In this episode of Revenue Boost: A Marketing Podcast, Kerry Curran and Erin Cigich, CEO of PerformCB, discuss driving business growth through account-based marketing (ABM) strategies. Erin shares her 17-year journey at PerformCB, focusing on how they identified their ideal customer profile (ICP) and aligned marketing with sales to generate high-quality leads. She highlights the importance of sales and marketing alignment, performance-based marketing, leveraging data to optimize campaigns, and how ABM has enabled PerformCB to secure large-scale clients. This episode offers valuable insights for executives focused on revenue growth and lead generation.

Podcast transcript

Kerry Curran, RBMA (00:01.607)

All right. So welcome, Erin. I'm very excited to have you with us today. Tell us about you and your background and your experience.

Erin Cigich (00:10.67)

Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to join you this morning. My name is Erin Sigich and I am the CEO at PerformCB. I've been CEO of the business for about 10 years, but I've been with the business for 17 years. So I joined the business as one of the first 10 employees and started in an account management role and kind of worked my way up over time here.

And what does PerformCB do? PerformCB works alongside your existing agency relationships or your existing channel or partner relationships to help you find new incremental customers all on a pay for results model. So when brands work with us or if agencies work with us, they only pay when they get a new customer.

We built all kinds of proprietary tech that's patented, that helps us power and do that. But that's been the story of PerformCB and really my career. I've been here for 17 years, so it's a good long time.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (01:09.13)

That's amazing. That's a great tenure and clearly you're doing something right. So we've talked a bit about the challenges for agency growth, especially B2B strategy and business growth. So I'd love to hear about what strategies and approaches you've taken over the years to help continue the growth of PerformCB.

Erin Cigich (01:34.082)

Yeah. So, you know, there's been all sorts of growth stories to the business being in business for, you know, since 2002. But what's been top of mind for us recently has been a focus on account based marketing. We have been the epitome, like so many of my peers I've talked to, like the Cobbler's kid has no shoes, right? We do marketing for our clients, but we haven't really been super serious about it for ourselves. And so over the last 12 to 18 months, we have focused on figuring out our ideal customer profile, getting account -based marketing up and running, and then getting that handshake between sales and marketing like lockstep. That's been a big, big focus of ours and like to kind of unpack that more if you want.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (02:21.437)

Yeah. So, starting with the ICP, how did you, like, what did, you know, we were like, I went for myself. I want to, I want to market to everyone. I want to work with everyone, but you know, you have to put in your targets. So how do you, what was the process that you and your team went through to decide who's the best ICP for you?

Erin Cigich (02:43.34)

Yeah, I mean the promise of performance marketing is that you can have a very broad client base and we have acquired six businesses over the years and integrated them. So we actually can play pretty big …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (02:53.545)

Wow.

Erin Cigich (02:56.182)

… pond. And so for years, we were like, well, we could work with anyone, we can work with anyone, which then meant our marketing was like just broadcasting to everyone. But that meant that our marketing funnel and our sales funnel, like it was like, you've got all of this and it spits out X. So finally, we said, hey, maybe people aren't crazy. Like maybe there is something to this ideal customer profile thing. The first thing we did is we looked at a bunch of data, you know, we've got data on the business. That's another beauty of performance …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (03:04.763)

Mm-hmm. 

Erin Cigich (03:26.098)

… marketing is when you've got so much data at your fingertips. And we tried to identify through the data who our best customers were. And that gave us some indications, but honestly, it wasn't a roadmap. wasn't a, this is so obvious. Here they are. And we had some really smart folks look at the data externally for us too. We're owned by private equity and we got all their summer analysts to take a look and go, well, what do you see here? And nobody came up with anything, but we're fortunate in that, you know, …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (03:28.425)

Yeah.

Erin Cigich (03:55.95)

My EVP of marketers, who's the head of sales and our COO and our CSO, they've all been with the business for 15 years. So we said, okay, like in your heart of hearts, in your gut, we know who the best customers are. Let's write it down. So we wrote it down. And for a quarter or two, we followed it. And we said, we are only going to onboard these types of clients. And it worked really well. And then we got, you know, we're like, that's working well. Like, let's just try, you know, expand …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (04:09.257)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Erin Cigich (04:25.976)

… again and that quarter was terrible so once you find something that's working you have to keep doing it for sure.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (04:29.712)

Yeah. That's so interesting and it's such a good example of, yeah, like you want to do it all and realizing that honing in is what makes you successful. Did you look at company size, revenue size or vertical or some of, you don't have to give us all the ingredients to your secret sauce, but you know, how did you kind of really narrow it down?

