If sales is ignoring your account lists and your campaign ROI is hard to defend, the problem is not your strategy. It is the data underneath it. We will show you exactly how buyer intent signals transform ABM from a targeting exercise into a revenue engine, covering everything from account selection to activation timing to messaging that meets buyers where they are. 

Walk away with:

• A framework for replacing static firmographic lists with intent-backed account selection 
• Clear triggers for knowing when to activate campaigns, escalate to sales, or pull back spend
• Messaging strategies built around the specific topics your target accounts are consuming right now 
• A data foundation that makes ABM pipeline attribution defensible in any budget review 
• A concrete approach to rebuilding sales confidence in marketing-sourced account lists

This webinar airs at 12 PM and will be available on-demand for six months after airing.

The post AI-Powered ABM That Targets Accounts Ready to Buy appeared first on ���������.

Are you an ? This training is worth 2.5 Continuing Education Units (CEUs) to maintain your PCM®️ certification.

Meet Your Instructor

Kimberlee West

Director of Product Marketing at Uniphore

Kimberlee is the Director of Product Marketing at Uniphore. Kimberlee leads a team helping to bridge the gap between humans and machines using voice, AI and automation to ensure that every voice, on every call, is truly heard. With over 10 years of experience in B2B and B2C marketing, Kimberlee is responsible for building the brand voice and enabling sales at Uniphore.

Kimberlee is skilled in building and scaling product marketing teams as being the lead for GTM. She is well versed in ABM, previously working at 6sense and being a regular speaker for the ��������� for all things GTM – sales enablement, messaging and positioning.

��������� Members Get the Best Pricing

Not only do members get discounts on training like this, but they also receive exclusive content, downloadable tools, unlimited access to ��������� Journals, membership in networking communities and more.

Join & SAVE

The post Incorporating ABM in your Go-To-Market Campaigns appeared first on ���������.

Join us on March 4 at 12 pm CT /1 pm ET for an actionable session on how to change the way you fuse AI into your ABM strategy.. We’ll show you how to identify high-value accounts showing buying signals, create hyper-targeted campaigns that resonate, and prove the ROI of your ABM investments to sales and leadership.

You’ll walk away with: 

• A framework for integrating intent signals into your ABM strategy
• Proven tactics to use AI for smarter campaign personalization and targeting 
• Real-world examples of intent-driven ABM campaigns that drove measurable revenue
• Strategies to improve conversion rates and shorten sales cycles 
• Methods to demonstrate clear ABM performance  and ROI to leadership

The post Intent to Impact: Practical Ways to Apply AI in Modern ABM appeared first on ���������.

Learn together! Purchase 3 or more training seats for your team or network and save up to $19 per ticket! Users can be assigned and updated after the purchase.

Are you an ��������� Professional Certified Marketer®️? This training is worth 2 Continuing Education Units (CEUs) to maintain your PCM®️ certification.

��������� Members Get the Best Pricing

Not only do members get discounts on training like this, but they also receive exclusive content, downloadable tools, unlimited access to ��������� Journals, membership in networking communities and more.

Join & SAVE

Training Backed By Research

��������� training is unique because of its data-backed approach. The ��������� Competency Model Framework identifies the most impactful skills marketers need to advance their careers. It’s based on our research with more than 1,000 marketing professionals and academic leaders.

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The post A Modern B2B Marketing Approach appeared first on ���������.

Strong marketing programs and the collateral that fuel them are essential to support a successful sales team. Managing, customizing, and distributing these marketing materials takes time and energy. Moreover, there is an expense associated with the related processes. Companies looking to lower related costs and drive revenue can look to marketing asset management tools.

In the world of marketing asset management tools, an asset is any digital document that is used for marketing purposes. Asset management is the process of effectively controlling those assets, creating a single source of truth relative to marketing, and enabling instant access to those assets which may include images, graphics, layouts, PDF files, and video clips. Companies that understand the value of asset management use digital asset management solutions to centralize access for easy editing and sharing with salespeople or customers.

Asset management brings together people, processes, and files to make marketing and sales workflows—including collaboration, content review and approval, brand management, and version control—more streamlined and efficient. Here are a few ways that enterprise-level asset management tools lower costs and drive revenue.

