How N.Rich is saving me as a marketer in a sales-led org

Okay, it seems like we are live. Hi everyone, please let me know if you can hear me and see me. I'm not sharing my screen yet, but you should hear me fine. Audio is good. Nice to see everyone here. I was surprised by the turnout—I was expecting maybe 15 to 20 attendees for a product webinar, but we've got 50, 60, 70 signups. It looks like the topic is quite burning, and I'm definitely not alone in this situation as a marketer in a sales-led organization.

I'll cover today my journey and experience with how N.Rich has been helping me over the past almost 4.5 years I've been with the company. I joined back in 2021 at quite an interesting moment. We had a marketing team and we were bringing on SDRs in batches month after month—the idea was that the company would be very sales-led from day one. At some point, I remained the only marketer in the company with 50+ salespeople. I spent a year as the only marketer and survived, as you can see.

Then I was given the opportunity to start building a marketing team from the ground up. We came to the realization that marketing support and more active participation was beneficial, necessary, and actually vital. By the time I stepped down from the head of marketing role, we had a team of 4 people plus agencies and freelancers. During this same period, I also started the Mixbound initiative together with our SDR lead. The idea was to prove that collaboration between sales and marketing—rather than running two motions in parallel—would result in better collaboration, better communication, and most importantly, better results in terms of pipeline and revenue. We proved it by reaching 60% better conversion to pipeline for ICP accounts that were worked on together by marketing and sales without battling over credit attribution. I'll also share the Mixbound playbook we created based on this project in follow-up materials, and you'll get the recording as well.

Now we have a much healthier proportion of marketing and sales headcount: 6 people in marketing, 8 people in sales, and we'll be hiring more. We're now hiring with a very different approach. What many of you will be waiting for is our marketing source revenue at N.Rich. That's my biggest win, I think—we don't measure it. We don't look at whether something came purely inbound or purely outbound. We're now at a stage where we realize this requires teamwork, efforts from SDRs, account executives, marketing, support, and everyone to generate pipeline and revenue in a healthy way.

We still face some problems, and it's not perfect. We're still quite sales-led, which is inevitable because the product is complex and we don't have a PLG motion. There's no way to explore it or play around with your own data to see what the product can do—you need to get in touch with a salesperson first. So we'll remain sales-led at least until we introduce other motions.

The problems we still face are: staying aligned with sales on our ICP criteria and account lists; gaining meaningful insights into account behavior; reaching strategic accounts effectively without spray and pray; getting recognition for marketing impact and justifying budget versus sales headcount. The last one resonated in my recent LinkedIn post—we weren't the only ones having this conversation about whether to spend on ads or hire another SDR.

Let me address the first problem: aligning with sales on strategic accounts. After I joined N.Rich, having spent almost 6 years at SEMrush where it was very marketing-led with a 100+ person marketing team—bigger than all of N.Rich—I had to rethink everything. The product was totally different, and I had to reason in a different paradigm. The main switch was moving from audiences and personas and parameters to accounts. I had to literally switch to account-based thinking.

Without this mindset, marketing would be seen as air cover and a supplier of bad leads, doing decoration while sales gets all the credit for strategic deals with the real big accounts and ICP targets. This is where I had to unlearn and learn a lot, and N.Rich helps me with this. We have a feature where we can set up our ICP segments and parameters, agree on them, and synchronize them within the system to send those accounts to marketing channels like account-based advertising and LinkedIn advertising.

I will now share my screen, and you should see the presentation now.

Please let me know if you can see this. You should see the presentation now. Yes, so before we start, a little bit about myself and my journey.

This is how we synchronize the ICP accounts that sales are working on to the N.Rich system. You create a workflow based on the CRM—we use HubSpot. The workflow is based on CRM data. You work on your list in HubSpot, and whenever the list is updated, whether sales or someone else changes the parameters or includes or excludes accounts, it's automatically reflected in N.Rich. When the company-based list is updated, it synchronizes with the segment.

Then you see what you can do with this. We have accounts at ICP Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3. You go to the segments "All Territories" and see that we have 1,200 accounts in Tier 1, then Tier 2 and Tier 3. These are the campaigns running for each segment. These are the LinkedIn segments we're pushing as LinkedIn matched audiences as well. You can immediately sort by last seen on the website. N.Rich tells you out of those 6K+ accounts which ones are already aware of you, visiting your website, showing first-party intent immediately.