Erin Cigich (04:56.918)

Yeah, so for us… vertical is a big key factor. So we do really well in e-commerce, in finance, and in lifestyle and entertainment. So those are kind of our big buckets. And obviously there's a lot of room to play inside of those. And then we also said, you know, the person, the company needs to come with a defined outcome. So we're all about outcome-based marketing. They need to come and know that they're buying calls or they're buying app installs or they're buying app engagements or they're buying, you know, sales of a product like …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (05:05.151)

Mm-hmm.

Erin Cigich (05:29.336)

We are not at the stage where we want to launch your program for you if you've never done it before. We want you to have some data and some understanding of what your customer lifetime value looks like. So those are some of the pieces of the puzzle for us. Big picture that can help. And we've got research tools that help us see who's out there and who's spending. But then a lot of times it comes down to the deal dynamics. So what can they afford to pay for a customer? What is customer acquisition?

Kerry Curran, RBMA (05:36.117)

Yeah.

Erin Cigich (05:59.133)

Flow actually looks like we want to find good partners and so the other thing we did is we increased our test budget which kind of sounds counterintuitive like make this frictionless, make it as easy as possible to get started. We wanted people that actually wanted to build a data set, were ready to optimize, and wanted to be able to scale up and spend millions of dollars. Because our biggest and best clients do spend millions of dollars. And so if you aren't willing to commit to a 30k or a 50k test budget, then it's kind of an early indicator that there might be a failure to ramp up in the relationship, and this isn't the right thing for you.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (06:33.869)

Yeah, I love the level of specificity because you're right. Like you want a client that's going to come in and be your partner. Listen, take your advice and this is what's going to work and increase that. So that's definitely something new that I haven't heard before of kind of a minimum test budget. But it sounds smart. And so it sounds like it's been working. And so one other question with when you're talking to you're going after ICP, do you look at the different titles of your targets, different levels within the organization, or do you kind of pick more of the organization and then reach out to them? I guess that kind of gets into your ABM.

Erin Cigich (07:21.164)

Yeah. So when we are creating our ICP list, we start, you know, we are very specific and we go and we find the company first. and then within the company, we are looking for titles. We are looking for a lot of titles because you know, the research shows, and you probably know this and could speak to it probably even more eloquently than I could. It's like, there's such a buying committee anymore and you've got to know.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (07:29.983)

Mm-hmm.

Erin Cigich (07:46.904)

Who your decider is, who your influencer is, you're not just selling to one person. So we've got, we've got like, we try to get like a whole nest of potential contacts within that organization.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (07:59.475)

Yeah, so smart. I can visualize how you've really identified who your target is. And so then the next step is to start the relationship. So talk us through your next steps of building that out into an ABM campaign.

Erin Cigich (08:19.254)

Yeah, so our marketing team will take kind of the wish list of clients and then they build out an ABM campaign and the ABM campaign is quite sophisticated and passes back and forth between sales and marketing and creates those touch points. But it involves email, involves kind of retargeting paid media, and then it involves more personalized outreach over time to the contacts as well. For years and years and years, we were like, how do we just be the biggest brand out there? How do we spend the most money and just get visible?

Kerry Curran, RBMA (08:34.889)

Mm-mm.

Erin Cigich (08:56.936)

Ultimately, like when we sat there and tried to run the performance numbers ourselves, it didn't make a difference. It's so much more like person to person or person to company selling. And so we've pivoted to this, which has been an interesting pivot over time. Like, you know, it feels a little counterintuitive not to just try to be seen as the biggest, but like, we just want the folks that need our services and can spend a lot of money. That's who we want to know who we are.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (09:10.751)

Mm-mm. Yeah, I get that. And so how did you start your kind of strategic planning with ABM? Are you looking at, did you look at different media channels? You talked about retargeting an email. Like how did you start that approach?

Erin Cigich (09:40.044)

Yeah, because we have the email addresses and the contacts that we want to reach. We essentially pick one paid media platform and then try to get a match there and build a critical mass.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (09:51.945)

Mm-hmm.

Erin Cigich (09:54.304)

Lots and lots of creative and kind of a whole funnel of like, cool, they're going to see this and now they'll see this and now they'll see this. And that's tied in with an email campaign as well. So we try to launch on one paid media platform, get the learnings from it, see what creatives are working well with that segment, because their segmentation involves for us, it's at the vertical level, right? We're saying something different to our finance clients than we're saying to our life …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (09:56.467)

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Erin Cigich (10:24.34)

… and entertainment clients. And then once you find winners, we try to expand it out to other platforms. So like if we start with Google, we'll go to LinkedIn, or if we start with LinkedIn, we can go to Google and things like that.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (10:25.951)

Right. Great. And so did you have a challenge getting a large enough data pool to make those decisions?