The post How Marketing Asset Management Tools Lower Costs and Drive Revenue appeared first on ���������.

Node relies on many proprietary algorithms to “accelerate serendipity.” Put less whimsically, it aspires to draw connections between users and companies that go unnoticed by traditional lead generation. If successful, Node could revitalize B-to-B marketing and prove to be a defining link on the path to advanced artificial intelligence. Marketing News spoke with Fatemi, who pitched Node with empathic declarations it would change the industry. 

Q: Using back-of-the-envelope terms, can you describe what exactly Node does?

A: Node helps sales and marketing organizations understand the world of people and companies they should sell or market to for the next five years, known as their total addressable market. They’re guessing at this [right now] because they’re purchasing incomplete lists of information from many different data vendors that all have limited coverage and quality. They might use a predictive tool to rank that list or rank those leads to prioritize them better and hope the right buyers come in and purchase their product. This results in what we commonly refer to as a funnel, where 80% of those prospects are the wrong people at the wrong companies at the wrong time being approached with the wrong message. 

We aim to flip that. The Node solution starts with identifying a company’s total addressable market. Then, Node will prioritize the execution on those markets that it has identified will drive more revenue per unit of time. In addition, Node provides all of the people and company intelligence required to tactically execute on the strategies it has prescribed. Node will proactively recommend the right prospects at the right time and even suggest the right message to reach out. It’s a truly end-to-end platform, from strategic to tactical, in terms of execution. We call it people-based intelligence. 

Q: Can you give me a sense of how this will change day-to-day operations for marketers?

A: We reduced the need for about 10 different point solutions on the market. We reduced the need for individual point solutions of data vendors, as well as predictive solutions. Customers of Node are able to recoup their cost of Node within the first eight weeks of deployment. 

To give you a sense of the breadth of this, to date we’ve generated recommendations that resulted in $100 million in closed business, more than $330 million in increased [sales] pipeline [or, the potential money in play as prospects move toward closing a deal], and our recommendations have driven 4.7 times higher deal sizes than the company average. We use Node internally, so all the customers we have are recommended by Node. 

Q: Don’t sales and marketing teams already have a pretty good idea of who they should be going after?

A: If that were the case, then we wouldn’t have an 80% failure rate, or a 1% conversion rate for marketing-qualified leads to deals closed, right? Sales and marketing teams are guessing. They’re doing the best that they can by utilizing these broken point solutions and vendors, as well as their own intuition, to identify what their ideal customer profile is. They’re missing 70% to 90% of the optimal customers that they should go after.

Q: Where did you first come up with the idea for Node?  

A: I’m a Silicon Valley native. I started working at Google when I was 19. I was one of the youngest employees at the company. I was there for six years. I spent six years in the startup world, as well. I’ve essentially spent more than a decade focused on go-to-market strategies, global expansion, as well as building strategic partnerships at Google, YouTube and in the startup world. The story behind Node really has to do with the last six years that I was in the startup world, where I was making a lot of introductions between people and companies. 

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I decided to do an analysis of all of the introductions that I’d made and uncovered that a lot of outcomes of those introductions had resulted in life-changing opportunities for both businesses and individuals. For example, I found out that my recommendations had led to millions of dollars in investment, a number of acquisitions, a number of sales and marketing partnerships, hires and so on. I was essentially acting as a Node within my network and facilitating discovery of those right opportunities at the right time. I started digging into my own matching algorithm.

I realized what could be done if I were to actually use technology to accelerate the serendipity that I was driving. That’s where I realized that a lot of the approaches that Google used to help us find the right information through search can be applied to solve this greater discovery problem. Sales and marketing is the first application of this. 

With the proliferation of information—90% of the information on the web was created in the last two years—there is now more information than we could possibly absorb in a lifetime. 

There’s all this data out there that’s relevant to us that we don’t know we should be searching for. We see the next 10 years being all about proactive and personalized discovery, and we aim to solve this bigger discovery problem by powering personalized recommendation. 

Q: When you say we don’t know what we should be searching for, could you elaborate on what you mean by that?

