Anna Tsymbalist, Head of Account-Based Marketing (ABM) at Influ2, explores the rapid rise of ABM and its impact on modern B2B marketing.
She unpacks the evolution of Influ2’s platform, highlighting how it enables marketers to target specific decision-makers, build dynamic audiences, and track contact-level intent and engagement with precision. Anna explains why this shift—from account-level to person-level marketing—has been critical for delivering more relevant, measurable campaigns.
Throughout the conversation, Anna emphasizes that successful ABM hinges on tight alignment between marketing and sales, long-term strategy, and a deep understanding of buyer behavior. She also discusses common pitfalls, such as over-reliance on intent data and lack of cross-team coordination.
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About Influ2
Influ2 is a B2B marketing platform built to bring precision and transparency to account-based marketing. Instead of targeting entire accounts, Influ2 enables marketers to reach specific decision-makers within buying committees, delivering highly personalized ads and tracking engagement at the individual level. By connecting marketing activities directly to sales outcomes, Influ2 helps teams align more effectively, optimize campaigns with real data, and drive measurable revenue impact.
Time Stamps
00:00:17 – Guest Introduction: Anna Tsymbalist
00:04:12 – Influ2 Overview and Its Role in ABM
00:04:30 – Challenges in ABM and the Need for Precision
00:08:07 – Contact-Level Targeting vs. Account-Level Targeting
00:12:39 – Key Elements for Successful ABM Campaigns
00:15:03 – The Importance of Data and Timing in ABM
00:17:57 – Common Mistakes in ABM Campaigns
00:26:18 – Best Marketing Advice Received
00:27:13 – Advice for New Marketing Graduates
Quotes
“ABM is like this interesting mixture of strategic campaigns, demand gen and content, basically.” Anna Tsymbalist, Head of Account Based Marketing at Influ2.
“Human behavior is at the core of any purchase. And that’s what I always keep in mind that people are people and they’re going to be behaving the way people behave.” Anna Tsymbalist, Head of Account Based Marketing at Influ2.
“ABM is not just a marketing initiative. So ABM can’t be something that a couple of marketers are doing in their free time because it’s just not going to work that way.” Anna Tsymbalist, Head of Account Based Marketing at Influ2
Follow Anna:
Anna Tsymbalist on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anna-tsymbalist
Influ2 website: https://www.influ2.com/
Influ2 on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/influ2/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
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Transcript: Interview with Anna Tsymbalist at Influ2
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Anna Tsymbalist
Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today.
Mike: Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I’m joined by Anna Tsymbalist. She’s the head of ABM at Influ2, and she’s going to talk about one of the ways that marketing has really changed over recent years, which is this massive increase in ABM. So, Anna, welcome to the podcast. Looking forward to hearing about ABM. Can we start off by learning a bit about you, though? Can you tell us a little bit about your career and what made you choose Influ2 as your current company?
Anna: Yeah. Hi. Hi, Mike. Thank you so much for having me. So I have been with Enflue 2 for about four years at this point. I actually joined as an ABM manager and then just grew in the company. Before that, I was working for a company called Shelf, which, you know, was founded before the AI era. So it was a Google-like corporate search for contact centers and like Amazon robot builders and stuff like that. So before that I’ve done a lot of content. I think actually a lot of people who start in content end up in ABM because ABM is like this interesting mixture of strategic campaigns, demand gen and content, basically. And why I even started the whole ABM era is because We needed more business. We were in a situation at Shelf where we worked through all of the channels. We had a CMO who said, hey, we need to find what’s working and scale that. And that’s how we’re going to be successful. And that’s what we did. We found the best channel for the MQLs, we scaled it, and it stopped working. Very quickly. Because we just exhausted it. Because the audience has an end to it, and you need to find new and new channels all the way. So we were like, hmm. What do we do now? And that’s how we came across the whole ABM story and, you know, just learned it on the go and started focusing on very strategic deals and working with sales and working with partners. And I was really at some point I was marketing to like two accounts and working the actual deals with them together with sales. And I’ve been doing that for a while, I think like two or three years itself. And then Influe2 reached out to me because they liked my experience and what I was doing and how I see ABM. And the moment I actually saw the product, I was sold. I was like, I want to work here literally because I just wanted to use the product. And this is what I do all the time. Like my entire ABM program is built like whatever Influe2 covers is covered by Influe2 basically, because it solved my huge pain points of precision. It solved a lot of pain points with, you know, clear reporting and understanding what’s going on. So it was the product that sold me that position, basically. And that’s how I ended up in ABM. But yeah, at some point, I think I even like at some point at the start of my career, I managed a Facebook page with 7 million subscribers. And it was an entertainment page of a radio. So I think that is still some valuable experience that I took into the B2B world being fun and light and human.
Mike: I love that. I love the fact you joined the company because of the product. So, you know, maybe that’s a good place to start. You know, do you want to tell us a little bit more about what Influ2 does, how it helps ABM marketers and how it helps solve your problems?