Erin Cigich (10:46.016)

It did take us a little bit. We've got a big client wishlist and so depending on what your ICP is, that could be a problem because you have to have a critical mass for the platforms to go, okay, we've got enough matches to do something with this. Fortunately with the scale of our business we do, but if you are a smaller shop that might present a challenge. Like how have you seen people solve that problem if you can't get a big enough data set?

Kerry Curran, RBMA (11:12.435)

Right, yeah, no, I think that's a big challenge, especially because as you talked about, you really want to narrow down and target. And so I know I've been on those platforms and you're like, it's a small number and you're kind of, it takes time to get the data. it's, yeah, and I think getting it from multiple platforms as well helps to pull it in and kind of cross reference.


And so did you also test different messaging? You talked about creativity. How did that process kind of expand and kind of identify what really resonates? You want to make sure, to your point, you want to stand out, you want to demonstrate your expertise.

Erin Cigich (11:52.334)

Yeah, absolutely. So we are testing right now, I think about 10 different creative paths, I mean, they're not so wildly different, but we're in marketing, right? There's 10 kinds of pathways for the creatives highlighting this value prep or focus more on a special offer or focus more on making the person the champion. And so we've got those all testing and it's interesting to see like what's working in the finance vertical isn't necessarily what's working in the e -commerce vertical. And so it really does kind of play differently …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (12:01.865)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Erin Cigich (12:30.861)

… for that. So that means like for us the creatives or everything from the kind of the ad copy that might appear to some of the banner placements for the retargeting campaigns and then also the email cadences.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (12:40.255)

Mm-hmm.

Erin Cigich (12:45.326)

I mean, ultimately, we try to speak in plain English. Like, that's one of the big pieces for us. Like, sometimes we've all gotten those emails that are like, very, very in the weeds marketing jargon. And I'm like, I've been in this space for 17 years, and I can't tell what you're trying to sell me. Yeah.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (12:49.333)

Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Erin Cigich (13:04.93)

So we try to stay benefits focused. And then the other thing we really try to highlight for our company is we don't need to displace anyone. We're not trying to displace your agency. We don't need to displace your internal buys. We truly do help you find new customers that you're not tapping into through those other channels. And it's on a performance -based model. providing you with the right ICP, it's kind of a no -brainer to test if you've got the budget for it.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (13:21.663)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (13:29.634)

Yeah, no, that's, you're definitely getting the data and taking action on it, which is such a key part of ABM. And then another key part is getting the teams internally to, as you said, shake hands and really communicate together. So talk about kind of, did you have to build stronger communication between your sales and marketing team and how is that going?

Erin Cigich (13:53.538)

Yeah, so right now the leader of our sales team and our marketing team are very aligned. Being in this business for a long time, we've certainly had that not be the case, where it's friction and it's like, what the heck is this person doing? fighting over who's getting credit for stuff. We all want to land customers' eyes.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (14:07.092)

Yeah, yeah.

Erin Cigich (14:19.17)

But now I think we've got a really good relationship going. And I think one of the important parts as we were launching the AVM campaign is like, one, we really needed sales support to identify the right customers. Like they were a big piece of that puzzle. but two, like we sort of updated them almost weekly as we were getting things off the ground, like, Hey, this is what we've done. Here are the creatives that we're testing. How do you feel about this? Does this align with what you might say? We took some of their best cadences that they'd written for sales outreach and worked them into the campaign. And so I think that they really feel like they were partners in creating the campaign, which is giving them more buy -in. And then, you know, if I'm a sales rep and you can get me a booked call with one of these, you know, identified prospects, I'm pumped. So I think ABM is nice because of that.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (14:49.685)

Mm-hmm.

Erin Cigich (15:14.22)

I'm a sales rep, I want to talk to these people, you're going to get me a call with these people. Like, awesome. When we were taking a more full funnel approach, it was like, here's a lead. And you're like, I don't want to talk to this person. Like, they don't have your budget or they don't have the right campaign structure. And now you're wasting my time that I could be using elsewhere. And so I think that ABM actually helps to reduce some of the friction between sales and marketing.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (15:37.683)

Yeah, but it takes time. So, was that a shift in the kind of culture almost of I'm going to have fewer but better leads than to your point of like just looking at the volume number?

Erin Cigich (15:52.138)

Yes, yes. And so for us, rather than being really focused on the number of leads, we are looking for booked calls. So that's kind of what we're using as our North Star is like, how many booked calls are we securing? Because that means that somebody on our sales team has been like, yes, I want to talk to this person and the potential prospect has agreed to the call too. So now you really feel like marketing, I've brought the horse to water, now sales, you get them to drink, but we got that handoff going. And so it was a bit of an adjustment to go like, hey, what are the lead numbers? What are the lead numbers to how many calls are we generating?