A: When we search, we already know what we’re looking for. It’s almost too late [for discovery] when we get to a search box. We essentially need to build machines that make sense of all of the people, companies and products on the web; understand what you care about; then facilitate discovery of those right opportunities, at the right time, in whatever application you’re in. 

We will know that we’ve succeeded when you can log in to any application and it will come with an understanding of you. That’s also the promise of AI. Powered by Node, you will receive recommendations for the people that you should know and why, the companies that you should know and why, the job opportunities to pursue, and even the articles you should read. Let’s say, in the future, you want to advise companies. You can actually enter in the type of opportunity you’re looking for, maybe in a particular location, and Node will proactively recommend who those people and companies are, why they are being recommended and how you can most effectively take advantage of that opportunity. 

To translate that, we will make a recommendation for a person—Penny Wilson, let’s say. We will state why we made that recommendation. So, we’ll say Penny was your former buyer. She used to work at your existing customer. She just moved to a new company that Node has identified has a higher deal-size potential, and exactly what those signals are. Not only that, here’s what you should say when you pick up the phone and call her. You should let her know that one of her direct competitors is a customer of yours. That you went to the same university and you worked at the same previous company as her. Oh, and by the way, she’s actually using a product you have an integration with. 

Q: How are you finding these links between your client and the leads you recommend? 

A: The infrastructure behind our system, the technology itself, you can think of as a search engine without a search box. We generate what that query should be, and then we translate that in a way that’s personalized to the individual. There’re three steps to our product value chain. The first step is, obviously, data acquisition, building these deep profiles on people and companies with high accuracy. We use natural links processing, which are a number of AI techniques to acquire that data using the web as our database. To date, we have more than half a billion profiles of both people and companies. While that is a challenging thing to do, that is not our core competency. Our core IP comes in the next two phases. The second step is connecting all of the relationships between those data points—essentially, building the Node graph—as well as prescribing, or making a recommendation. You can think of it as building a model for every person, then explaining why we made that recommendation and personalizing it to the end user. 

Q: What you describe seems like it would be very helpful for marketers in a small world. Would this work if somebody wanted to expand into a new market, and those personal connections aren’t there? 

A: That is what Mark Cuban loves to call “prescriptive” about what we do, where you could have zero presence, zero customers in an industry sector or a location. But because we know all the companies within those industry sectors or locations, and we identify that they exhibit attributes that will drive more revenue per unit of time, Node can recommend the next markets and opportunities for your business, and can also relate it in other ways. 

For example, knowing the industry that your company is in, understanding the competitors that you have, the customers that you may have and then looking at the customers of your competitors or other proxies, based on social proximity through our graph, we can make recommendations. 

Q: How are the customized sales scripts generated? 

A: It’s largely based on deep profiles that we have in our data layer and the modeling that we do. We have marketing teams that use our insights to do personal advertising as well. We’re leveraging social proximity algorithms, as well as our understanding of commonalities between people, companies and the relationships between them, to be able to then generate these scripts in real time. 

Q: How would you characterize your endeavors while operating Node in stealth mode?

A: We’ve been under the radar for the last two and a half years. Pretty tight-lipped about what we’re doing. We’re really excited to be publicly emerging and entering the market with real value that we’ve driven for our customers. Now is the time we’re ready to emerge and support customers worldwide and help them leverage the power of Node.

Q: You’ve secured $16.3 million in financing. How happy are you with that figure? 

A: With these funds, we’re essentially going to be doubling the size of the company. We’re at 22 employees today. We will also be leveraging these funds to invest in product development, as well as sales and marketing, to climax the amount of customers we have in the next 18 months or so. 

Q: How did you convince Mark Cuban to come on board? Did you know him prior to starting Node? 

A: We were introduced about six years ago through mutual friends. I believe he was most recently quoted saying, “The first trillionaire will be an AI entrepreneur.” He is a huge believer in the power of the technology, as well as our initial use case, and he has been a great supporter, almost selling Node for us, if you will. 

Q: Is Node completely different from anything that’s currently available on the market? Do you feel that you’re operating without any competitors? 

