Account-based marketing (ABM) is a B2B strategy, but at the core it’s all about people. And people want empathy, personalized engagement, and value from the companies they interact with.
Lyft, a Salesforce customer, knows a thing or two about connecting with businesses on a personal level. In this Q&A, Head of Business Growth Marketing Jenifer Ho shares how Salesforce Customer 360 primes the transportation network company’s B2B business to reach more customers and scale its growth.
How does Salesforce help you maintain a complete view of your customers?
Salesforce’s
CRM is the single source of truth for our accounts. We use it to better understand who we’re selling to. We rely on the data ingested through this platform to:
- Bridge knowledge gaps. For example, we learned that businesses using Salesforce for CRM are likely using marketing automation, too.
- Identify accounts that are ready to engage.
- Personalize content in our marketing and advertising platforms.
- Study sales trends so we can replicate our success.
All of these activities help us build stronger relationships with our accounts. We engage in sales conversations that feel more natural, and we start those conversations from a more advanced stage in the selling cycle because our timing is right. We’re talking to the right people, and we know our solutions are top of mind for them. It’s a little bit like mind reading!
What does your buying committee look like?
It’s complicated! Lyft Business has three main focus areas — employee solutions, healthcare, and automotive — and the buying committee varies a lot for each one.
In our employee solutions segment, we help organizations with their business travel and commuting needs, so we talk to a lot of corporate travel and benefits managers. Our automotive team works with anyone from service managers to dealership owners. For healthcare, we work with C-suite executives, healthcare directors, and other layers of management. In both our healthcare and automotive segments, we hear from agents who schedule rides on behalf of patients or people in their organizations. And in any of these areas, we might see representatives from finance and procurement.
These are just a few of the personas who help their companies decide to sign up for one of our programs. But they aren’t the only ones. In many cases, we’re also building relationships with buyers we’ve never worked with before. They don’t fit our ideal customer profile (ICP), and they may know us only in the context of their own use case.
How do you use Salesforce to engage these buyers?
Salesforce helps us understand our audiences and speak to everyone on the committee.
One of the main ways we deliver personalized content is through Salesforce’s B2B marketing automation platform,
Pardot. Pardot houses our landing pages, which typically include a form component, and syncs that information to our CRM to create sales leads. We use it for lead scoring, so we’re only sharing the right leads with sales. And we build lead-nurturing and lifecycle email communications to keep buyers engaged.
We also use the platform
Advertising Studio to send retargeting messages to different subsets of our audience. Because Ad Studio is connected to our CRM, we can easily input that data into third-party advertising platforms and marry it to our lead-nurturing efforts.
For example, when organizations become inactive, we might push that data from our CRM into Facebook to try to reconnect with them.
Ad Studio is one of my favorite Salesforce products. We recently signed up for a refresher because we know we're not using it to its full potential. But what we’ve discovered so far has been amazing.
“When organizations become inactive, we might push that data from our CRM into Facebook to try to reconnect with them.”
Which Salesforce products help your internal teams work better together?
The Salesforce CRM helps our marketing, sales, and service teams maintain shared reporting on our accounts and their customers — plus a shared understanding of those insights.
In our CRM, we track the individual bookings and rides associated with each account. For instance, if you take a ride on behalf of your company, we add a +1 for that company. So the data is always evolving. We’re often looking at trends.
We’re also staying informed on what the buyers in our accounts are doing. We see their activity on our website and how they’re engaging with our emails. What are they clicking on? What are they opening? Did they respond to a “cold” email? We also watch their interactions with us. When’s the last time they talked to a salesperson?
Many of our sales team members are actually in customer service and account manager roles to help existing customers stay engaged. They’re not traditional sales reps focused on getting new customers to sign a contract. New logo acquisition is definitely part of it, but the service component is a huge element of our success in retaining business.
No matter what your role is at Lyft, the Salesforce CRM provides you access to all of this information, and you can use it in a way that’s meaningful for you.
As ABM strategies evolve over the next few years, how do you see Salesforce playing a role in helping B2B businesses execute?
Regulations around data are evolving. More laws are being passed that empower people to have more control over their information. Some ABM strategies will have to evolve. There's a lot to be mindful of to avoid spamming people who haven’t opted in to hear from us. We’re very cautious of that.
Retargeting is another big topic for marketers. Cookies are going away in the next few years, and that’s typically how we retarget people: We “cookie” you, then follow you around online. Without cookies, how can we do this? That will need to be figured out.
Salesforce is the leader in helping marketing, sales, and service teams — and organizations in general — work better together. I believe you can be a thought leader in this space too. You can lead with a robust offering of solutions and create a roadmap that B2B organizations can follow.
- Read Jenifer Ho’s blog to learn how Lyft used ABM strategies to support essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
