I am free.

In addition to needing to “work smarter” than the competition to gain its fair share of the market, Ping Identity also faced a funding deficit and needed to generate quick impact. A mandate to grow was issued by Ping’s executive team, placing extra pressure on the marketing and sales teams to embrace bolder thinking in both their design and approach. Since Ping had never undertaken an account-based marketing (ABM) approach before, we decided to capitalize on its desire to embrace new strategies and develop an innovative ABM approach to help the company reach new account segments and target personas previously out of reach.

To support the client’s first ABM campaign, we leveraged best practice frameworks and tactics to create engagement with target accounts through the development and deployment of a high-value offer (HVO). This meant creating a strategy to:

1. Establish and maintain alignment and orchestration across marketing, sales, product, and agency partners with collaboration, diverse points of view, education, transparent communication, and an eye for change management.
2. Be creative, be bold, tell a human story that stands out and engages.
3. Personalize all messaging, creative, and offers to the appropriate target segment, account, and persona.
4. Move fast, be agile, optimize relentlessly.
5. Leverage the existing technology and data stack for ABM, and only add functionality as needed.
6. Utilize an integrated approach.
7. Build a high-trust partnership.

Together, we adopted a mindset that felt more B2C since we know that B2B buyers are consumers, too. Lastly, we created a detailed revenue growth plan and strategy in order to foster alignment and investment from key revenue stakeholders across the enterprise.

Our strategy was based on the belief that the words “I AM” are two of the most powerful words in the English language because whatever you say after “I AM” will shape the future of your trajectory. We capitalized on the client’s product acronym to design, build, and establish 1:One account-based and 1:Few account-based pilot programs in the United States and EU, targeting 100 accounts in total. We were in market less than 16 weeks, and within the first 60 days started driving targeted engagement and a sales pipeline.

While we certainly believed that the client’s target audience would respond favorably to our B2B2C approach, the immediate success of the campaign blew even us away.