A: I would say we reduce the need for a number of point solutions that are utilized in the market, from individual point solutions and data vendors, or predictive solutions as well. That’s the closest proximity we have to light overlap. Data is a really important part of what we do. Obviously, we make really intelligent recommendations. But for the most part, the way in which we’re solving this problem is fundamentally different. We’re not trying to rank a bunch of stuff in your Salesforce; we ’re trying to identify the right people, companies and markets that you should go after that will take your business to the vision of the business you want to be. We’re building our system as a platform so that in the future you can imagine Node being fuel for other engines, applications or systems of record that today, when you purchase, come empty. 

The post Sales Enablement Startup Node Aims to ‘Flip’ the Traditional Funnel with Matchmaking Algorithm appeared first on ���������.

More business doesn’t always mean more customers. Heavy users of a product or service are apt to increase their investment over time, provided they remain sufficiently loyal. To nurture such customers, marketers must understand their needs and deliver more value to them, sometimes at the expense of finding new opportunities. 

That’s the strategic decision B-to-B communications company has embodied over the past several years. As an international data and network solutions provider that’s been in business since 1995, the company has thousands of potential clients it could forge a stronger relationship with. Rather than try to expand its appeal and draw in more customers, Brocade decided to redouble its efforts to take care of its core supporters. It tweaked its offering to meet the needs of its top 200 customers, which comprised 80% of sales.

This effort came to be known internally as Customer First. “This is the magic of a B-to-B company. In the marketing department, one of our jobs is to really understand our customers and our market,” says , Brocade’s CMO. “We wanted to make sure that everything the company was doing internally and externally was putting the best interests of the customer first.”

Action

“We began with the intent of being very customer-focused, but we weren’t sure what our initial starting point was,” Heckart says. “We needed a benchmark to know if we were terrible or OK.”

Brocade brought in a third-party evaluator, , to determine its Net Promoter Score, or NPS, a metric to assess customer loyalty. Customers are asked to respond, using a 10-point scale, to a limited series of questions around a single theme: How likely are you to recommend this company to another person? Respondents who answer with a nine or 10 are considered promoters, or unofficial advocates for a brand. A response of seven or eight indicates passiveness, while people whose answers fall between zero and six are considered detractors. The upshot of all this is a higher score, which likely means happier customers and a greater probability of word-of-mouth business acquisition. 

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Rather than commission a single NPS, Brocade decided early that the project would be a long-term effort involving annual assessments. In between surveys Brocade would work to understand feedback, incorporate it into processes and communicate it to clients.

“That was pragmatism taking over. I have a philosophy for any initiative and that is summarized as ‘Think big, start small and move fast,’ ” Heckart says.

For Brocade, starting small meant soliciting input from its top 50 clients. These 50 clients would serve as the model for all the initial prototyping before the program could expand to include the next 150 clients. Within six months, all 200 had been surveyed. The results were encouraging. In fact, the overall NPS of 51 placed Brocade among the best in class for this area.

Yet, while undoubtedly welcome news, the high scores posed a bit of problem moving forward: How do you improve on an A grade? 

“We started to worry that because the scores were already pretty high and customers were already pretty happy that maybe it would be really difficult to move the needle,” Heckart says. “Yet we had made a commitment to tie everyone’s compensation to this.”

Brocade’s answer was to push higher. “We made a goal to get to 52. It didn’t seem like much but that would have been on the average trend for improvements across all of Walker’s B-to-B database.”

To get there, Brocade looked at sales packages for each of the 200 customers included in the survey. Some clients had unique needs based on the nature of their business. Heckart’s team worked closely with sales to devise client-specific solutions for individual and cluster problems that would enhance the value of Brocade’s offerings to these customers. A package was developed for every single customer, incorporating the NPS feedback, and forwarded to the sales team to communicate how Brocade had developed individually tailored changes.

Additionally, there were broad-brush themes in some of the less satisfactory answers concerning Brocade’s performance. Armed with these commonalities, Brocade could address the issues in a way that would hopefully make its customers happier. When the company learned certain product lines, for instance, were perceived to lack sufficient customer support, the company beefed up its outreach efforts for those offerings. An engineering task force was created to enhance the code in lower-rated products. 

