're calling it key accounting marketing.

Speaker 2: 24:39

It's not going to be for everyone.

Speaker 2: 24:41

So if, if your sales cycles is is really fast, um, and your your contract values average contact values are kind of lower than what it would be for a headcount to staff, this, a one--to-one method, is probably not the best strategy and what you can do is a hybrid.

Speaker 2: 24:58

So you do one-to-few, you do one-to-many with all of your clever modern segmentations and intent signals and that's totally fine, and you can dip your toe and say, okay, do the one-to-fews, do the one-to-manys, and then, with any bandwidth left, let's just test pilot company X, let's see if we can spend some extra budget and see any kind of increased engagement or whatever it is. That's a really good way to kind of dip your toe in. But the true, like enterprise size, if you have K plus ACVs and deals that are closing, if your sales cycle is six months or longer, you need this engagement to keep people involved and to keep people interested in buying and worried about the pain point that you're trying to solve. So there's a whole discussion to be had about folks that don't believe in marketing. We can't even get into that now, but of course I'm in the camp.

Speaker 1: 25:48

I'll write that book someday, I'll write the book someday, or it's like. This is the reasons why there's the what's? The 95 five rule, where 95% of your customers aren't in market Currently, only 5% of them are. And so if you're for your big customers, it's like man, you just got to keep, you got to get on the day one list when they're looking, and you're not going to get on that list if they don't know who you are. And so ABM with big accounts is a great way to make sure they at least know who you are and what your brand stands for. And I do totally agree that it's a sales approach. We're going to think of whatever that term is for what this is, or maybe it shouldn't be called. Maybe the person that does it should have a sales sort of name. We need to think of that. Bolton. We'll get a blog post out there at some point together.

Speaker 2: 26:35

Yeah, maybe it's a marketing account executive.

Speaker 1: 26:38

Yeah, yeah. Well, there it is, yeah Something.

Speaker 2: 26:40

M-A-E.

Speaker 1: 26:46

Yeah, m-a-e, I like it. One last question, and then I'm going to have you play a little game here. Since you've done so many of these, what's one underrated tool, tactic, tactic or workflow you think people should be using now in abm? Let me sit with that for a second I need my knee jerk is direct mail.

Speaker 2: 26:59

I think that that the secret's kind of out of the bag there. You know, there was a long time where people would say you're still there. On direct mail we budgeted for for mailers it's not 1990, what are you talking about? But there's been such a huge resurgence, especially with, with intent, data, that you can get and say, all right, we know this person's just in in crocheting, let's get them a crochet with our logo or wherever it is that can be really powerful, because landing on desks is is having a physical presence is huge. Um, so that's probably not an earth-shaking one, but that's that's my knee jerk.

Speaker 2: 27:33

I think visual. I keep coming back to billboards because I really think that there's a huge visual component in physical space that we're also missing. And if you can get to people when they're inside of their kind of daily routines, when not in front of their computer, that's massive. So whether it's posters or a billboard or buying visual space on a bus, like these are things that can have. They're very cost efficient because not a lot of people are doing them and it's hard to prove the ROI because it's not digital and you can't pixel a billboard. But when people, when you disrupt people maybe that's a bad word when you shock people into saying like, oh, that's an ad for so-and-so. They were, they invited me to that webinar and they sent me that awesome head cover that starts to really build this kind of ecosystem within their mind of this is a legitimate player in the space at the very least totally.

Speaker 1: 28:27

It's a pattern. When someone told me that they use the word pattern interrupt, and I think that is becoming even more needed now than ever, especially with ai, because event I mean eventually you can't use email, you won't be able to use linkedin. Really there's going to be calls coming to you that are crazy. I think the personal connection angle is going to be one of the last things we're left with. And then I do believe that maybe an abm, especially that the, the, the, the thing, the tactics are going to work are going to be a personal connection that you can make with an individual. So it's like you know it's direct mail, it's showing up in a space they don't know, it's events specific events.

Speaker 1: 29:05

The event industry might see a huge resurgence because of all the other noise in the non face-to-face world. I just say I think I'm hearing that from where people are like the only thing that might be left will be the conversations that we have, because everything else will be just so noisy going on with all the crazy stuff. Okay, I wanted to this will be the third time I've tried this and but the other two times it worked. No, the other two times it completely exploded. No, I'm kidding. So what I do is I'm going to call this ai roulette and I'm going to put a question into perplexity, and it's basically I put all of our. I said I'm having a conversation with bolton, uh, here's what we're going to talk about, um, and here's his background. And then I put all of your, all of your, uh a link to your linkedin profile with all your posts, so so it could read your posts.

Speaker 2: 29:53

Nice, so I'm going to hit.

Speaker 1: 29:55

I'm going to hit send here and we're going to see what it says. Okay, based on Bolton's recent LinkedIn activity and profile, here is here's a provocative and unexpected question you could ask him at the end of the show. Bolton, you recently announced that your company journey JRNI is pronounced Journey. If you had to rebrand yourself as an ABM practitioner with an unconventional spelling, what would it be and why?

Speaker 2: 30:22

So I have to rebrand myself.

Speaker 1: 30:24

Yeah, you got to rebrand yourself as an ABM practitioner with an unconventional spelling Kind of like what's the our music artist my kids listen to? Jake spelled G-V-K-E, I think, or something like that.

Speaker 2: 30:39

Yeah, you get the Charlie X, X-C-X. Whatever, I'm not hitting the one. Oh geez, that's a good one. So my coworkers at Journey have taken to calling me Boltron because I'm a marketing machine. So I think I would have to go Boltron and Boltron because I'm a marketing machine. So I think I would have to go Boltron and then switch the O with a zero, because that kind of evokes the digital side and the kind of tech support that you need to be successful in account-based marketing.

Speaker 1: 31:07

Oh, that's good. I think you should probably put that in your LinkedIn profile. Then I might have to. It would be very edgy to have the zero in the in the then no one could find you Like where's Bolton?

Speaker 1: 31:19

True, probably break the algorithm. Well, this has been awesome, man. I really I've always enjoyed catching up with you, but this is really good. I think I think some great stuff here for people. I think I here for people. I think I think it's, I think I I'm. Eyes are open now for me about the sales angle here on all this stuff so amazing. I know you'd bring some great insight. I would love to have you back on again in the future to talk about how this is all working out with all the AI stuff that's going on. It's going to be crazy, but I really appreciate it. I want people to be able to get ahold of you. What's the best way for them to reach you?

Speaker 2: 31:51

I'd say connect on LinkedIn. I'm always there just innovating the journey brand and just trying to make connections. So yeah, check me out on LinkedIn, please.

Speaker 1: 32:01

Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Bolton. It's great to have you here and I look forward to catching up with you soon. Awesome Thanks, Kevin.