This is the third post in a series on how to do ABM During Covid. Here, you can find part 1 and part 2.

In our last post, we covered how Outreach re-invented its event strategy by creating a new format that brought celebrities, prospects and reps together in a virtual event that was equal parts entertainment and business.

Now we’ll introduce a new strategy from our guide ‘10 strategies to save your ABM program during Covid’. This time, we’re sharing the strategic brilliance of Gremlin, a company that makes chaos engineering tools that help companies find weaknesses in their systems before they become a problem. Because moments of website downtime can make a difference of millions of dollars for their customers, Gremlin helps companies surface problems in their underlying infrastructure to prevent downtime from happening, saving them big bucks. But companies can’t always see the value of this process clearly at first.

Peter Zawistowicz, Director of Growth Marketing at Gremlin says it’s all about making that impact palpable. “Whenever we can, we try to quantify the cost of downtime for people. You’d be surprised to hear that a lot of companies don't actually think about that in terms of where they invest engineering time. So we focused our website content and some of our company's marketing on trying to quantify the value of reliability in dollars and cents, for each industry.”

Gremlin has built a successful self-service engine by creating longtail content on Chaos Engineering. Developers, looking to a search engine for tutorials, discover Gremlin’s content and many choose to sign up for Gremlin, a paid product with a great UI, API and a higher level of security than the open source options.

But for enterprise customers who have specific use cases with higher stakes, the process looks a lot different. It’s much more of a direct sales motion, which takes a degree of astuteness about the customer, combined with personalization and experimentation. “Is an industry-focused approach effective or is a persona based approach effective, or geography, or use case––what are the different slices that we can take of our addressable market that are the most effective?” Peter asks rhetorically as he sets up his solution.

The answer Gremlin landed on was to address prospects by vertical.

For each target account, Gremlin calculates the cost of website downtime based on the company’s number of website visitors (from Alexa) and the vertical they’re in (e.g. e-commerce). They use Mutiny to display this custom ROI on their landing pages, which also adapt the imagery based on vertical and the color combination based on the account’s brand colors.

By focusing on verticals and personalizing for their specific challenges, Gremlin is able to take a much more nuanced approach where their marketing becomes more fluent in the language and (and potential blindspots) of their targets—and thus more effective.

Gremlin has gotten great at building a scalable program around leading with value and quantifying that value for lots of different use cases. And that’s key when customers may be facing problems that they might not fully understand yet themselves.

Peter summarizes it this way: “Gone are the days where you can just have a really snappy ad and that's enough. You have to provide value before anybody even signs up for your product, before they've signed a contract with you. They already have to think of you as a resource and that’s what makes them want to lean in.”

If you can't get enough of posts like this, and don't want to wait until we publish the next one, you can download  our guide '10 Strategies to save your ABM program during Covid' here.