Noticeably lower scores also tended to follow patterns of geography. Brocade does business all over the world, and some of the companies included in the NPS are located in Japan and Germany, which historically tend to be much harder graders than Americans. But Brocade also reviewed its sales reps in these areas to ensure they were doing everything possible to obtain a maximum score. 

Results

A year later, Brocade administrated the NPS again. The results greatly surpassed initial expectations. The team blew past its self-imposed goal of 52 and leapt all the way to 62, higher than any company Walker had ever surveyed before.

That success has translated into increased revenue and more business for Brocade, as happier customers are proving to be more heavily invested customers. The second-round NPS results were released in August 2016 on the heels of third-quarter earnings for the company. That report showed a revenue increase of 7% over the previous year—the entire time the most intensive portions of the Customer First program were in effect—and a 13% increase quarter over quarter. For Heckart, there’s no doubt that the boost was due in part to Brocade’s efforts to concentrate on making its biggest clients its happiest clients.

“We do know … there is a correlation between purchasing and the rate at which these customers buy and the increases of purchasing and their level of satisfaction,” Heckart says. 

Mission accomplished. 

The post Combining NPS and Account-based Marketing for B-to-B Success appeared first on ���������.

We all want more sales; that’s a given. But how we get more sales is not.

Many marketers have turned to account-based marketing (ABM) to identify and target the companies they’d most like to sell to, but breaking through to the accounts that can push your enterprise to new levels of scale is never easy. In fact, it’s often nearly impossible.

There is a shadow form of marketing out there that perfectly complements ABM and has been generating results most marketers would find hard to believe. I dubbed it “contact marketing” in my book How to Get a Meeting With Anyone.

Contact marketing is a fusion of marketing and selling, employing specific campaigns designed to connect with specific high-value prospects, including CEOs, C-level executives and other top decision makers. As I was researching for the book, I discovered that a surprising number of marketers were using their own homespun, often audacious methods for creating breakthroughs. But it was all happening in complete isolation—all the practitioners knew was that they needed to find a way to break through to someone very important, someone who would be difficult to reach.

You might recall some pretty outrageous things you’ve done to connect with someone. Maybe you’ve heard stories, like the single shoe that shows up with the promise of the other to complete the pair when the proposed meeting takes place. Or a remote-control car model showing up with a note promising the missing control unit during the meeting.

Sending half of a gift with the promise of the other half may crack some doors open with some difficult-to-reach prospects, but it’s hardly state-of-the-art contact marketing. Many CEOs report taking a meeting just to get the missing piece, then ushering the representative out the door. Once the toy is brought home to the CEO’s children, the representative and his company are soon forgotten.

Simply getting in the door is an important part of making meaningful contact, but it’s not enough. The contact campaign must also impart a feeling of, “I love the way this person thinks. I need to meet this person.” And it must quickly deliver the promise of value focused on the target executive’s specific needs.

Contact marketing campaigns don’t operate like other types of campaigns. The target group is usually quite small, sometimes just a single person. The cost spent to reach each person can also be quite high, easily hundreds of dollars or more. While the cost and audience figures may be surprising, the results can be shocking. Response rates to contact marketing campaigns have been as high as 100%, producing ROI figures in the tens, even hundreds of thousands of percent.

When the founder of NoWait set out to launch his app, he employed a classic contact marketing strategy. The campaign targeted just 30 people, but these were the CEOs of the top 30 restaurant chains in the country.

The NoWait app turns any smartphone into one of those pucks used by restaurants to alert customers that their table is ready. By eliminating the pager device, NoWait also eliminates the need to wait in the restaurant for a table. To introduce the app to the 30 dream clients, NoWait devised a clever campaign that featured personalized videos delivered on iPads in custom NoWait packaging.

Each video contains three segments. The first features a man-on-the-street host showing up at one of the chain’s restaurants on a busy Saturday night with a hidden lapel cam. Walking in, he finds a huge crowd inside waiting for tables. The video finishes with the NoWait CEO speaking directly into the camera to the recipient, saying, “I love eating at your restaurants, but I hate waiting for a table. We should talk.”

