BC Startup Sales Podcast – Vertical Account-Based Marketing Strategies with Diana Byrne (Boxever)

This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Diana Byrne, VP of Marketing at Boxever, to discuss “Vertical Account-Based Marketing Strategies.” Boxever is a “Customer Intelligence Cloud” for enterprise marketers. The company’s SaaS solution unifies customer, operating and product data, and provides an overlaying analytics platform empowering users to granularly personalize their customers’ experience. As a result, Boxever users are able to optimize for lower acquisition costs, accelerated conversion rates, improved customer engagement and higher lifetime values. In today’s episode, Diana and I discuss Boxever’s extremely unique formula for vertical marketing, and the industry- and account-based growth marketing strategies that have served them so well over the past 7 years. Today’s episode is a must-listen for any startup leader contemplating strategies for focused go-to-market around a specific vertical.

While elements of vertical account-based marketing have been discussed in the SaaS ecosystem before, I don’t think the phrase has ever been formally coined or explored. Yet it’s an extremely powerful concept that I think has immense value for almost any B2B SaaS startup. The idea is that before diving into account-level specifics, one must understand the idiosyncrasies of the industry those accounts operate in–their vertical. Not simply the companies, budgets, and top stakeholders, but the day-to-day job, across all roles. This includes the lingo, the titles, the common frustrations, and all the other details that defines business in that vertical from others. A sound vertical account-based marketing strategy requires all go-to-market professionals to go through a deep discovery and insights effort to ensure that your employees “talk the talk” as well as your customers themselves. Diana’s background and efforts at Boxever make her the perfect guide for today’s topic. Founded in 2011 in Dublin, the Boxever has raised nearly $20MM in venture funding raised to date and is quickly nearing 100 employees. In its early days, the business went to market with a strong vertical focus in the airline industry, and has since broadened out industries served to hospitality, retail, and financial services. Vertical account-based marketing strategies, as Diana will relate, have been key to their success.

Diana Byrne is the VP of Marketing at Boxever and has spent most of her career implementing industry-first strategies. Prior to her current role, Diana served as Head of Performance Marketing at Smurfit Kappa, a leading global provider of packaging solutions with ~45,000 employees across 34 countries and a revenue of >$10B. While a jump from a packaging to software may seem like a big one, Diana’s goals at the two companies were in fact quite similar: increase market share through a vertical-first approach to growth marketing. Earlier in her career, Diana worked as a Managing Director at Nutshell Marketing, where amongst other things, she specialized in consulting on new market expansion initiatives, both industry- and geography-based. All in all, she’s a perfect guide for this episode’s topic: Vertical Account-Based Marketing Strategies.

In today’s podcast, we’ll walk through Diana’s 5-step framework for a successful vertical account-based marketing strategy. We begin with the deep research process that’s critical to vertical positioning and messaging. Second, we talk though refining these learnings into insights that are transferable and usable across your startup. Next we dive into targeting: how do you ensure you’re reaching the right people through the right industry-specific channels, and set a plan to bring the knowledge and value they want to prospects programmatically? Finally, Diana explains the crescendo of the vertical account-based marketing strategy, the “wow phase” in which sales professionals have a live opportunity to demonstrate the work put into understanding needs of not only the account, but of the vertical as a whole.

If you liked “Vertical Account-Based Marketing Strategies” and want to read more content from the Bowery Capital Team, check out other relevant posts from the Bowery Capital Blog. If you haven’t already, subscribe to the podcast to get all our new content each week!