Jay Schwedelson: We are back for Do This Not That, and we have a guest who is very awesome. He's an incredible human being. So who do we got here? We have Steve Armenti, who you may follow on LinkedIn 'cause he's a big deal. So this guy has had a wild career. First of all, he ran a lot of demand gen at Google for, like, a zillion years. That's a hard job running demand gen at Google, right? He's been ranked the number one ABM expert in 2026 right now, and he's helped to build pipeline of over $2 billion. Two billion. I can't even get, uh, two, $2,000 of pipeline. That is wild. He's the founder of an agency called twelfth, and he's really all about ABM and attribution and AI slop, getting rid of it, and all the things. So we're gonna dig into it all. Fired up that he's here. Steve, welcome to the show, man

Steve Armenti: Thanks, Jay. Wow. I, I'm, uh, I'm so grateful to be here. I, I wanna take that clip and maybe put that on my website 'cause it's so damn good

Jay Schwedelson: All right, well, before we get into, like, everything about, you know, your, your take on what's working with ABM, what's working with, like, how to get people in pipeline and stuff, what did I miss? What that-- What do you actually do for a living?

Steve Armenti: Yeah. So I mean, that's a great question. For, for a living these days, I would say I'm, I'm helping clients figure out ABM, uh, in, in all it that means, right? And so if you follow, uh, you know, best practices, there's, you know, there's one-to-one ABM, there's one-to-few, there's one-to-many. That's all been disrupted by AI and the access to tools and data we have now. And so companies that are selling large ticket, high ACV deals to, you know, the Fortune 1000 is where ABM plays well. And so they're either navigating how to set that up properly, or they're navigating how to modernize it with, with AI and a lot of the technology today. And so that's pretty much the day-to-day is figuring that out, right? And I, I have a team of, of really senior, uh, strategic folks that, that help bring it to life in the day-to-day. But, you know, my job is like, what's, what's going on in ABM three months from now, one year from now? That's what I'm thinking about

Jay Schwedelson: A- all right, so let me jump in there for a second. I got a question. So everybody out there is listening like I, I know what ABM is, right? Well, if you don't, we're talking about account-based marketing. You have a set of accounts of these companies that you wanna get business from, and that's who you're marketing to. That's who you're doing all your outbound stuff, whatever. And I gotta be honest, of course, I do a lot of ABM stuff, but when I hear ABM, the first thing that comes to mind is cold email. Uh, we're just gonna set, you know, f--k get a bunch of these cold emails that are... We don't have permission or whatever on, and we're gonna send out a zillion emails, and that's... When I think of an ABM program, that's what I think of. Is that still the current state of the union? Is that still how brands are doing ABM, or is-- am I-- is that a thing of the past?

Steve Armenti: So two things. One, that, that f- phrase there is the bane of my existence, and I am actively trying to, uh, dispel that everywhere I go. And the, the second thing is, so one, one thing that's happened in the market around ABM is that smaller, ambitious, you know, startup, scale-up type companies caught onto this idea of ABM because they all wanna sell larger deals as well, and they said, "We're gonna run ABM." And then in parallel to that, you had a bunch of offshore agencies and, and, you know, micro consultants type, type folks that say, "I do ABM for startups." And in my mind, that is completely contradictory. You cannot do ABM for startups because the complexity that real true ABM requires. And so what happened is a lot of these companies flooded the market with these services, and they'll say, "Hey, we will build you an account list. We'll go scrape contacts off of ZoomInfo, Clay, um, you know, whatever tool you wanna use, and then we will start sending them personalized messages, and that's your ABM." And so, like, on the surface, that sounds pretty good, but when you pull back the curtain, all that is is cold email, and that is 100% not e- you know, not ABM. We can, we can get into that, and I can, I can rant for hours about how terrible of an idea that is. But yeah, that's, that's what's happening. And so right now, there's, there's folks that, you know, really practice ABM. They're ABM experts and practitioners. They work at companies like Snowflake, Red Hat, um, you know, big enterprises, Atlassian. They're running true ABM, right? And these programs produce hundreds of millions and billions of dollars in pipeline and, and that's where I came from on the Google side. And then you've got this whole other world of startups that are trying to apply ABM to companies that are selling a few thousand dollar ARR deals, and it, and it just doesn't work. The, the economics will never work for you

Jay Schwedelson: So, okay, if the idea of true cold email is a little bit of a relic, which I'm pro that it's a relic 'cause it kind of annoys the crap out of me, um, demand gen is getting hard. I mean, is it now, is the move to generate, you know, this inbound opportunity just create a bunch of AI slop and it's all about quantity not quality, and then your, the phones are gonna ring? Or is that n- like, how do we actually generate demand without the cold email garbage?