The targeted executives were so impressed that roughly 70% responded, some saying it was the cleverest campaign they’d ever seen. Thanks to the campaign, the NoWait app is now featured in 20 of the top 30 restaurant chains in America.

Top sales blogger and best-selling author Dan Waldschmidt gives us another example of the power of focusing on very few high-value prospects with an audacious delivery. In addition to his blogging, Waldschmidt is a turnaround specialist. He has a fascinating way of connecting with prospects for his services.

Waldschmidt combs the business news every day, looking for stories of missed earnings estimates. When he finds one, he has a beautiful sword made with the CEO’s name and an inscription engraved on the blade. It ships in a fine wooden box with a handwritten note inside. The note says, “Business is war and I noticed you lost a battle recently. I just wanted to let you know if you ever need a few extra hands in battle, we’ve got your back.”

Waldschmidt reports a nearly 100% response rate to his campaign.

Cartoons That Create Contact

My introduction to the world of contact marketing came as a result of my cartoons. In addition to being a marketer, I’m one of The Wall Street Journal’s cartoonists. I quickly discovered how powerful cartoons can be as contact devices.

When I launched my first creative agency years ago, I targeted two dozen consumer marketing directors at the big Manhattan-based magazine publishing companies. I sent a personalized print of one of my cartoons along with a note explaining I’d just beat controls for Rolling Stone and Bon Appétit using that same personalized cartoon device. I urged that we produce similar tests for their titles. As a result, not only did I connected with all of my target prospects, they all became clients. That was a 100% response that was worth millions of dollars. It launched my marketing business, and it all came from a campaign that cost less than $100.

These are just a small sampling of the stories coming from marketers all over the world of a movement no one actually knew was a movement. There are several types of gift strategies; the car and shoe examples, my cartoons and Waldschmidt’s swords are part of the half-gift, art, humor and film and visual metaphor categories.

Other strategies include specific uses of e-mail, social media, video, insight and intelligence, interviews and media exposure—including several methods that went way beyond normal marketing thinking, like the campaign used to reach a single contact by running a letter of introduction as a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal. The ad cost $10,000, but resulted in a $350 million sale.

As I’ve spoken at events, connected with readers on social media and interviewed many marketing and sales thought leaders, it has become clear that contact marketing has been a movement for a very long time. Not being afraid to spend a lot per contact, using large amounts of creativity and audacity and believing that high-potential accounts are worth every effort to win their business is what contact marketers all have in common.

You’re probably already part of it. If you aren’t, you really should be.

The post What Is Contact Marketing? Super-charged Account-based Marketing appeared first on ���������.

Last spring, General Mills sent shockwaves through the agency world with the announcement it was launching a review of all its creative part ners for U.S. retail brands. Lucrative part nerships with power players McCann, Saatchi & Saatchi and Wieden & Kennedy were all under examination, all put on notice with a terse statement released by the company and attributed to no one in part icular: “We have a responsibility to ensure we have the right agency partners to continue growing our business, and agency reviews are a routine part of running a successful business today.”

Much of the industry kicked into high gear, putting together proposals. At stake was more than $700 million of ad spend hyping supermarket staples such as Betty Crocker, Cheerios, Nature Valley and Yoplait. By the time the dust settled at the beginning of December 2016, 72andSunny and Redscout, both owned by marketing holding company MDC Partners, were tapped as agencies of record (AOR). Three other shops—Joan, The Community and —were named as “preferred U.S. project-based agencies.” For San Francisco-based Erich & Kallman, the announcement capped off a year ripe with winning. Well, three-quarters of a year.

The indie ad shop had only announced its formation that April, weeks before word of the General Mills agency review trickled out. By the time it became a preferred project provider for the food giant, it had already landed other highly sought clients, including Chick-Fil-A, which choose the Bay Area startup over five rivals after dumping The Richards Group, its AOR for the past 22 years.

