How to Target the Perfect B2B Customers With Terminus

Welcome back to Marketing Marvels! Here today to explore an amazing software called Terminus is CMO and Co-Founder Sangram Vajre, as well as Sales Manager Alex Latraverse.
Converting your B2B leads into sales is a universally inefficient process—only one percent of those leads turn into customers. Consumers have grown accustomed to automated email nurturing. Terminus helps companies rise above that noise by bringing account-based marketing into the picture, reaching precisely targeted leads across many channels at once.
If you’re curious about account-based marketing and are ready to turn more of your B2B leads into customers, tune in for Alex’s demo of Terminus!

Jay: Hey, everybody. It’s Jay Baer from Convince & Convert and welcome to another episode of Marketing Marvels, where I bring you marketing technology that you, the busy marketer should consider incorporating into your business. These are all solutions that I know, that I love, that I recommend. We do this show about every three weeks and bring you new solutions that you should absolutely consider doing demos on and maybe incorporate into your own business.
We’re going to do a quick demo here in a little bit, but today on the Marketing Marvels show we have not just one, but two special guests from Terminus, one of the leaders in the emerging field of account-based marketing. Cannot wait to talk ABM with everybody out there today in Marketing Marvels land.
So, two special guests—we have Sangram Vajre, who is the CMO of the company, and Alex Latraverse from the accounts team. Sangram, how are you?
Sangram: Thanks, Jay. This is Sangram. So, Jay, really excited to be on Modern Marvels. This is really, really exciting. As Jay said, I’m Sangram Vajre and I’m the Cofounder and CMO at Terminus. We are the leading account-based marketing provider and it’s been really exciting to come from a lead-based marketing role where I was the Head of Marketing at Pardot and went through the acquisition of Salesforce.
So, to come into this new world of account-based marketing, which is really the hottest topic right now, and this is a great time because we just relaunched our product and relaunched our UI and hopefully everyone will love it. So, again, really excited to be on the show.
Jay: Thanks so much. I really appreciate that. Look, here’s the whole thing on account-based marketing, right? Alex will talk about this in a little bit, but only 1% of all of the leads we generate actually turn into customers, 1%. So, let’s see, quick math tells me that 99% of the leads that we’re creating end up being, for all intents and purposes, a waste of time and money.
One of the reasons that’s true, one of the reasons it’s not very efficient to take people from a lead to a close is that we’re only nurturing those leads primarily through one technology, through email, right? You get the automated email through our marketing automation system and after two days you get another email and then another email. And look, it can work and it does work at some level.
But people consume information in a lot of different places other than just email. But historically it’s been really, really hard to say, “All right, look I want to try and reach my prospects on email but also maybe with a video and also maybe on social and also maybe with banner ads and also with direct mail or skywriting or smoke signals or whatever,” like coordinating all that was a super-gigantic enormous hassle and really expensive.
So, what Terminus has done is built a system that does all of that for you. Look, you’re going to see this in a second when Alex turns on the demo, but it’s like magic. It’s magic. You say, “I want to reach all the people who make decisions at Company X and Terminus goes out and reaches all the people at Company X in a cross-channel omni-channel way. It reaches them on social, it reaches them on email, reaches them with videos, reaches them in any of the places they can find them, which is incredibly, incredibly powerful.
If you’re at all in B2B in any way, shape or form, you need to get on this. In fact, even though we’re not a huge company, we are absolutely thinking about ways that we can adopt Terminus even at Convince & Convert because it’s that powerful and it’s that easy to use. You’re going to see that in just a second.
Also, a reminder, we’re having a special offer here in a little bit after the demo. So, hang on. Watch the demo with Alex.
Alex: I don’t know how much more I can add to what Sangram said before. From my perspective as a sales professional, I get really excited about what Terminus and others are doing in the account-based marketing space and seeing firsthand the power that account-based marketing can provide to a sales organization and the alignment it drives between the two teams, it’s powerful stuff. So, excited to be here and kind of let your audience know a little bit more about what Terminus does.
Jay: Right on. Let’s take a look at it. You got the screen share ready to rock there?
