Google Cloud: Reigniting the spark. A year-long ABM journey
Personal relationships serve as the backbone of any long-term B2B partnership, influencing decision-making in complex sales cycles and high-stakes contracts.
These relationships foster trust, facilitate effective communication, and enable collaborative problem-solving, ultimately leading to increased customer loyalty and sustainable business growth.
These relationships are built over many months and indeed years. Meetings, roundtables, events, emails, calls, conferences, etc. – much conducted face-to-face.
These in-person encounters accelerate the trust-building process, create opportunities for problem-solving and innovation, and solidify the relational ties that are crucial for long-term business partnerships.
We have never witnessed anything like it.
In-person encounters came to an abrupt end.
Many enterprises felt the effects across their entire clientbase. Those relationships that once thrived had started to suffer.
Deep connections dwindled in the face of a greater challenge.
But, those meaningful connections are often still ‘alive’ beneath the surface.
At Google Cloud, we faced such a challenge with one of our long-standing clients – a global bank with whom we had been working for over 10 years.
While the roots of the partnership ran deep, we had lost broader team engagement. We had become part of the furniture, and the appetite to innovate had long since diminished.
So, to bring our partnership back to life, we built out a year-long Account-based Marketing strategy, embarked on a worldwide roadshow, and provided our client with the opportunity to network with some of the top executives from all corners of the world.
And the impact? Doors opening for multiple new conversations and opportunities; 80+ senior executives engaged; and a transformed Annual Contract Value (ACV) pipeline.
Not just a spark, but a roaring fire.
In a long-term partnership, it’s easy to lose sight of what matters most: your client.
We weren’t prepared to let complacency damage such a long-standing and deep-rooted relationship.
With the overarching theme of ‘Collective Intelligence’, we ran a series of intimate, exclusive events specifically for IT decision-makers within the bank.
Our main focus was to not let it feel remotely sales-focused for our contacts. This wasn’t about upselling or getting more money out of the client. This was about providing value-driven, insightful experiences to solidify the partnership.
Essentially, this was all about putting the client back at the center. Focusing on their transformation journey, their pain points, and their values – and how Google Cloud could support them across the board.
Feedback from attendees has been overwhelmingly positive and they expressed appreciation for the personalization of the event to reflect and celebrate the partnership between
The best relationships are those where both parties have shared interests, shared goals, shared passions.
Bringing the same principle into your professional relationships is just as effective.
Throughout the ABM journey, we wanted to showcase the highlights of our work with the bank, and to focus on the next stage of the bank’s transformation journey.
It was about demonstrating their modernization opportunities, and how Google Cloud fits into the bigger picture.
For the bank, sustainability had always been front and center – so, throughout the events, we kept sustainability as a definitive theme, allowing us to repurpose brand materials and demonstrate our shared values.
However, for such a global brand, we knew we had to create an experience that really cut through the noise. We had to offer these decision-makers something different, worthwhile, and better than the regular sales content they were so used to.
By curating a hyper-personalized, exclusive, co-branded experience in multiple locations, we successfully demonstrated the strong commitment of Google Cloud to its partnership with the bank.
We offered first-hand insights from the greatest minds at Google, alongside proven success stories from other enterprises, plus elevated dining experiences and networking opportunities in New York, Singapore, Hong Kong, and London.
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If we wanted to highlight the value of our partnership with the bank, we knew we had to make the events feel as exclusive and intimate as possible. And that meant we needed to find the right balance between Google participants and the decision-maker IT audience.
We wanted to provide the contacts with ample opportunities for invaluable One-to-one conversations with the experts from Google Cloud – about their challenges, future plans and further initiatives.
ABM program reignited relationships with board members from the account HQ globally. Transformational pipeline in the works. I can clearly see a link back to the Roadshow
We made sure there was approximately one Google Cloud representative for every three or four customers in attendance.
Those customers consisted of IT and C-Suite decision-makers, and the most senior customer stakeholders based in London, Singapore, and New York.
We also had extra Google Cloud attendees on hand, as relationship and networking staff.
This was generally up to 10 Google reps for an event of up to 20 IT decision-makers, so as to ensure more meaningful networking conversations could take place.
And that meant securing buy-in and alignment.
To gain a complete understanding of both the challenges and opportunities within the account, we sought insights and input from various teams within Google Cloud – from Sales to Customer Success.
From here, we allocated a budget, with a clear goal of a ‘10x’ return on investment in the fiscal year.
But, this collaboration needed to extend beyond the foundational planning phases.
In rolling out these events, we needed both the Marketing and Sales teams to work in tandem, to create a highly personalized and memorable experience.
Running these events in multiple geographic regions was uncharted territory for our teams – which made total alignment and collaboration all the more crucial to the success of the program.
For our client, we knew our content had to feed into the experience. We needed to reinforce Google Cloud brand affinity across the organization, echoing the leadership sentiment as to how we could help the bank to deliver differentiated services and solutions.
As center stage for our digital campaign, we created a video titled “The Google Cloud & ‘Customer’: A World of Possibilities”. This snapshot celebrated key moments during the customer’s Google Cloud journey, as well as exploring the future possibilities of our partnership.
It was all about helping the bank to see how much we valued our long-standing relationship.
All of our creative – from the social campaigns promoting the events to the content we shared throughout the roadshow – had one thing in common: It was focused on shared values and goals.
The messages we conveyed to the bank had to be inspiring and to offer true value – not focus on selling a solution, but instead demonstrate just how much we have to offer, through the partnership.
By sharing our insights and expertise on pressing issues such as sustainability, security and diversity, and the benefits of instilling a culture of innovation in the organization, we helped to position Google Cloud as a strategic partner, as opposed to just another solution provider.
This type of activity and engagement is having a hugely positive effect on our relationship, especially for some of the regional leadership & teams
Strengthened relationship with key people across multiple sub-regions focusing on innovation & growth objectives opening door for multiple new conversations & opportunities
Quite simply, they speak for themselves.
By bringing the bank’s Global C-level executives together with their regional peers, and having them stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the senior Google Cloud team, we strengthened relationships with key people across multiple sub-regions.
We were able to engage 80+ senior executives in 2022 – including the CEO of the customer’s Singapore Headquarters – influencing a significant growth in pipeline. And our learnings from the events have also helped to shape our approach for 2023 and beyond.
Not only have we secured the budget to continue the roadshow for a second year, but we have also doubled our global footprint, with seven locations and a heavy focus on APAC regions to further increase brand awareness.
With our extended program, we aim to capitalize on the momentum established in 2022, further energize the relationship, improve education on Google Cloud’s values, and take the performance of the bank to the next level.
The program has now become a case study for global ABM execution, with a customer-first, human-to-human mindset at its heart.