Steve Armenti: Yeah, it is getting really hard, and I personally have been on the front lines of it, right? And, you know, the, on the twelfth agency, we've set up cold email programs. We've set up, uh, you know, ad programs, email lifecycle programs. We've done it for startups all the way to multi-billion dollar enterprises. And so we've had a front row seat to watching the decline of these channels because it's not just cold email. What I think is happening is that, you know, two things. One, we're, the channels are getting more crowded, so there are more and more companies being started. Every AI company on the planet right now has a distribution problem. They maybe have a good product, maybe they don't. They're trying to find product market fit, and once they do, the next thing their investors say is distribution, right? Go hire a growth leader and start, you know, pumping your product out there. So everybody's flooding into demand gen trying to generate demand, and that's, that's having an impact on the economics in these channels where, you know, I've been looking at some data that shows the rising co- acquisition cost in B2B on Google Ads, for example, as a channel. The rising cost, uh, on LinkedIn, and then in parallel, looking at the de-declining performance of cold email. You know, open rates, reply rates are, are dropping fifty plus percent year over year because, again, everybody's flooding to it. And then the other element, which is, you know, a bit contrarian right now, is that AI is making it worse. So it is incredibly easy right now for an offshore GTM engineer to build a list, set up Instantly, set up outbound email infrastructure, mailboxes, DNS, all that stuff, automate some messages. You can even personalize them with Claude Code. I've seen some good personalization. But then just basically relentlessly blast those messages to thousands and thousands of people, which you think like, "Oh, that, that sounds good." Like unit economics means if I email fifteen thousand people, I should get a few opportunities out of it. Where early last year that was true, now it's not because you have that other factor of everybody's doing it. And so, you know, the person that really suffers from this is, is actually the buyer. Like, it's the end buyer who's going to suffer because they're getting bombarded with all of this slop. And, you know, I just, I think creativity's been lost in demand gen and amongst all those other factors, that's kind of the recipe for why it's so hard right now.

Jay Schwedelson: So I, first of all, I agree with everything you're saying, and I, I, my hot take on all things is that, um, when we actually do get people to fill out a form, to maybe call inbound to do whatever, we are, I think as a, companies in general, are slow to focus on those people. And yet if somebody sends like a nasty unsubscribe, "Take me off your list, why are you emailing me?" All this energy and meeting time goes to, "Oh my God, we have people that are upset over here." Do- is there an intentionality of your clients and the people that you're working with about inbound and phone calls and form fills? Like, is, is that something you have to like make sure everyone's focused in on it? And like how do you do that?

Steve Armenti: Yeah. I, you know, I think that is, is true. You know, where, you know, outbound had its moment last year, and then I think inbound brand PR is now having its return moment after that because all of those tactics were abused, and so folks realized quickly, or some are still realizing, that it doesn't work. And so I think, you know, one of the ways I think about inbound is, is value creation. So if you want inbound, you need to create value. Otherwise, there's no reason for someone to come to your website, right? And so, you know, even though I, I kind of bash on these channels frequently, oftentimes what I find is that it's not the channel, it's, it's the purpose, it's the means, it's the intention behind the channel, right? And so if you're, for example, just, uh, you know, running that workflow I mentioned of like Clay plus Instantly and Claude Code, and you're, and you're sending thousands and thousands of emails a month, and you've personalized based on the same template that everyone else is, which, which is basically, "Hi, I, I noticed something. Here's what my product does. Would you like to book a demo?" That's not creative. There's no ingenuity there. There's nothing unique about that, and so it's not gonna perform well. Whereas where I have seen these channels work is when you offer something of value, whether that's in, uh, you know, an audit or an invitation to a webinar or invitation to join a podcast or, um, some of the things we're doing now around one-to-one experiences is super unique. And so the, the channel can work, but what you put into the channel is becoming more and more important. And then how you, you know, distribute and really like compound that message across all your channels is ultimately what we see work, right? So it's more full funnel, uh, across multiple buyers, and that's, that's I think what the, the promise of ABM is when you can get that right.