Alex: Yes. Cool. So, the first thing I wanted to do is kind of talk a little bit about this concept of the flipped funnel. This is typically where we start. What we’re showing here with this graphic, we really use this concept to illustrate what is account-based marketing? What’s different about that strategy from your traditional B2B marketing strategy? And really at its core it’s a fundamental shift from being focused on lead gen and measuring success of our marketing programs based around lead gen to how are we able to impact and drive revenue in a target set of accounts.
So, what you see over here on the left is that traditional lead-based funnel we’re all very familiar with. It’s more of that marketing to the masses approach. We’re trying to drive as many leads as we can in the top end, push them through a pre-defined qualification process, hand them over to sales and hopefully convert to customers.
This is absolutely an effective strategy. It’s been around for a long time, widely adopted. The challenge that’s emerged here and what’s really led to the popularity and growth of the account-based marketing space is according to Forrester, less than 1% of leads that you’re generating are actually turning in to customers.
So, this process is not really the most efficient approach. When you look at it as a 1% conversion or somewhere in that realm, essentially 99% of our time, money, energy and efforts are wasted because those leads are never turning in to customers.
So, at Terminus we’re challenging our customers to think a little bit differently and instead flip that funnel upside down. So, start by identifying who are the best fit companies for us to be going after, whether it’s prospective customers, current customers, who are the companies we know are a good fit for our products and services? Let’s start there by identifying them.
And then let’s expand our reach into those organizations. So, let’s identify not only the decision makers and champions that are sales team is working with, but how do we identify all of the key stakeholders of that organization, whether they’re decision makers or influencers and how do we get our message in front of them?
So, again, going back to that thought that, you know, most of what marketers do today is really concentrated through email as our primary channel. So, account-based marketing takes into consideration how do we engage with these individuals across as many channels as possible and in a way that feels natural throughout their daily browsing behavior.
And the goal of this type of strategy is not to just customers but to create advocates. At Terminus, we think of advocates as one, you’re starting with companies that are a good fit in the first place, you’re driving that conversation and consensus wide and deep within the account across all the key buying groups.
If done correctly, these are customers that should be posed to be longer-term customers, higher value customers and ultimately a higher percentage of them actually turning into brand advocates, so folks that can go out and help you further your message in the marketplace. That’s really what we’re focused on here at Terminus is helping our customers to turn their customers into advocates.
Specifically where Terminus fits within this type of strategy are these middle two sections here, expand and engage. So, Terminus, you come to Terminus and you give us a list of companies that you would like to target. We’re going to out. We’re going to find all of the key people within those accounts that match your target audience and then we’re going to coordinate outreach to them across social, mobile, display and video channels with very personalized and targeted and digital advertising.
Jay: So, you can reach those people by company type, by job title, by a combination of those.
Alex: Yeah. I’ll go into that a little bit more here when I jump into the product demo. We’re going to be targeting at the departmental level, so the departmental level personas.
Jay: So, marketing department, IT department, finance department, HR department, etc.
Alex: That’s correct. And we do that for a couple reasons, really the most important being again, we want to get your message in front of all of the people on those buying teams, right? According to another study, this one done by Gartner, on average there are 7 to 10 individuals involved in a buying decision. So, if we’re concentrating our efforts on the two or three primary decision makers, we’re missing 50+% of that buying committee. And at Terminus, we’re really focused on how can we get your message in front of all the right people at that company but also be as efficient as possible with that marketing spend.
Jay: So, when they sit down to make a buying decision, they’re like, “Hey, how about these guys?” They’re like, “Oh yeah, I know those guys. I like their content. I’ve seen some of their stuff.” Like everybody kind of has this awareness and kinship for the organization and Terminus powers that.
Alex: Exactly. And there are some great examples of that. A number of our customers have done case studies for us where they’ve spoken to exactly that. What’s the impact that it’s had not only on the success of their marketing organization but their sales team? How is this actually affecting the conversations that sales individuals are able to have with these target companies, whether it’s cold outreach, existing customers, whatever it may be? I’m certainly happen to share some of those as well for anybody who wants to reach out after the demo.
