Tipalti is a modern finance solution that helps businesses automate their manual processes to let them focus on more pressing tasks that lead to company success. To maintain maximum performance, Senior Account-based Marketing (ABM) Manager, Peter Tarrant, ensures Tipalti’s internal go-to-market strategies run smoothly—he oversees everything from tech stack to messaging to ensure that his teams are efficiently engaging target accounts in a way that drives revenue.
Overview of Tipalit’s demand generation & ABM strategy
Tipalti dedicates 32% of their marketing headcount to demand generation, which consists of field marketing and events, traditional inbound marketing, and integrated marketing. While SDRs don’t report into marketing, they frequently collaborate on campaigns and messaging to support cold outreach efforts. Peter’s day-to-day objective is to find, engage, & personalize communication towards target accounts.
His main key performance indicator (KPI) is net new pipeline creation through ABM. He orchestrates a total of 16 bi-quarterly industry campaigns that involve a multitude of channels and tactics: MagicLinks in Outreach sequences, marketing emails, LinkedIn & display advertising, and more. This multichannel approach is effective as it targets key accounts from a number of angles.
The other component of his approach is more of a 1:1 coordinated effort with sales reps on identified accounts. This is more effective with enterprise accounts and buying committees with over 50 people.
The sales team loves Postal, so marketing loves it.
Pivoting from direct mail to Offline Engagement
The pandemic forced marketers to adjust their direct mail strategy: with work shifting to remote & home offices, Peter’s team had to rely on recipients to confirm their address before receiving a gift.
Prior to switching to Postal, Tipalti's address confirmation rate was between 15-18%. With Postal, they’ve seen a dramatic uptick in address confirmation rates of 28%.
Segmenting global teams to allow for granular budget management
On the Postal platform, Tipalti currently has 22 teams set-up and 370 enabled users. Across sales, they have 5 individual teams: inbound and outbound SDRs, North America, UK, and EU users. Each team is given a monthly budget that is pooled within the Postal platform and monitored to ensure equal distribution of funds.
Tipalti’s send types include:
- MagicLinks - digital gift redemption via a link that gives the sender the ability to approve the order for ABM campaigns to include in Outreach sequences, Salesloft cadences, Marketo emails, etc.
- Direct Sends - must have correct shipping address for recipient prior to sending.
- Personalized Emails - comes through looking clean yet in a different format within the inbox. These are branded to Tipalti’s liking and optimized around what works.
- Chrome Extension - lets reps send gift emails directly from Outreach or Salesforce while in Google Chrome.
The sales team has achieved a year-to-date 26% item acceptance rate so far in 2023.
Peter’s team has found that personalized emails and direct sends have the highest engagement metrics. However, many of Tipalti’s reps prefer using MagicLinks as you can easily send them through LinkedIn messages and emails.
Prospecting and top-of-funnel engagement
From the beginning of Tipalit’s sales process, offline touch points are used to break through the noise throughout the buyer’s journey. For instance, QR codes with gift offerings are integrated into cold outreach sequences, gift cards are used as a friendly nudge for pre-meeting reminders, and personalized items are sent as a post-meeting follow-up.
One of my favorite follow-up plays is whenever our rep hears a dog barking in the background, send that person a dog piñata or doggie care package.
Field marketing and experiences
For conferences and in-person events, Tipalti also uses the offline channel to drive engagement with booth attendees, before and after it takes place. Before the event, MagicLinks with branded swag are used to drive booth traffic and set in person meetings. At the event, on-site QR codes direct booth attendees to MagicLinks where they can digitally redeem swag that’s sent directly to their home address, so they don’t have the carry home the items in their luggage.
Postal is a great solution if you’re cognizant of swag waste.
After making a connection with an individual at an event, items are sent through Postal as event follow-up to keep the conversation going and incentivize the prospect to attend the meetings.
How Tipalti tracks ROI of their Offline programs
For Peter’s team at Tipalti, the impact Offline Engagement tactics had on their funnel was largely a black box. Now, having the level of insights into who was touched, from which account, and what items and use cases are converting to closed revenue has been a gamechanger.
Postal’s in-app reporting helps Peter track spend by team. The order report & recent activity provides notifications on items being accepted, shipped, or delivered. That way, if a rep misses an email, they can see if item was delivered before reaching out.
One of the most insightful tabs is being able to view Salesforce opportunities associated with different categories of gifts. Peter cited food items proportionally have higher closed won associated with them as opposed to gift cards.
The Salesforce integration makes it easy to automate the sending of items to customers being onboarded as well as give full visibility to management on the impact of Postal to Tipalti’s sales funnel.
When new customers hit certain stages of the onboarding process with Tipalti, a Salesforce trigger will automatically send them a “Delight the Customer” gift box.
Ultimately, Peter believes an Offline Engagement Platform is a must have for B2B demand generation teams. With Postal, Tipalti’s sales, alliances, marketing, account management, and all customer facing teams can easily & seamlessly gift those that are engaged with a personalized gift to further bolster their relationships, both internationally and domestically.