Jay Schwedelson: So how do you measure that? I mean, uh, uh, I know that's a loaded question, but everyone's saying, you know, not everyone, sometimes I say attribution is garbage. And even though it's not, I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth because I feel like sometimes it's hard to get your arms around, uh, real attribution. I mean, how do you, how do you measure attribution?

Steve Armenti: Yeah, that's, that's the question, and it's such a l- a loaded gun on LinkedIn, right? The pro-attribution, anti-attribution. I, I probably fall somewhere in the middle where we actually have a unique a- attribution model called Account Progression, where we're actually measuring, uh, or we're, we're indexing the accounts that we're targeting. So let's say there's 100 accounts that we're targeting in a program. We actually look granularly in the behavioral data at the account level over time, so we can see are people from that account, and therefore that account in general, moving towards a, you know, lower funnel sales type conversation. And, you know, there's, there are some pretty good tools out there. Um, like we, we do a lot with data analytics and tool called CallRail, which can do like inbound call attribution tracking, which is pretty cool and sort of like, uh, you know, collates all the data for you. So, like we might pull a signal from that that says, oh, you know, somebody from this company or this person called in the other day and it was after hours, and so you missed that call, but we now have a signal that something's going on like, you know, with that person or within that, that, that business. Um, and so we like tie that back to the account progression model, and then when you're, you know, when you're doing this right and you have ads firing, you have events going on, you've got, you know, uh, media, you've got emails going out and you're tracking web visits, now all of a sudden demand gen becomes a function of generating signals. And you, and if you track those signals properly, you can get a pretty good sense of what's happening with your buyers and the companies you're targeting, and then you can action off of that. And so there's, you know, there's a whole model around it. There's scoring involved and as you move accounts from, you know, high funnel to low funnel, you can, uh, you kind of predict and, and orchestrate next steps. And, you know, to me, that's kind of the, the future of marketing, right? It's, it's, uh, a lot more science now with AI, but, uh, we, we can't forget about the art and we can't forget about the brand and the creative side.

Jay Schwedelson: Well, see, I love the fact that you talked about inbound signals and using cool tools like CallRail, which I'm obviously a big fan of. I always talk about them. And the reason I, I, I'm happy you're talking about the signals is I think there's so much energy at brands, business brands, consumer brands, doesn't matter, about negativity. Meaning, like I talked about, nasty unsubscribes or we need to figure out how to wake the dead. How do we get people that have not opened or clicked or done something in six months or 12 months or whatever, how do we get them engaged? And there's all these endless meetings and discussions and whatever, how do we get these people that are not really invested in what we're doing, that don't care about what we're doing, to get involved? And then there's not as much time spent on how about our new customers? How about the people that just signed up? How about we focus on the people who give a crap about what we're doing? So when you talk about signals, that's coming from such a, a positive mindset. And, you know, speaking of positive mindset, before we run out of time on this thing, give me some rapid fire, you know, quick tips and tactics on here's how you should be using AI. Here's something else you shouldn't be doing with ABM. Whatever it is that the Steve Armenti secret to life is, hit us with what you got

Steve Armenti: Oof. Okay. Secret to life. Uh, I'm still figuring that out. I, I, I just turned 40, and so this is, this is my decade to figure that out. Um, but on the, on the professional side, I, I would say there's a, there's a few key concepts and, you know, one is I, I used this phrase y- a while ago on LinkedIn. I called it first draft marketing, and this applies to AI. Do not do first draft marketing. And, and I'll explain what this is, which is you have a problem, your boss asks you to do something, your peer asks you to do something. Like, you get an input, right? And I think the, the habit today is, "Oh, let me take that transcript. Let me take my notes. Let me just drop it into AI. AI's gonna give me something back, and then I run with it." That's, that's a first draft. That is a horrible idea, and you need to, you need to, you need to, one, curate the context way better. I- just a transcript with no other context about, you know, your, your role, your company, your market, your ICP, your problems, that's not enough context to get a good output out of AI. So you need to be ruthless with the context, and then I think you need to be ruthless with the editing. And if you tackle those two things, I think you can get a lot of good output out of, of AI.