Jay: Yeah. It’s not really cold at that point, right? It’s at least lukewarm because they’ve had some experience with the organization through the kind of content and advertising, frankly, that Terminus puts out there.
Alex: Exactly.
Jay: Awesome. All right. Let’s check it out.
Alex: Yeah. Let’s jump into it. Usually the question I get is, “Hey, it sounds great. But how do you actually do this?” So, I’m going to walk everybody through kind of an overview of the product, an accelerated demo. This is the campaign builder. So, this is Terminus. Creating a campaign is a pretty simple and straightforward process.
The first thing you’re going to do within Terminus is to specify that target audience. So, who are the companies and individuals that you want to reach out to. We do integrate natively with Salesforce, which gives us the ability to pull from the objects that you see here. Salesforce is far from a requirement.
You also have the ability to pull in companies by name. So, whether you came down here and manually entered the name of the company and the URL or uploaded via .csv, so for any non-Salesforce users out there, you can actually still take advantage of the Terminus platform.
With the Salesforce integration, it adds the dynamic and ability to actually pull based on the objects that you see here. So, whether you want to pull accounts from current campaigns to maybe running with your marketing automation platform. You want to pull based on lead status, account status or opportunities. I’ll kind of show you what that looks like.
So, if I select the opportunities record, this is a really popular and common campaign type amongst our customers. We call this a pipeline velocity campaign. So, this dropdown here, this is where you actually have the ability to pull companies based on the opportunity stage. So, we’re able to pull in any field from your Salesforce, default or custom. So, you’d see the stages in your sales process reflected here. So, you can select one or multiple opportunity stages, add that rule. Terminus is going to pull all of the companies from your Salesforce that match.
Jay: So, the idea here, Alex, is that those companies that match would start to see advertising, the people in the right department, of course, would start to see advertising about your company and that’s because we know they are considering making a purchase because their current state in the funnel is under negotiation or at the proposal stage.
Alex: Yes. This becomes really powerful with allowing marketing to align with sales on the accounts and opportunities that they’re active in currently. So, if your organization maybe lacks perfect alignment between sales and marketing . . .
Jay: That never happens. I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Alex: No. Never for our customers, certainly. But this kind of puts marketing in the driver’s seat, right? So, giving you the ability to target these companies by opportunity stage, regardless of whether or not you have that alignment or interaction with sales.
You can also do some pretty powerful things within Terminus as far as these campaigns are dynamic, right, dynamic within Salesforce. So, we can set all sorts of triggers based on opportunity stage, really based on any of these objects here. So, giving the ability to build a holistic ABM strategy within Terminus and let your target companies progress and move through campaigns based on opportunity stage. That’s probably a little bit too deep for this demo, but we’re certainly happy to go into further detail with anybody who would like to learn more.
Jay: So, Alex, where do these ads go? Where do they show up? Is it on websites? Is it in social? Is it both? Where would a target person and a target company actually see this creative?
Alex: Yeah. That’s a great question. Let me do one thing first and I’ll kind of come back to answering that. But just to give you kind of the full context of how you build this audience. So, after we pull in the companies, which again, we’re just pulling the name of the company and their URL, you would come down here and define who’s the audience you would like to reach.
So, what is that functional department that you want to target with this specific campaign? So, having the ability to target the different functional groups, we also have the ability to engage with specifically the C-suite or the VPs within an organization, but you would select that department level here.
And then this is really where Terminus goes to work and the power of what our software does. So, we’re going to go out and do our partnerships with various data providers. We’re going to find all of the individuals in these accounts that match your audience criteria.
So, we’re going to find those specific individuals. We’re then going to match them to their cookie records, which that’s really the differentiator for Terminus and what we do is the ability to connect an individual at these companies with their cookie records. And that’s what makes this data actionable and gives us the ability to proactively target them and engage with them virtually anywhere they go online.
So, back to your question, Jay, around where will they actually see these advertisements. We integrate with 55 ad exchange partners. So, across traditional display channels, social channels, the big ones there being Facebook and LinkedIn, video channels–we can serve ads across all of those different networks, all those different channels. The different approach that we’re taking is instead of going having to determine and kind of guess where your audience is where you want to . . .
