Next week’s B2B Sales and Marketing Exchange conference in Boston is coming up fast! To give you another sneak peek at the talented brand marketers sharing their insights and best practices, I’ve interviewed Omar Al-Sinjari, Senior Manager, Digital Marketing at RelayHealth – McKesson.
Omar is responsible for all things digital and a full stack operator including ABM, web, analytics, attribution, lead generation and marketing operations.
RelayHealth is a business unit of McKesson which is a $214 billion Fortune 10 company. Large enterprise level organizations bring with them a different set of marketing challenges and opportunities and with all of the evolution in B2B marketing and sales that has emerged, Omar is a great person to give us perspective.
At B2BSMX Omar will be on a panel (How To Do ABM At The Enterprise Level And Scale) Tuesday August 13th at 2pm. If you’re thinking of attending B2BSMX, there’s a 25% off discount code at the end of the interview.
Lee Odden: You’ve had a long history of working in the healthcare industry. Please share a bit about your background and current role as Senior Manager, Digital Marketing at RelayHealth – McKesson.
Omar Al-Sinjari: Throughout my whole career I have either Marketed to or worked in the healthcare industry. I have been involved in Digital Marketing for the last 11 years, first at a very small company, sending out emails and redesigning/managing a website.
As my career progressed, I slowly became the SME regarding digital at each one of my jobs, which evolved into my passion for all things digital marketing.
Currently at RelayHealth – McKesson, I am responsible for all things digital. I currently own the digital strategy and execution including: Marketing Operations, Analytics, Attribution, ABM, Intent, SEO and Web Presence.
Lee Odden: You’ve accomplished a lot in your time with McKesson. What is the secret to success working in marketing at such a large organization?
When embarking on a digital transformation or any marketing change, you have to have thick skin and be willing to collaborate. @omaralsinjari
Omar Al-Sinjari: Collaboration, thick skin, openness to change and patience.
When embarking on a digital transformation or any marketing change, you have to have thick skin and be willing to collaborate. In my role at Corporate McKesson, I created a cross business unit group called Marketing Operations Leadership Council (MOLC) which brought together Marketing Ops leaders and practitioners across McKesson. This was an opportunity to collaborate, share best practices and make decisions across a huge Corporation.
Change doesn’t happen overnight and educating the business on why you are trying to change is imperative along with taken a data driven approach and assessing what the business needs are.
Lee Odden: Today’s B2B marketing is a cornucopia of tactics from ABM to content marketing to influencer marketing, what advice can you share about how can B2B marketers find focus and make the right decisions on their tactical mix?
Omar Al-Sinjari: Partner with sales and customer success (account management) to better understand the customer.
From an ABM perspective you need to find out who to target and why. Ask the following questions:
- Which accounts are best for expansion?
- Which accounts have been difficult to target?
- Who do you target?
- What is their title?
- Who are the people involved in the buying process?
Lee Odden: At B2BSMX you will be participating on a panel about ABM at the enterprise level. What are some of the top challenges with ABM at a large company?
Omar Al-Sinjari: In my role with RelayHealth, which is a business unit within McKesson, my ABM efforts are mainly focused at my business unit (BU) level. But I have shared some of my best ABM success with the other BUs and created a strategy and a playbook that can be used across the organization.
The great thing about ABM is, it’s account based, so you need to target multiple people within an organization, not just one single person or one single lead. @omaralsinjari
Some of the biggest challenges with ABM are determining who the target market is: Who within the organization you want to target. Also understanding why. One of the hardest things with ABM is determining who you can target and why you want to target those folks because different people are involved in different stages of the buying cycle. The great thing about ABM is, it’s account based, so you need to target multiple people within an organization, not just one single person or one single lead. Understanding that distinction allows you to be successful.
Lee Odden: ABM has gained quite a bit of momentum in the B2B marketing world over the last few years. Do you believe it’s helped with bring sales and marketing together?
Omar Al-Sinjari: I think everyone has been account-based at some point in terms of knowing who you are going to target and why. So ABM and ABM platforms have put some technology behind those efforts and help facilitate the conversation between sales marketing.
ABM allows you to educate sales teams and the customer success teams because it’s not just a marketing and sales conversation. @omaralsinjari
I think the concept of ABM enables marketers to talk to sales folks about who we need to target and why, instead of just saying, “Who are your top accounts?”.
The term ABM allows you to educate sales teams and the customer success teams because it’s not just a marketing and sales conversation. In my opinion, it needs to be a sales, account management, customer success and marketing conversation. Then start trickling that throughout the rest of the organization as well.
An ABM platform enables those conversations and allows you to provide data and understanding, like what are the interactions and how many interactions are you having. ABM platforms then enable you to build a marketing attribution model based on those interactions.
Lee Odden: You’re talking about bringing data together, ABM and ABM technology enabling conversations that happen between sales, account management, customer success and marketing and so forth. That’s a much bigger and coordinated effort than you often find in campaign based marketing and traditional demand gen type programs, isn’t it?
