There's this funny thing that ends up happening often at new companies: they don't have any PMs and everyone goes, “Ah, we don't need PMs because the product is successful.” In 99% of those situations, it's because either the engineers or the designers are the customer. All that actually does is show you the power of what you can do when design and engineering understand the customer as deeply as we expect PMs to.

At the time of this project, we had a lot of institutional knowledge around serving marketers who were responsible for their org’s website—digital marketers, growth marketers, etc.—but account-based marketing was a new space for us. That meant it was really important to give our product, design, and engineering teams enough context to really get into the headspace of how people in that area are working on a daily basis.

So “list” is actually a misleading name for this work, because it really fell under the umbrella of product expansion. At Mutiny, we organize and sort of prioritize things by the persona that we serve. There's a team within marketing departments called account-based marketing, or ABM. These are the folks that pair up with sales, and they typically go outbound where there's a list of target companies. When we started this project, serving that persona had recently become a business priority for us. In this video, I walk through the factors that led us to deciding to serve that persona in the way that we did.

No matter how well you execute on a project, if the underlying strategy and assumptions are off, you’re always going to run into problems. Questioning that foundation can be excruciatingly painful, especially if there are people in leadership or on the exec team who are really enthusiastic about moving a project forward. We ran into a version of that dynamic here, and while we still produced a bunch of great work that’s provided us with a basis for what we’re doing now, I would have taken a different approach to this the first time around if I’d pushed harder on certain assumptions about where we were at with our core product.

There are so many ways to learn about your potential users. Five that I find the most valuable are user journey maps, customer recordings, competitor breakdowns, ride-alongs, and role-playing.

Most people probably have a fair idea about the standard divergence and convergence exercises. Here, I walk through how we adapted those for this specific project. One point I always stress is that you should never do this work on the same day: you need at least 24 hours of space to get some distance and perspective on the ideas you’ve arrived at.

Kevin Yien

As Mutiny was expanding to serve users doing account-based marketing, our team needed to understand an entirely new use case. I built this PRD to give them the context they needed while keeping the scope tight enough to deliver efficiently.

The responsibility of Marketing changes depending on a company’s go-to-market strategy.

Marketing-led growth places an emphasis on driving traffic to owned properties (e.g. website). This can be done through a variety of channels such as advertising, organic (e.g. SEO), social, or content (e.g. blog articles, newsletters). Traffic is typically anonymous, but can be enriched via data providers (e.g. Clearbit). Mutiny’s Inbound features are a great fit here — personalizing pages by segment to increase conversion.

Sales-led growth places an emphasis on deal efficiency and deal velocity. 

This is where Account-Based Marketing (ABM) or Account-Based Sales (ABS) is most powerful. 

 (i.e. companies) the business has deemed important / high value. ABM is most successful when it is a joint effort across Marketing and Sales (and potentially Product, Partnerships, or Customer Success, depending on the company). It is important to note that ABM is a cross-functional go-to-market motion because many companies have failed when there is not buy-in across departments (e.g. Marketing creates personalized landing pages for target accounts, but Sales does not use them).

Note: There is also product-led growth (PLG) which is increasingly common and powerful that we are intentionally not covering here.

ABM can take the form of 1:1 or 1:many. The larger the deal size, and the more complex the buying process, the smaller the ratio. Below is a simplified flow for an ABM program:

: Find the right accounts with the right attributes. This is the most important and time consuming step in the process. If you target the wrong accounts (or contacts within those accounts), the rest of the process will be futile. This type of work can be done by SDRs in some companies, but is transitioned to ABM when employed. The rest of the process is the same.

: Once an ABM manager has a cleaned list of target accounts (that Sales is aligned with), they create a program to engage with them. This can include targeted ads, emails, landing pages, events, and more.

: Since ABM is a joint effort across Marketing and Sales, they are jointly responsible for revenue (the ultimate metric). The goal for Marketing shifts from the number of leads generated (MQLs) to the engagement and velocity of target accounts. [Competitor] likes to tout the metric of Target Account Pipeline (TAP) in their own materials, which is the dollar amount of active sales deals from the target list. For example, if Marketing started with a target list of 100 accounts that represented $100M of potential revenue and drove 30 of those accounts to the point that they were being actively worked by an account executive, then the TAP would be $30M. This is not the only (or best) way to measure the success of ABM, but it offers one relevant perspective. The key is that ABM managers need to be able to measure how many target accounts have engaged with their content, how engaged they are (this could be a number of events or a composite), how far they are in the funnel, and how many eventually turn into real dollars.

ABM brings Marketing and Sales closer together. The potential opportunity of ABM is to bring Marketing 

The largest pain point exists at the Identify step. We will likely not address this area first because it does not benefit from our core strength of personalization.

Mutiny has an Outbound flow in the product today that helps solve part of the Engage step in the broader ABM workflow.

 Here is an example of how someone running ABM today would leverage Mutiny.

This will happen outside of Mutiny through desk research.

This can exist in the CRM, a sourcing tool (e.g. Apollo), or be manually maintained in a spreadsheet.

Instead of defining segments based on attributes, you would explicitly state the accounts, contacts, and associated attributes you need for personalization in Mutiny.

3.) Select whether you are targeting companies or contacts (individuals)

This likely doesn’t deserve its own callout but is how Mutiny works today

The distinction is important to inform whether you are personalizing at the company or individual level though

We currently offer a nice cleaning tool (e.g. remove LLC from company names)

But one could spend more time making it even more personalized given importance and nuance of accounts.

Now the ABM manager needs to figure out how to get target contacts to go to this page

This could be via email, ads, or other communication channels

There is a CSV export for preview links and screenshots, but the copy paste motion is rough to say the least

[Redacted: further detail on current product gaps for the ABM use case]

Account-based marketing is most effective in a B2B context where there is a Sales team to partner with the Marketing efforts. Our initial target will be companies who already have an established ABM program (i.e. education on the value of ABM is not required). The longer term potential will be to get more teams started with ABM who don’t have the resources to bootstrap.

We will start by iterating with a handful of existing customers for a faster feedback loop:

Hold up! Let’s reconvene for a quick live discussion before you move on to the next section.

 Drop your name here so others know you’re done reading —> xxxxx

🚫 Now that we have a lay of the land, let’s go through a convergence exercise. There are several potential starting points for us. We will discuss the tradeoffs associated with each and decide which is most worthwhile. The outcome will be a specific job to start with and direction to build a roadmap around. More granular product definition will come after.

Milestone 1: Create native version of lists in Mutiny

Mutiny is expanding and formalizing the types of objects it handles. Today we have 

, which are a dynamic set of people defined by a set of attributes (e.g. Industry AND Location). Segments are a dynamic list that updates based on the defined attributes.

PRD for Lists Feature at Mutiny

Problem Alignment

Context

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