Jay: We’ll just find them. You’ll just find them for us.
Alex: Exactly. Right. So, we’re only advertising to the right people in these target companies and advertising wherever they go online.
Jay: And then once they click an ad, they go to a landing page that we create and setup and then perhaps they provide us some personally identified information. They sign up for email, etc. Then you would take it and put it back into your marketing automation system and you could then nurture them via email or what have you, but you’re going to run that in parallel with additional Terminus campaigns.
Alex: That’s exactly right, Jay. There are really a lot of cool things that our customers are doing and setting up bidirectional triggers and integrations with our marketing automation products, primarily through Salesforce but triggering campaigns and actions in Terminus based on lead scoring, or scoring from some more of those traditional lead gen programs like a marketing automation product, or setting up email campaigns to be triggered off of activity within Terminus. So, yes, absolutely. The two a pretty closely tied together.
What I’m going to show you next is what does this all look like. So, this is the reporting dashboard. So, this is showing you the campaigns that you have active, your aggregate level metrics. What’s unique to Terminus and gets pretty interesting is if we drill into a campaign we can check out and see how that campaign is actually performing at the account level. So, this is, again, a summary of the campaign that you’ve setup.
We’re then going to show you . . . we’re very transparent with our data. So, we’re going to show you how many companies we’re able to match and then specific to the audiences that you want to target, how many devices can Terminus engage with? So that’s how we’re going to define reach is the total number of devices that belong to your audience that we can engage with and advertise to.
And then you’re able to see by target company what does that activity look like? So, what is our reach? How many impressions and clicks are we driving? Exactly how much have we spent advertising to this organization? You could opt a company out of these campaigns by toggling this button here.
But we’re very transparent with our data. We’re going to write this data back into sales force and make it very easy to export into any BI or analytics tool you’re using. That’s where our customers are doing some really interesting things, layering Terminus on as a variable to really understand what is the impact not only to my overall win rate but to different stages, conversion percentages across different stages of my sales process.
So, some of the key areas that our customers are looking at and really using Terminus to increase conversions would be the amounts of leads that are turning into opportunities. How are we able to impact and accelerate deal velocity, so increasing that pipeline velocity? And then average deal size, right?
Jay: Definitely. Do you upload the ad creative into Terminus directly? So, we say, “Okay, here’s the ads for the marketing department. Here are the ads for the HR department. Here are the ads for the customer service department,” and you put those into the Terminus system right there?
Alex: Yes. So, Terminus is a self-service platform. So, our customers bring the creatives to us. They upload it into the platform. That was one of the remaining stages on the campaign builder. It’s as simple as a drag and drop. You would load that creative. You could setup some different A/B tests and rules for the creative. But yeah, load the creative in and Terminus will go ahead and bid on those ad spots based on the rules that you setup.
Jay: One of the things that I love is a) the interface is amazing. Right? There’s a lot going on here. This is a complicated system that’s doing a lot of magical things behind the scenes. But the interface is so clean you can instantly get an idea of what’s happening and what’s working and what needs to be improved. It’s terrific. But also, look, the reality is for a lot of people who jump in on Terminus, this is the first time they’ve ever done account-based marketing. So, they’re like, “Wait, I don’t quite exactly know how to do this right.”
So, what I love is that you have a really strong services department and each new customer gets a customer success buddy to make sure that this gets setup right, that it gets bombarded, that they’re maximizing the value of Terminus and I think it’s just terrific.
Alex: Yeah. Thanks for the feedback, Jay, it’s great. It’s definitely a powerful platform but some of the consistent and common feedback is that it’s just very easy to use. For anybody out there who may be looking at this and wondering, “How do I even get started?” One thing to note here is that every one of our customers has a dedicated success route. They are onboarding, troubleshooting support but it’s much, much more than that.
