How Snowflake’s Hermi Ruiz Built a World-Class ABM Program with Personalization at Scale

This piece is brought to you by Sendoso Head of Product Marketing Lauren Barraco.

The new sales landscape calls for new ways of engaging customers and prospects in a strategic way. For Hermi Ruiz, ABM Manager for the Cloud Data Platform Snowflake, this meant continuing to make meaningful connections with prospects and their Snowflake Community even in the face of stay-at-home orders.

Over the last few months of navigating the remote-first world via ABM, Snowflake has been able to continue their growth: launching campaigns with enviable meeting rates, getting stalled accounts moving again, and boosting active opportunity rates as high as 50%.

I recently sat down with Hermi during DemandBase’s ABM Innovation Tour in a session called “Snowflake Scales Personalization into a World-Class ABM Program” to learn more about Snowflake’s ABM journey, and how they built this world-class program by leveraging direct mail and eGifts to target key accounts.

Try a New Approach

During this time of heightened digital overwhelm, landing a meeting with a key stakeholder often requires some out-of-the-box thinking. This is where options like eGift cards, swag items, and personalized gifts can break through the noise and get a date on the calendar. To do this, Snowflake leverages Sendoso’s one-to-one platform features.

Snowflake understands that its SDRs are in the best position to decide when and what to send, sending off a thoughtful gesture when it’s most needed. “Have they not been able to get through to this person via traditional or digital channels? Let’s try something new, something cool, something different.” As Hermi explains, no one knows these accounts better than the account owners themselves, so empowering them with the ability to reach out in a personal way is important to the overall sales approach.

This approach also works for other types of outreach throughout the sales cycle, such as event and conference follow-ups.

Feature Something for Everyone

When sending nationally or internationally, it’s essential to ensure that your recipient can directly benefit from the gift or item you choose to send. This fact holds especially true for eGift cards. “We want to make sure that everyone’s included,” explains Hermi. After all, it’s no fun if “someone gives you a gift card to a cool thing, but you can’t use it because there’s nothing around you can redeem it for!”

In this case, the flexibility of Sendoso’s offerings makes it easy to treat prospects and customers to something special, with access to both local and national vendors for food, drinks, and sweet treats that make the connection. Some favorite sends for Snowflake include coffee- and lunch-themed cards, sweets from local vendors, and branded treats through Sendoso Direct.

Hermi and the team empower their reps to get creative and serve most everyone with a “Swag Menu” approach that allows a lot of flexibility with gifts across territories and locations.

Orchestrate Data & Tech

Creating a human touch relies upon expert use of the data at hand, helping you make decisions about what you’re sending, who you’re engaging with, and what metrics you’re trying to influence through your efforts. While Sendoso helps sales and marketing achieve these goals out of the box, Snowflake has found added power in the easy integration with other platforms within their stack.

For instance, the team uses Engagio with Sendoso to maximize the ROI on its sends by targeting the best stakeholders within its accounts. “We’ve segmented out their account list; we worked with our sales operations team and created an engagement model to really help our Sales Directors identify those high-value accounts. Using a platform like Engagio, they’re able to quickly identify who those top engaged people are and target them that way.”

Keep Innovating

A world-class ABM program is evolutionary, moving effectively with the changing sales landscape. As the world continues to embrace virtual events and a different way of doing business, Snowflake is planning for the future, relying on Sendoso to back their campaigns. “Now that we can’t meet for dinner or drinks at happy hour, being able to have a virtual wine tasting from our own homes is really valuable.”

These innovative events allow Snowflake to bring together prospects and customers in a way that feels genuine and exciting, even when in-person cocktail hours and events aren’t possible. Once events conclude, the team can keep the conversation going with automated follow-up workflows, actionable data insights, and the ability to demonstrate the ROI on their campaigns.

Using the power of personalization at scale, Snowflake has enjoyed success even through challenging times. To learn more about how Snowflake and Sendoso are enabling teams to achieve more—including the popular sends Sales teams are using right now— register for the full, on-demand webinar here.

Register for our half-day virtual event Out of the Box for even more ABM strategies for Marketing, Sales & CX, evolving from ABM to Account-Based Everything (ABX).