“Event-based marketing used to be huge. Nowadays, people want to find that information themselves.”
That’s Connor Fassnacht, Digital Marketing Lead for the Americas at Corian® Design, a DuPont Company. He’s talking about the shift in buyer behavior we’ve seen over the past decade.
Before, prospects would turn to sales reps for education and information. Nowadays? Not so much.
Today’s buyers spend 45% of their time independently researching their options and just 17% meeting with potential vendors. Oh, that’s all vendors, too. Individually, each sales rep is looking at around 5 or 6% of a buyer’s time.
Faced with an audience of buyers who wanted to be left alone, Connor had to get creative.
Since joining DuPont in the spring of 2021, he’s helped DuPont’s sales reps and a large network of distributor reps roll out highly customized deal homepages to better engage buyers—including C-suite execs.
Here’s how he did it.
Augmenting ABM with shareable Pages
Connor works within DuPont’s Corian® Design division, which specializes in Corian® Solid Surface, Quartz and Endura™ surfacing solutions for worktops, countertops, feature walls and more.
“A lot of people think of the classic solid surface countertops that were big in the ‘60s and ‘70s, but we are so much more than that now,” says Connor. If you’ve recently been to a Starbucks cafe or McDonald’s restaurant, or watched Selling Sunset or Million Dollar Listing: LA, you’ve probably already seen their work.
DuPont’s sales team focuses mostly on enterprise deals—universities, health care providers, retailers, food service, and national hospitality chains. To contend with the large, complex buying journeys that are common in the world of enterprise sales, they use account-based marketing (ABM).
If you’re unfamiliar with ABM, think of it as marketing to an audience of one. There are no generic outreach campaigns or sales pitches here. Every single touchpoint needs to be intentional and personalized to the buyer. And when you’re a global company as big as DuPont, that’s tricky to orchestrate.
Instead of having one basic pitch deck or far-reaching customer story, you end up with dozens of highly-tailored assets. And getting all that content to prospects can be a nightmare. Often, reps resort to email, sending attachment after attachment and hoping their prospects have an organizational system on their end to sift through it all. (Spoiler: they usually don’t.)
Using Showpad’s Pages, Connor began creating personalized content hub pages for specific applications, such as for home builders. These custom Pages provide highly visual, engaging experiences featuring the information and benefits that most concern them as well as ABM accounts. They also act as the single source of truth for both the seller and the buyer—storing all their deal’s content assets and information in one secure, easy-to-navigate place. Connor then customizes each Page with the buyer’s logo and branding so they know it was made just for them.
“Say we’re building one for the University of Pennsylvania Health Systems,” says Connor. “We create a custom shareable Page with UPenn’s branding on it and content tailored to their specific needs and project specifications.”
But giving buyers the space to consume content on their own terms doesn’t mean sales reps are left in the dark. With Showpad’s Pages, reps collect key engagement data from all stakeholders on the buying team. They’ll know exactly which content assets buyers interacted with, which document pages or slides they looked at and for how long, and which assets they shared and who they shared them with. They can then use this information to make strategic, insight-led decisions when it comes to their follow-up conversations.
“Internal colleagues, external stakeholders, customers, everybody loves them,” Connor says. “It’s so much better than emailing 15 attachments to a prospect.”
While Connor’s shareable Page strategy excels in one-to-one ABM campaigns, it’s shown impressive results in one-to-many strategies too.
ABM tactics in an at-scale strategy
Connor recently took Corian® Design to a major hospitality conference. The 50 largest fast-food chains—Starbucks, McDonald’s, Chipotle, Domino’s, Dunkin’, Taco Bell, among others—all sent executives. All these companies were prime target accounts for DuPont’s Corian® Design.
There was just one problem: 50 accounts is a lot to manage at once, especially during a short conference.
To deliver a great buying experience at scale, Connor turned to his ABM toolkit. He built out a visually-appealing, comprehensive Page around Corian® Design’s offerings specifically tailored to the food service industry. He included fabrication information, color tools, product specifications, anti-bacterial and mold certifications, and everything else an interested executive could ask for—all in one place.
He shared that Page with 45 C-Suite executives. Then sat back to watch how they interacted with it. Within a couple of hours, the Page was buzzing with viewers. Since the event, it has been viewed more than 250 times by executives and stakeholders of the largest fast-food chains in the world.
Better yet, these exec-level buyers are exploring the Page and engaging with the content. The average time spent on page is over 3.5 minutes. With such a long dwell time, it’s clear that buyers aren’t just scanning the content, says Connor. They’re digging into the specifics and reading.
“If people go to a clunky website or watch a clunky PowerPoint, what does that say about the brand?” he says. “Whereas, we’re providing a sleek experience. It’s super visual and it also provides the documentation they’re looking for.”
Building for the future
When Connor first arrived at DuPont, the company had just introduced its first sales enablement solution. Their focus was on onboarding people onto the platform and training them to use it. Any change management is difficult, but transforming how people work is especially challenging.
Connor worked closely with DuPont’s sales leadership to drive adoption. The transformation began to pick up the pace. Eventually, even their most seasoned salespeople, who initially resisted change, became power users.
With more sales reps at DuPont now equipped with sales enablement technology, Connor’s Showpad Pages success story is just the start. He plans to further optimize DuPont’s ABM strategy, align their sales motion with modern buying habits, and empower their sales reps to reach—and engage—more buyers.