So, it’s helping you to really look at what, you know, are you doing today with your current sales and marketing programs? What does that outreach look like? What are you trying to accomplish? They’re going to help you build that initial ABM strategy. We use a document that you’ll be able to find on the Terminus website called our ABM framework to really outline what does that strategy need to look like. What are you trying to accomplish? They’re going to help you get these campaigns up and running and then at least once a month do a campaign review.
So, how are the campaigns performing? Where can we improve? How are we tracking towards our goals? Where do we need to tweak the strategy? We provide a lot of support for our customers. Our focus is how can we make Terminators, as we call them, successful with account-based marketing. So, we are dedicated at our core to making our users successful with this tool.
Jay: I love it. And actually, because it’s so efficient, you’re only putting ads in front of the people who you know are in this very narrow group that you’re looking for a particular company and a particular department in that company. The actually ad spend is typically not super high, right, because you’re not wasting ad dollars. You’re only reaching the people that you need to reach. So, that’s terrific too. Now, clearly you’ve got to pay for the Terminus software. I think it starts at $1,000 a month. Is that right, Alex, based on how many campaigns you’re running?
Alex: Yes. It’s primarily based on the number of campaigns. Really all of our plans are scoped customly depending on the needs of the individual client. There are two components. There’s that platform fee and then there’s the ad spend, the media spend. One thing to note on that is that Terminus does not markup media spend, which is also fairly unique. So, you control your ad budget within the campaign. Any dollars that you dedicate there, 100% of it goes to actually serving ads. There’s no premium, no markup on that.
Jay: That’s nice. I know other folks in the account-based marketing world to that, right? They actually take money off of your ad spend, which makes your ads work less hard, obviously. That’s fantastic. Man, I love it. I cannot wait to dig in. I’m going to start playing with this sucker and doing some amazing things. I’m just going to put ads of my face out there and just put it everywhere, all the people I need to talk to.
You know what would be cool, just even for a speaker, right? Every time I’m getting ready to do a speech with a company because I do a lot of company specific work now, just run a quick Terminus campaign just so people know, “I’m coming. I can’t wait to see you next week, everybody at this Fortune 500 company,” that would be really fun.
Alex: Yeah, absolutely. Events, webinars, that’s kind of an interesting use case where Terminus can really be used to drive attendance on the front end form the right companies but then also on the back end engage with all of the key influencers, decision makers in those accounts. So, if somebody’s showing interest, how can we really start to penetrate those accounts and help our sales team drive revenue there?
Jay: Yeah. It’s terrific. To learn more about account-based marketing . . . it is a revolution, guys, I’m telling you. This is the way everything is headed on the B2B side of the house. There’s a brand now book that was actually written by Sangram, who we’ll talk to in just a second, and it is called “Account-Based Marketing for Dummies.” And look, don’t pooh-pooh the Dummies series. It is a really good book. It’s really, really useful to understand how ABM works and how you can use it in your organization.
So, here’s a really cool thing. If you go to the Terminus site, there’s a special landing page offer down here that you can take advantage of, click the link below the video and you can go there and get a free chapter of the book and then they’ll show you how to do a full book and then also do a demo with Alex or Alex’s team to see the full capabilities of Terminus and you’re going to be glad you did. Because I think, just based on the short demo, you can understand how powerful this system is and how it can not only save you a bunch of money, but also massively improve your results.
And as Alex said, the alignment between sales and marketing gets a lot, lot better with this kind of tool in your arsenal. So, thanks very much for that and thanks for the special offer and congrats on the new book. I’m super psyched about that as well.
Alex, a couple questions for you before we wrap it up. You’re a smart guy. You could be doing anything. How did you get to Terminus and what’s your story there?
Alex: Yeah. Good question. So, if I’m being honest, actually the previous company I was at, I’d kind of heard about Terminus just from being in the area. I didn’t really know what account-based marketing was but saw that Terminus was making some noise. So, I decided to kind of take a look at what they did to actually setup a demo for the director of marketing at my previous company and I sat in and watched the demo. For me personally as a sales professional . . .
Jay: You’re like, “What is going on here?”