A STAR IS BORN

To agency managing director Steven Erich, success was welcome, but not altogether surprising. He formed the agency with co-eponymous creative director Eric Kallman after decades spent playing midwife to marketers’ gestating brand identities. That’s given him some strong hunches about what the people who place ad orders are looking for. “I’ve always thought, ‘Why does the world need another advertising agency? There’s plenty of them,’” Erich says. “I didn’t want to do something that just didn’t make any sense.”

Bucking much of modern marketing thinking, Erich wanted his agency to eschew the drive toward Big Data, as it was neither he nor his partner’s forte. “Everything that was happening in the industry was around the tech-based stuff—data learning and programmatic, [with] much more data analysis at the center of the offering and things that were focusing on media,” he says. “If analytics is gaging how people are using the products or buying the products, that’s fine. … Where I’ve not seen it successful is deciding what advertising is successful and what’s going to move the market.”

Erich and Kallman saw themselves as experts of the artistic side of advertising. Pathos, ethos and logos subtly working within a captivating mise-enscène. And, Erich says, these experts are most absent in today’s ad world.

“We don’t really think creative work has gotten better in the past few years. In fact, it’s gotten worse,” he says. “We thought there might be an opportunity to focus on the creative product. Not the technology, not the data, but the engagement of consumers. We have that going for us.”

It’s clear the partners are on the same page. While with another agency in 2010, Kallman espoused a similar philosophy on YouTube’s “Show + Tell.” “There’s no way to sway anything, except with creativity and except with ideas,” he says. “It’s almost like the solution for advertising … is to want to be more creative, because now you’re just trying to make something people want to look at or watch just as much as the actual article or program or whatever it is.”

Kallman most recently spent time at Goodby Silverstein & Partners, filling the role of executive creative director. Before that he held the same position at Barton F. Graf and was a copywriter at TBWA/Chiat/Day and Widen + Kennedy, where he notched a towering career highlight when he co-created “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign for Old Spice.

Erich spent the bulk of his career at Crispin Porter + Bogusky, rising through the ranks as an account manager and later managing director, before being named president at the start of 2014. It was at CP + B the pair met one another. Kallman was looking for an exit from Barton F. Graf and was going through the interview process at CP + B. The outfit liked him and extended a job offer. Erich made a personal pitch for him to join corporate headquarters in Boulder, Colorado. But in the end, Kallman declined and decided he’d rather return to his native San Francisco.

���������t 18 months later, both men were free agents, having left their respective places of employment. They arranged a phone call to discuss career prospects.

“I thought [Eric] would take another big role at a big ad agency, but he was interested in starting his own thing, and I had been investigating starting my own agency,” Erich says. “I immediately said we should do something together. I think so [highly] of his work, and I thought it would be a unique and powerful combination.”

The pair spent a few months canvassing contacts to assess interest in their vision. Receiving affirmation, they moved forward. By the time of the official unveiling in April, they had already completed work for MTV and were pitching Chick-Fil-A.

EXTRAORDINARY POPULAR ILLUSIONS AND THE FADNESS OF CROWDS

Just because Erich & Kallman are creative, it doesn’t mean their work is overwrought or high-concept. Quite the opposite, Erich says. More than anything else, they prefer to make ads that are sure to be talked about.

“The work we’ve done in the past is not niche, award-winning or things that are inherently personal or one-on-one. It’s very broad, water-cooler kind of stuff,” says Erich. “It’s work meant for people to see and react to and share and then hopefully move them to purchase or the [desired] action.”

While others may be looking to nurture a personal bond with a consumer, Erich & Kallman want to be quoted. The way they see it, the more intimate the ad, the less people talk about it with one another. “The work that we do is meant to be broadly appealing and shareable because it’s a better way to spend your money. Your media buy increases much more if people are going to share with other people,” Erich says.

A lot of the time this means being funny. The ads they created for Chick-Fil-A hyping its new Egg White Grill breakfast sandwich, for instance, feature famous historical figures such as Michelangelo and Amelia Earhart scoffing at critics who called them crazy right before they went on the change they world. When Apple did something similar two decades ago with its “Think Different” campaign, it was all about somber hero worship. The Chick-Fil-A spots are playing for laughs, depicting Beethoven bragging in song about being the greatest composer of all time, and Thomas Edison gloating about the success of the electric light.