For example, we can see that an account was on the website yesterday for the last time. Within the last month, we engaged 21 users. We saw first-party intent from 21 users within the account, with many website visits and an average visit time above 2 minutes. This means they're not just bouncing off—they're actually checking the content.

As a result, there's nothing better as a marketer in a sales-led organization than seeing recognition from the sales team, especially publicly. We had a meeting note showing that a decision maker was impressed by us targeting her on LinkedIn at just the right time. That's it.

The second issue is gaining strategic insights and signals into account behavior. In sales-led organizations, sales reps are always talking to buyers and claim to know them best. Marketing insights are often dismissed. We often hear, "No, it's not relevant. It's not a valid value prop. I spoke to 10 buyers last month—they don't care about it." What we can back up with are the account-level analytics we have in N.Rich.

Let's say we take one of our existing clients. We can extract insights from N.Rich to make this a dialogue rather than a one-way conversation where a salesperson says, "We need to change everything on the website because I spoke to 10, 15, 30 buyers, and this is what they care about—they just want cheap clicks from your advertising platform." We can tell them instead: "We see that this account, before they even got in touch or converted into a sales opportunity, interacted with this webinar about winning from day one and getting to the final consideration set as a Challenger brand. They spent 10 minutes on the webinar page. Then we see in the CRM they signed up for this webinar, watched it, and clicked the follow-up. Then they were exposed to these ads. We saw signals of intent from this account—that's how they got interested in us."

It's not that at the moment they reach the sales-ready stage they'll be asking about cost per click and how we charge. But that's not what got them into the funnel or onto the buyer journey. Something else attracted their attention and interest. I've had many conversations and debates about what we should highlight. The sales team has their own lens and experience talking to many buyers, but at a very particular moment—when they're ready, evaluating, and already decided whether to get in touch with us. Those are the buyers sales talks to because they already made the decision to contact us. Something drove them to convert, and that's how you see what exactly drove them. These are different scenarios.

The third issue many of us face is knowing how to reach our ICP effectively. With Google, we can't be sure we're reaching only the right accounts. We can experiment with audience settings and keywords, but we never have full control over which exact companies see our ads. LinkedIn is amazing with all its account-based targeting functionality, but the downside is if your audience isn't active on LinkedIn, if no one from your target account is active there—and I have to remind myself that not everyone hangs out on LinkedIn every day like I do—then it's very hard to reach decision makers through one social network.

This is where N.Rich comes in. It's our core functionality—an ABM advertising platform with LinkedIn integration. We can push segments as retargeting segments and cold segments to LinkedIn through native integration. Many clients use N.Rich Ads as a layer to engage cold accounts at cheaper cost, then retarget those segments to LinkedIn.

We can go to campaigns, and this is how we're running our own campaigns.

N.Rich can serve three types of ad creatives. There are classic standard cross-channel display ads. We also now have an AI agent to help create both images and texts—that actually differentiates N.Rich a lot from LinkedIn Ads. On LinkedIn, you can experiment with a maximum of 5 creatives in one campaign. With N.Rich, that goes up to 350 ad variations—5 headlines, 5 descriptions, and a variety of images. The system runs A/B tests in the background, and you can see in analytics which creative combination performed best. We provide much more options for testing.

Another interesting format is native articles, something N.Rich started with back in 2015 or 2016 when this format was first invented. The way it works is like an article where you can include links, images, and logos—something people can scroll through and read. Importantly, we charge per engagement. When someone just scrolls past, you're not charged. Only when someone scrolls more than 50% of the content are you charged. Everything else is basically free impressions. So if you want to get your logo out there for free, you can include an image earlier in the text and get free impressions.

This is how you go to your sales team and say, "We're running ads to reach the exact same accounts you're targeting with outbound efforts. Here's how many accounts we engaged in the last quarter, and you can see the progression—we're generating more clicks, more video ad views." Again, this is only limited to ICP accounts, not display ads to random audiences that might create weird spam emails. This is only your target accounts. On the timeline, you can see all the clicks and engagements from campaigns, including LinkedIn clicks. You can see when they started being engaged on LinkedIn versus before when they were clicking ads and visiting your website. You can even track sales engagement—if your sales team sent emails or LinkedIn DMs, it's tracked here.