Alex: It was specifically when I saw Terminus’ ability to setup campaigns based on opportunity stage and on top of that, engage with customers and provide that air cover to me as a sales rep, across more channels than just email, I looked at it and I said, “This is the future. This is the way things are going. If you and your company aren’t doing this, like, you’re losing already and you might not even know it. For me, I kind of dropped everything I was doing and said, “I’m going to go pursue a career at Terminus. I want to be a part of this.”
Jay: Man, that is a fantastic story. I love that you shared that with everybody here at Marketing Marvels. That’s extraordinary. This is so good. What I do on this show is I say, “This is so good. I need to have you on the show.” What you did is quite a bit more, which is, “This is so good, I’m quitting my job and taking a job with these guys.” So, props to you.
Alex: I was the stereotypical sales rep. I wanted my marketing department to give me all this great collateral . . .
Jay: Give me a lead, baby. Give me the leads.
Alex: I would stick it in a folder, use it when I wanted to. As soon as I got into the account, I would opt all the people out of the email campaigns because I didn’t want marketing emailing them. And I saw Terminus and I said, “Wow, this is really powerful. This is going to help enabling my marketing department to get in front of people that I’m unable to as a sales rep, especially those more executive level individuals.” For me, that was it. I saw the power and I decided, “I’m going to go pursue a career at Terminus.”
Jay: That’s awesome. So, in addition to Terminus, and make sure you go to the landing page, get the free chapter of the book, setup a demo with Alex, see how they’ll work for your Terminus, in addition to Terminus, though, Alex, what’s a marketing marvel for you? What’s some marketing technology out there that you dig?
Alex: There are a lot of great tools out there. I would say personally my favorite is InsightSquared. I’m a numbers guy. I have a finance background. I’m very analytical in my business and the way I approach things. And ever since I started using InsightSquared, I’ve really been drawn to that tool. I’ve spent a lot of time there really analyzing everything we’re doing as a sales team and organization. I love that tool. I give those guys a lot of credit.
Jay: Yeah. It’s a really great one. They’d be a good candidate to have on this show to show how they kind of take a whole new approach to analytics and dashboards and arm you with information you might not ordinarily have. That’s a really good idea. We’ll talk to them and try to get them on a future episode.
Alex: Absolutely.
Jay: Anything else we left out before we wrap it up?
Alex: No. I would encourage anybody who’s interested to learn more to reach out to us. We’re happy to setup a demo to talk further. There’s quite a bit more than that the product does that I didn’t go into today. In particular how you can kind of setup dynamic campaigns and stage-based triggers, all those types of things.
Our team is really, really good at helping folks to figure out, “Okay, I’m new to account-based marketing. I’m new to Terminus. Here’s what I’m doing today. What do I need to start? What are use cases that will be impactful for me? Who are some of your customers that are facing similar challenges trying to drive similar objectives and where are they seeing success?” Reach out to us. We have some great customers out there, great case studies. Happy to setup time to talk and let you learn a little bit more.
Jay: Yeah. Absolutely do it. You’re going to be blown away at the capabilities of this tool. Sangram, Alex, thanks so much for being on the show. Fantastic demo. I appreciate it. I want to remind everyone that Marketing Marvels is a production of Convince & Convert Media. New episodes of this show approximately every three weeks.
To make sure that you get every episode, just go to subscribe, just go to the YouTube channel and subscribe. Go to bit.ly/marketingmarvels, all lower case. That’s bit.ly/marketingmarvels. Make sure you click the button and then they’ll know every time we have a new episode we can share with you. We’ve had, I don’t even know, like 10 or 12 episodes, just an amazing lineup of technologies that marketers should absolutely be considering. Go back and check out the archives too. You’ll be glad that you did, a special offer in every show as well.
As mentioned, Marketing Marvels is a production of Convince & Convert Media. We have a bunch of other great shows for you, including the Social Pros podcast, the Content Pros podcast, the Business of Story podcast, Influencer Pros, which is all about the emerging field of influencer marketing and the Convince & Convert podcast itself. Go to convinceandconvert.com/podcasts for the entire lineup and all of our previous archives.
So, on behalf of everybody at Convince & Convert and behalf of my pals at Terminus, thanks so much for being on Marketing Marvels and I’ll see you next time.