Omar Al-Sinjari: Oh yeah, for sure. It’s not just batch and blast. I think previously a lot of marketers would try to figure out who their target accounts were, then go buy a list and just start sending them a bunch of emails.
What ABM and using an ABM platform allows you to do is to stay top of mind in their short term memory. @omaralsinjari
Marketing has evolved and I don’t think people want to be marketed to that way anymore. I’m not even sure if people want to be shown display ads or targeted that way.
What ABM and using an ABM platform allows you to do is to stay top of mind in their short term memory. A buyer might have seen a solution two years ago, a solution they weren’t quite ready to buy right away. Then a few years down the line, they remember that ad or that brand or that message and how it will allow you to solve one of your B2B problems.
Lee Odden: With your experience with ABM, I’m wondering what best practices you can share for other enterprise level B2B marketers?
Omar Al-Sinjari: Partnering and evangelizing ABM with sales and customer success as well as taking a data-driven approach to how you market from an ABM perspective.
If you do have some sort of insight tool on your website that tells you a company’s IP address, that could be a source of data saying that a company is interested or they’re poking around our website. Or, if you’re seeing multiple people from one company come into your website, that’s giving you an indicator that people are interested. Then you add those folks to your ABM targets.
Partnering with the rest of the organization and educating the organization and getting people on board is especially important.
ABM is not just about net new customers, it’s also how you churn your base and expand accounts, especially as your company has new acquisitions, new solutions or new products. @omaralsinjari
How you expand within those accounts is important and ABM is a great tool to stay top of mind.
When someone buys your solution, you could end up interacting with 10 or 15 different people, whether they are from procurement, security and risk, to the actual person that’s going to be implementing. Understanding that there’s not just one person and that you need to target an account as a whole is essential.
Best practice ABM is about finding all of the people that are involved in the process, plus that one person evangelizing your solution that you’re trying to sell. @omaralsinjari
There are some situations where there are multiple stakeholders and the person that’s signing the agreement might not even be involved in the buying process until the end. So, best practice ABM is about finding all of the people that are involved in the process, plus that one person evangelizing your solution that you’re trying to sell. That evangelist will be one of your key targets, but understanding the customer as a whole picture is important.
Lee Odden: Do you have an ABM success story that you could share either one of your own or, or even something you’ve observed out in the industry?
Omar Al-Sinjari: We’ve experienced a significant, 40% growth within one of our segments year over year. That’s by targeting folks in one specific vertical and focusing on some key customers.
You can look at a company like Terminus and see how much growth they’ve had implementing ABM. ABM is B2B marketing now. It’s understanding and showing success and using data to drive decision making. Ultimately, what it all comes down to is, how are you attributing interactions to the bottom line?
Lee Odden: What are some of the top B2B marketing trends that you think are worth paying attention to in the coming year?
Omar Al-Sinjari: ABM, marketing attribution, and CDP or customer data platforms.
I don’t know how many companies are listed on the Martech list now, but I think at some point there’s going to be some sort of consolidation there.
If I had a crystal ball, I’d love to see what will be coming up from a technology standpoint and how people consume information from a B2B perspective. For example, understanding different stages according to where the buyer is in their journey and being able to use some sort of AI technology to identify and show trends across the buying cycle. Also, understanding the buying cycle and then using some sort of predictive analytics or AI to get deeper into data from an overall customer lifecycle perspective.
Lee Odden: What sources of information do you rely on most to stay on top of B2B marketing?
Omar Al-Sinjari: I use a few different sources including Chief Martech by Scott Brinker and the Marketo blog. There are several newsletters that I subscribe to and I use Google Alerts to track specific topics. I also stay up to date by attending conferences and learning from other people. I really enjoy reading case studies and about new technologies out there.
I also use social media, including Linkedin and Twitter to stay abreast of what’s going on. It’s changing all the time and everyone has opinions, right?
Lee Odden: What are you most excited about upcoming B2B SMX conference in Boston?
Omar Al-Sinjari: I’m excited for the Flip My Funnel track. I’m also excited for the REVTalks and Demand Gen Summit. I’m pretty much excited for all of it.
At B2BSMX I’m looking forward to learning from others because in this industry, you’re constantly learning and you need to be able to adapt and change. @omaralsinjari
Really, I’m looking forward to learning from others because in this industry, you’re constantly learning and you need to be able to adapt and change. And I think the overall message for ABM is change. It’s changing the way you go to market, how you interact with different people in your organization and changing the narrative as it relates to marketing. Specifically, changing marketing from being a cost center to a profit center.
Lee Odden: Thank you Omar!
Be sure to follow Omar Al-Sinjari on Twitter: omaralsinjari
For information about the B2BSMX conference including agenda, speakers, workshops, mentor opportunities and more:
B2B Sales and Marketing Exchange: Boston
August 12-13, 2019
Encore Boston Harbor
GET 25% OFF using Discount Code: 25TRB
Registration: https://
