ICP marketing done right
How Mutiny built a scaled and cost-effective ABX approach
👋 Hi, it’s Kyle Poyar and welcome to Growth Unhinged, my weekly newsletter exploring the hidden playbooks behind the fastest-growing startups.
Mutiny was founded in 2018 with a specific goal: help B2B companies turn their websites into their top revenue channel.
Their inbound marketing engine quickly took off and Mutiny attracted a who’s who of B2B customers including Snowflake, Segment, Writer, Qualtrics and Carta. The startup raised an $18.5M Series A from Sequoia in September 2021. Just six months later they raised $50M more, this time from Tiger and Insight.
Armed with this influx of funding, it was time to formally develop an outbound marketing channel to accelerate pipeline growth. That’s when Liam Goldfarb joined the team as founding BDR (he now leads the Business Development team). His first question: who do we want to target?
It turns out that answering this question correctly was both more strategic and more error-prone than it appears. And getting this right today is make-or-break as everyone seeks out efficient growth.
Today’s edition walks through exactly how Mutiny built a data-driven target account list, how BDRs partnered with marketing to engage those accounts (including a recent campaign that went viral on LinkedIn), and how the team measured success (hint: Mutiny is not an “MQL shop”).
The results speak for themselves. When Liam first joined, 15% of pipeline came from outbound efforts. Now outbound generates 45% (!) of Mutiny’s pipeline – all while the overall pipeline has grown substantially.
Account selection: From gut-based decisions to precision ICP targeting
Back in 2022, Mutiny had a rough idea of who their best customers were, but this hadn’t been distilled down into a precise list of target accounts. Without that precision, BDRs would be left with a lot of guesswork and a lot of wasted time.
Mutiny’s initial ICP approach combined broad targeting with gut-based decisions (sounds familiar…). The team then partnered with Adam Schoenfeld at Keyplay to dial up the rigor in terms of how Mutiny defined their ideal customer profile (ICP) and customer segments. They incorporated three types of signals including firmographics (ex: company headcount, industry), technographics (ex: what website technology they use) and buying intent (ex: hiring signals, website traffic).
The next major challenge for Liam was around how to operationalize the target account list and decide what to do with it first. He found that Mutiny had the most success when (a) account-based marketing sent ads to the same people the BDRs were reaching out to and (b) they personalized messages and plays based on specific signals that went into the account score. For example, personalizing the message in the outreach based on seeing a strong tech and/or hiring signal.
Soon enough, Liam had proven out that the outbound motion could work and eventually hired four BDRs to join him. Then things started to change.
Evolving the ICP: It’s a program, not a one-off list
This was already a big leap forward for Mutiny. But the list of target accounts soon became stale as the market and Mutiny’s product evolved.
Mutiny re-positioned around the value proposition of 1:1 GTM as opposed to website conversion (their prior positioning). Prior signals like high website traffic no longer seemed like the best predictors that a prospect would be interested in 1:1 marketing.
Evolving Mutiny’s ICP started with a game of ‘keep or throw out’ between Mutiny’s heads of marketing, sales, business development, demand generation and customer experience. Each leader individually reviewed Mutiny’s existing signals and scored them in order to create hypotheses about how to evolve ICP scoring going forward. This helped unearth newer ICP signals such as whether the account has a sales-led motion, dedicated ABM titles, and is actively hiring for AEs and SDRs.
Mutiny back-tested these assumptions via Keyplay against closed-won opportunities (good fit accounts) along with closed-lost ones (bad fit accounts). From there, Liam ran all the accounts that were currently in pipeline, had recently closed or were top customers against the new account scoring (Tier A-D). “This was a really important part of feeling like we had gotten it to a really good place to then roll out.”
When looking at Mutiny’s LinkedIn ads, the new ICP account grades jumped off the page. The new Tier A accounts saw a 30% conversion from lead to opportunity. Tier B accounts had an 8% conversion. For Tiers C and D, the conversion was a rounding error.
By moving to a new and improved list of target accounts, Mutiny increased close rates, shortened the sales cycle and spent less on advertising to unqualified accounts.
“This should be a program and not a one-off build,” Liam stressed. “Every six months to a year we now take a look back at the scoring and refine based on what we see in terms of who’s closing, who are our top customers and who’s renewing.”
Account engagement: Making outreach feel 1:1 but on a 1:many scale
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Kyle Poyar’s Growth Unhinged to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.