Kerry Curran, RBMA (16:30.013)

Right. Right. And how did that, you mentioned your private equity own. So how did your corporate board kind of feel about that shift?

Erin Cigich (16:42.19)

Yeah. So I'm fortunate in that our private equity ownership is focused on media marketing and technology. In fact, they own Adweek and their last fund. so they're like, they get it. Many of them have been operators of agencies. And in fact, like, David Berklin sits on our advisory board, and he ran Dentsu for 10 years. And so from the day I met him, … 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (16:52.554)

Wow. Okay. We get it. So that's a huge benefit. Yeah.

Erin Cigich (17:10.67)

He was like, you need to be doing account based marketing. I wish I had listened to him at the beginning, you know? So I met him in 2021 when Berenter entered the business and he's like, you should do account based marketing. And I was like, sure. Yeah. We like it, we've got a plan. Now like years later, I'm like, he was so right. Like, why didn't I just listen to him at the beginning? So they were very supportive of it.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (17:17.178)

Yeah, yeah.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (17:32.403)

Yeah. Yeah. No, that's huge to have that buy-in because I think often the focus is on, like we're saying, the volume versus the quality. it's a shift, but it's getting you to your revenue goals. So that's what's important. so we talked a bit too about ABM, there's a lot of technology and AI that goes into effectiveness and efficiency. So can you share a bit of how you know, use the tech to be more effective for your team.

Erin Cigich (18:05.294)

Yeah. mean, from some of the basic use cases like ChatGPT. So, okay, here's one base marketing plan in terms of content and what the sales outreach might look like. Create 12 more versions of this. All right. You do need a human to look back through it and make sure that it doesn't get squirrely, but that has been a game changer for us to be able to implement things like that.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (18:12.98)

Yeah. To scale the copy and content.

Erin Cigich (18:35.5)

Yeah, and then the other piece of the puzzle that's been big is automating different pieces. So basically as soon as we've got a lead, right, in our outbound marketing email platform, then into our CRM, then it gets fed automatically based on a series of parameters. gets fed automatically into the right email cadence and all the systems are talking to each other and hey, the user behavior was this and so now we're going down this path. So a lot of that.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (19:06.889)

Yep. Yeah.

Erin Cigich (19:08.302)

We've really built out either leveraging some of our own builds, because we have our own development team of about 30 or so engineers, data scientists. But then for our sales pieces, we're using a lot of off-the-shelf AI, because a lot of our developers are focused on our own platform. We're focused on client service, the developers.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (19:26.153)

Yeah, of course. It's definitely such a valuable strategy and initiative to roll out. And so it definitely sounds like it's, it was a journey, but you're, you're on it for sure. What are your, excuse me, recommendations for a company that has heard about ABM has read about it. Like what a great way to get started and kind of start rolling out that initiative?

Erin Cigich (20:00.972)

I think the number one thing that you have to do is get real about your ideal customer profile because you could figure out all the intricacies and pieces of account-based marketing, but if you're not targeting the right people, you won't get the right results. For us, the longest piece of the puzzle is really coming to grips with this is who we want to target and being able to enrich and build out that list and get it to be big enough. Like that was the biggest piece.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (20:27.551)

Mm-hmm.

Erin Cigich (20:28.49)

The next step was segmentation. Like, okay, we've got this list, but do we really want to say the same thing to all of these people? In some instances, you might want to for us because we're vertical focus. We don't. And so it's almost like not the account based marketing pieces that the company has to show up with first, because I think that if you want to start a crawl, walk, run, you know, there's plenty of freelance or …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (20:39.423)

Mm-hmm.

Erin Cigich (20:53.207)

… you know, fractional or services agencies that can help you with the execution of the account-based marketing piece, like the buys and all of those intricate pieces of it, but you've got to know who your ideal customer profile is and like what you need to say to them in order to close them.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (20:55.379)

Yep. Right.

And sticking with it too, right? You shared a bit of when you want to, you know, go beyond. Yeah. So, yeah. So staying focused and even though you want, you might want to scale and expand more, but knowing that that's, that's really kind of sticking to your North star. Yeah. Excellent. Well, thank you, Erin. This has been super valuable.

Erin Cigich (21:16.214)

Yeah.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (21:33.843)

I've loved hearing more about your experience and kind growing your agency and congratulations on all of the success you've had over the past years. It's great to see such a successful female CEO. should say CEO that happens to be female. We need more of you out in our world, especially in our industry. So thank you. It's really great to have you today.

Erin Cigich (21:51.884)

So thank you, I've really enjoyed the conversation.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (22:03.295)

All right, thank you.