“Their feeling was, especially with breakfast, they needed the work to not look like Chick-Fil-A ads,” Erich says. “The work that we did got people to notice that [Chick-Fil-A had] a [breakfast] part that they didn’t know about, or forgot about, and that there was this new product that they had never heard of and they needed to consider.”

Another example of this line of thinking is borne out in a recent spot for ONEHOPE Wine, a California social enterprise that sells wine and coffee and donates the proceeds to charity. Instead of creating an earnest web ad laying out the emotion behind the philanthropy, Erich and Kallman decided to go funny. They created an arrogant fictional pitchman named Charles Faircloth who has everything from a dinosaur egg he uses as a doorstop in his guest bathroom to a fleet of hovercrafts he’s never even seen, and hawks ONEHOPE to “normal people” as a token gesture of giving back.

“The humor wasn’t part of the brief, but it was to get people to notice the brand,” Erich says. “It’s got very quotable stuff in there. You find yourself quoting what this dude is saying to other people. … It’s just a goofy, fun spot, and they loved it.”

SMALL MATTERS

Waxing defiant in the face of Big Data aside, there is another huge trend that Erich & Kallman has working to its advantage: size. A statement by the General Mills COO Michael Fanuele, given after the preferred project partners were named, praised the virtues of bite-size boutiques like Erich & Kallman.

“In looking to round out our roster, we met with dozens of interesting agencies and were wildly impressed by the breadth of talent out there. The industry is teeming with small agencies of every variety doing really powerful work,” he said.

Some might bristle at being called small, but there’s a compelling argument that this is where a lot of the industry is heading, and Erich and Kallman view the descriptor as the cornerstone of their pitch process—which shouldn’t be surprising, considering Erich was part of the team that developed the Small Business Saturday campaign for American Express.

As he sees it, small is lean and nimble in ways the big players can’t be. One of their clients, Gusto, an online HR services platform, reached out to them with a request to put together a campaign at nearbreakneck speed. Six weeks after making the initial contact, the campaign went live on the internet in the form of a series of spots staring actress Kristen Schaal as a deluged human resources managerforced to perform a variety of roles to keep her company running smoothly.

“That would be very difficult at a larger agency. It’s doable, but it’s very much against the normal process,” Erich says. “Our process is very streamlined. We don’t have a lot of people involved. We work with the best talent we can hire. And there’s not a lot that can get in the way.”

Erich & Kallman can respond rapidly in large part because the founders set up the agency to handle a lot of individual project work. With just six employees at the core of the agency, the close-knit group can get on the same page quickly. In boom times, extra work is outsourced to well-established freelancers. “Freelance is stronger than it’s ever been,” Erich says. “It’s arguable there might be more talent outside of agencies than inside of agencies.”

Small is also trustworthy, or at least less suspicious. After the Association of National Advertisers’ bombshell report came out last year alleging that some large agencies were hiding discounts from clients, many brands are wary of how the creative sausage is made.

“Absolutely, agencies are taking a hit. There is a call for more transparency, and it is a hard time to be an agency,” Kallman says. “[With] the most honest, transparent big agency in the world, just because they are that big, there are going to be some doubts [from clients], even if there’s nothing going on.”

Add it all up, and what companies like Chick-Fil-A and General Mills are deciding is that small shops such as Erich & Kallman are a better value for their marketing dollars, which is exactly what Erich suspected heading to the agency-ownership stage of his career.

“There might be an opportunity where an agency that’s billed on project work, that’s billed on speed, that’s very creatively focused and that uses talent that’s out there now might have a place in the market,” Erich says. “We’re not going to steal business from everybody. But we think there might be an opportunity in the marketplace for somebody like us.”

Winning project work from General Mills is a good sign there is. Currently, Erich & Kallman has General Mills CCO Michael Fanuele singing its praises, telling Marketing News, “Obviously Steve and Eric are massive talents, two of the best in the industry, but the entrepreneurial energy of their own agency is turbo-charging that talent with a wide-eyed ambition and ferocious pragmatism. It’s personal for them now—and that’s only good news for the rest of us. Their creative muscle and agile model are sure to deliver treasures for us.”

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