Jay Schwedelson: All right. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. Keep

Steve Armenti: Oh, I'll say that's one. I'll give you one other fun one, um, which we're doing a lot of right now, is point AI behind the scenes. So AI rampantly, in my opinion, ruined the sales process for B2B. If, if the la-- I don't know when the last time you bought software, Jay, is, but, like, it- nowadays there's, there's no humans involved. Like, you're getting on the phone. You're maybe talking to an agent who's asking you a bunch of questions and running a BANT or, like, MEDDIC process on you, and then you, maybe you're actually genuinely interested and you get an automated email. Like, the whole thing's automated. And, you know, as, as a former corporate buyer and now, you know, I buy little tools and stuff for the agencies, I hate it. And so we point AI behind the scenes and we do it at the research level, at the scoring level, at the insight level so that then you can enable actual humans to, to go and sell to other humans. Uh, but yeah, uh, we could go on and on. I would love to hear what you

Jay Schwedelson: All right. Well, I, well here, more important than all this stuff, so you just turned 40. I just turned 50, so I can tell you about the 40s, but I wanna know, so like you hit this big milestone, right? 'Cause I just did it when I had turned 50. You, when you turned 40, were you like, okay, now, per- on the personal level, were you like, now I'm gonna bungee jump and skydive and, you know, go touch grass? Like, what did you decide you had to start doing when you hit this milestone?

Steve Armenti: So I'll, I'll g- go personal here for a bit. I, I think for a long time I got lost in my career as my identity. So, you know, and when I worked at Google, I mean, that was the, the biggest accomplishment of my life, and I, and I loved it. I loved the people there. I still love that company, I, you know, and what they stand for and, but it wrapped me up. It became my identity, and I lost track of actually living, right? And, like, having hobbies and doing things that are not, uh, B2B marketing. And so I went, like, way too deep on, on that side and, you know, now hitting 40, and I've been on this, this thought journey for the last two years as... And one of the reasons why I wanted to, uh, work for myself and be a founder was, man, the, the things that are important to me, like in this order, is, like, my health, my wife, my kids, and, like, going on vacation and having fun with them. Like, that's, that's the priority, and I'm, and I'm orienting everything else in my life around that, and I've found, you know, that's my North Star. I'm like, "That's what keeps me happy. That's what brings me joy," and it, and it also fires me up. Like, I get motivated to go to work because I'm, you know, I'm doing this for other people

Jay Schwedelson: Oh. Well, first of all, I wish I would've figured it out when I was 40. I'm starting to figure it out now that I'm 50. Um, and then my, my son, who's 20, said, "Dad, you're closer to 100 than 0." I go, "You can also shove it."

Steve Armenti: Right? You're like, "Hey, bro, I'm still stronger than you. I can still beat you into

Jay Schwedelson: I... Even though, but meanwhile, he can, like, out-lift me easily, and I'm not that strong. I go, "I don't care how much you lift. I will kick your butt for the rest of your life.

Steve Armenti: Yep

Jay Schwedelson: mess with me, dude." Uh, but everybody should follow Steve. All right, Steve Armenti on LinkedIn, A-R-M-E-N-T-I on LinkedIn, twelfth agency. The guy shares incredible content. We're gonna put it all in the show notes. Steve, what else do you wanna tell everybody about you? And tell everybody why you're awesome

Steve Armenti: Yeah. Thanks, man. I, uh, go to my LinkedIn, hope, you know, decide for yourself if I'm awesome or not. But I'll, I'll, I'll leave you with one thing that we, we've been doing a lot of, which has just been a blast, is these signal-based one-to-one experiences. And so we're, we're deeply researching prospects, and then we're curating experiences. So kind of like gifting, but think, you know, rounds of golf, ceramics classes, sushi-making classes, at-home chefs, driving Ferraris around, uh, you know, sports, sports tracks and stuff. And I'm, I'm so fired up about it, like our clients are, are thriving with it. And, uh, I, I would encourage anybody to, to think about that, think about how you can bring more human back into your marketing. Um, we're doing a ton of it, and it's working

Jay Schwedelson: Love it. Love it all. All right, Steve, man, appreciate you being here.

Steve Armenti: Likewise. Thanks, Jay