Keyplay’s Post

Shoutout to Adam Schoenfeld for inceptioning ICP marketing into my head

Everyone is an SDR now😉

Great visual Kyle! I'm assuming these plays are predominantly geared towards an ABM enterprise motion, or are they applicable to other GTM motions / target customers segments as well?

Kyle Poyar This is great. Question. PQL's is that "persona' or what's the P?

These plays work because they are built on a foundation of ICP Marketing. It's not just an ABM or outbound list. It's about strategic focus across every motion. ICP Marketing is taking hold because it's not another BLG (buzzword-led-growth) -- it's a return to fundamentals. We just got away from it when money was free. Now the best CMOs and CROs are hardcore anti spray and pray. Call it whatever you want, but the principles are timeless. Focus is the way to GTM excellence. At Keyplay we're 100% for this paradigm. We can't get your team alignmed & committed, but we can help you implement a strong ICP Model that provides dynamics scores, accounts tiers, and the context needed to enable modern ICP Marketing. While "growth at all costs" may have brought short-term wins, I'm excited that buyer rigor has returned and that we're getting back to the fundamentals.

Unless I’m missing something, which is entirely possible, this isn’t very different from A.I.D.A., which I believe debuted in 1898, but which more importantly has been shown not to be how brands convert sales. The main drawback of the model here seems immediately to be the assumption that potential buyers only have one brand (yours) in mind when they arrive at a state of need. Other unlikely steps include “self-educating on your value proposition” *without* apparently having been convinced to do so at any other point in the model! It seems self-evident that this is unlikely to occur. Uncomfortable as it is, because the vast majority of a brand’s potential buyers are not in market this cycle (LI’s 95:5, for example), marketing investment must inevitably be ‘spray and pray’, or perhaps more accurately and less disparagingly, ‘spray and rely’ - on the eventuality that they will come into market at some point, having heard of your brand and feeling good enough about it. People simply don’t walk obediently down a ‘pipeline’ (or a funnel or any other shaped conduit), no matter how reassuring it may be to imagine that they do.

I find that awareness usually needs to be split into two. 1. "Knows who you are" and 2. "Knows what you do" A lot of the gripe around the "wasted expense" of brand exposure programs is that they sometimes can get to #1, without getting to #2. And if you can get to #2 with brand exposure/awareness programs, that's when you see your CAC drop, because you're also getting inbound leads when folks have internal triggers (not publicly visible signs) vs. having the marketing team have to identify + scan for external signals of readiness to then market to.

Powerful was to visualise. Funnels are important but so ill-equipped to really define where people are and how people experience your brand / marketing / content and come to buy.

How do you have a more effective synergistic ecosystem when everyone internally wants to get paid (both payout and budget allocation). We silo so much because sales needs credit, srds need credit, marketing field needs credit, dgen needs credit, cannibalize partner credit - without overlap of attribution/single payer model, there's no flow and we get stuck in the waterfall.

This really shows that identifying the right people is as important as applying the right tactics at the right time. Call it easy 😱