For reaching strategic accounts effectively, we ran an experiment ourselves with approximately 2,000 accounts. We engaged them with both N.Rich advertisements and LinkedIn Ads. There are interesting takeaways. First, not all accounts were engaged through LinkedIn even though we're a martech platform with a marketer audience that's super active on LinkedIn. We didn't reach a lot of our audience. Only about 10% of accounts saw ads on both N.Rich and LinkedIn. For us, it was obvious we need to use multiple channels. If you don't believe in display advertising or N.Rich, this signal alone shows it's always beneficial to use several channels. If your particular account or buying committee isn't on LinkedIn or any other platform, there's basically no way you can reach them with marketing content. You'd just be doing cold outbound to those accounts.

Now let's get to getting recognition for marketing impact—something that always resonates. I got a request on LinkedIn to emphasize the trigger warning here. Imagine a new deal is signed and everyone's celebrating. Most probably the sales representative who closed the deal gets tagged first—absolutely deserved, no objections. Then the BDR gets tagged, then thank you to legal, operations, support. Unless it's a super obvious outbound lead who came in saying, "I've been your raving fan because I've been reading your SEO blogs"—unless something like that happens, it's already a lot if someone recognizes marketing impact.

This is what I use N.Rich for all the time. For months and even years, I've been quite a pain jumping into all the threads about when we landed new opportunities or signed new clients. I'd share screenshots with all the touchpoints that led to first getting in touch and then becoming customers. It's important you don't stop campaigns when an opportunity lands. The buyer got in touch, but they'll definitely be evaluating other options and competitors. You want to stay top of mind during evaluation. Marketing should be constantly in touch through campaigns, LinkedIn, email, events—whatever. A lot of these touchpoints can be recorded in N.Rich.

This is the result of me jumping into all the Slack threads over the last 3 years. Our sales team is now doing this proactively, recognizing our contribution, saying they knew about us well in advance of the deal. Our CRO suggested that screenshots from marketing should be in every deal, and I totally agree we should keep doing this.

The final issue resonated after my LinkedIn post. I realized I wasn't the only one having conversations like: "If we have a sales representative who can get in touch with 300 ICP accounts per month, what marketing channel would be as effective or ideally more effective in reaching our ICP? Why invest in another marketing initiative when we can invest in something much more predictable on the sales side?" N.Rich helps me with this too. We have the Sales Velocity Dashboard, which gives the breakdown of deal size, win rate, and average days to close for accounts with no ABM influence versus accounts influenced before, after, or before and after opportunities.

You can see that if an account wasn't part of our ABM campaigns—maybe they weren't in our official ICP list—we can still sign them, but the average deal size is much lower, the win rate is much lower, and the sales cycle is pretty much the same. Let me show you how this looks in the N.Rich platform.

Yes, this is how it looks in the N.Rich platform. We can go to Sales Velocity and this is it.

You can see the much lower deal size, win rate, and sales cycle. There's also an overview. If you multiply deal size by win rate and divide by average sales cycle, you get how much revenue the segment will produce for a given time range. You can see that whenever we have ABM influence—not necessarily just N.Rich campaigns, but when marketing and sales work together and accounts are part of ABM campaigns—the sales velocity is at least 4 times higher than when there was no registered ABM influence.

Another dashboard we're working on is the GTM Leader Dashboard, which we're still rolling out to clients. You can compare here. With cold outbound, if you have many accounts in the database and got in touch with 2,000 accounts during a year, your average conversion to opportunity is 5.3%. Out of those 136 accounts, your average win rate is 3% and you win 4 deals for that revenue. Meanwhile, if there's marketing influence—they interacted with your content, visited the website, engaged with ads—from the sales touched accounts, you have a much better conversion rate and significantly better win rate. Basically, from 3 deals here, you get more revenue than with cold outbound. The deal size and revenue could be because there are multiple deals per account. A customer might go through several deals, and that's the total revenue we ultimately got.

When the CFO or CRO asks why you should invest in an account-based marketing program rather than hire another sales rep, this is what you answer. We forecast that hiring one more rep for $150K will increase revenue this much. But based on our existing data and sales velocity analysis, if we allocate the same amount to ABM, this is how we'll increase conversion, increase average deal size, shorten the sales cycle, and this is how much more revenue we'll generate. You can compare the numbers yourself.

That's it. I'm ready to answer questions, or if there are no questions, we can wait. I see we don't have questions in the chat right now, which is totally fine. Sometimes questions come after you see the slides and recording. Please feel free to reach out on LinkedIn if anything comes up—I'm happy to answer. I'll share the recording and slides in the follow-up email. Thank you so much for staying here, and have a nice day everyone.