Anna: The problems that I had when I got the offer was precision targeting. I had very specific accounts that I wanted to work and I was trying to launch one-to-one campaigns. I had this content. And when you’re just starting out ABM, very often you think, if I could only get this piece of content that I crafted for them in front of them, they would be, you know, they’re going to convert immediately. Which is not always the case, but that’s what I thought at that point. And I just couldn’t do it because of the audience limitation, because of the lack of transparency, like technically it was impossible for me to do anything on my side. And the only actual channel that I had was sales. And, you know, it’s kind of limiting when your entire program depends on whether the salesperson remembers to send the email or not. And also whether their prospect remembers to open and read the email and like, there’s just no transparency and it’s very hard to measure your influence. So when I was joining Ansible 2, it was a contact level advertising platform. So the main functionality was that you define the audience that you want to target, so name, surname, the company, and you define the ad creatives that those people are seeing. And then you would get reporting on how many impressions you serve to a specific person, whether you’ve yielded any clicks, and also the signals and what they engage with would go to the salespeople so they could work on that intent. Basically, that’s what we’re calling it right now. And that was brilliant. I was like, finally, like this will help me test out all of my content ideas and give me the power, like the control. I kind of have control issues, I think, but it will give me control over what’s going on with my, with the materials that I’m producing. specifically because they come from a content background. And then the product evolved and it’s like rapidly growing in orchestration direction. So now within Flute 2, you can build dynamic audiences. We would call them cohorts. So whatever data you have in your CRM, you can dynamically ad and remove people from your campaigns, you can build ad journeys. And by ad journeys, so basically, if the person meets the criteria, this is the creative they’re seeing. And then how, like, based on how many impressions you serve, the clicks, the intent you pick up. you can change the content. So you can create this curated ad experience for your prospects and tell a story and actually see if they’re paying attention. And our latest release was huge. We released contact level intent. So within Flutoo, you can now pick up search intent. You can pick up social media signals. content intent, but everything is on the contact level. And again, what’s different about it is that we’re not listening to everyone, right? You’re only selecting the listening cohorts of the people who you’re interested in. So this is a perfect tool for someone who like has a very clear strategy and a clear audience. And we can talk about that because that was also something that we had to come up with in order to be successful with Influe2.
Mike: So, I mean, the really cool thing about Influe2 is around this targeting a contact rather than targeting an account. And I think, you know, a lot of marketers listening would have been burned. They’d have got, you know, engaged with some of the companies that were offering advertising based on IP, and they said, we can target your, you know, ABM target list, but there may only be 20 decision makers in a company of 50,000, and you’re blasting ads to everybody. So talk to me a little bit about how Influ2 actually identifies at a contact level, and how successful it is at matching that contact level, because presumably it’s not going to be 100%.
Anna: So the technology of showing an ad to a specific person is actually not that innovative at this point. You can do matched audiences on LinkedIn, you can do matched audience on Google, but what you don’t have is the visibility into the impressions and the clicks and this contact level precision of reporting. Because just showing something to an account, you can define personas, you can define seniority, but that’s all sort of a black box for a user. And what Influ2 is very good at is actually, you know, reading that black box and using data to have a very, very educated guess on who’s seen the ad and who’s clicked on it. And I would say the accuracy is like 98%. So the accuracy of the reporting is very high. The only thing is that we, you know, we need to make sure that we can reach them. So with Enflo2, you’re paying for a matched target, not for like, you have a slot of a matched target, basically. So whoever we can match, we can reach them successfully.
Mike: And I mean, presumably a lot of companies want to use this for their ABM. I mean, who are your main customers or some of your big public customers?
Anna: Cub Gemini, AppsFlyer, Chargebee, a lot of companies. We actually have a case, a video case study with a customer who did not want to reveal who they are. Like they’re like, we love you so much. We’re going to do like a video, a production, but we don’t want people to know who we are because they work in a small space and they see it as their competitive advantage. So they’re like, you know, they just didn’t want to, they just didn’t want to disclose it. We do have a lot of enterprises as well. And they’re also very hesitant. The competitor is knowing about Influ2. Actually, I don’t think Influ2 is talked about enough. That’s why we’re here.
Mike: Yeah, hopefully we can help with that. I mean, it sounds like, you know, from what you said, that’s a quite a broad range of companies from very large enterprises to sort of smaller midsize companies. Is that a fair reflection?
Anna: Yes, so Influ2 is the best fit for companies who already have some sort of an ABM structure in place who work with the SDRs. So they have to be, they have to have a certain maturity of their marketing structure in order for them to be successful with Influ2. And we actually did a very deep research of our happy customers to figure out who’s the best, who’s the best fit. And that’s how we actually defined the audience for, for my work for ABM. And that means I work with a very specific sets of accounts who match those criteria. And that has improved our performance tremendously. Like my work is a little harder, but the company’s doing much better. simply because we only want to sell to people who we know are ready to adopt and be successful rather than, you know, Sometimes, like it’s all about the mindset as well. If you have a company that thinks ABM is a tactic and it’s a relatively small company, then they’re probably expecting results in like two weeks or something. So it’s not a good fit because that’s just not how ABM works. It’s not a product issue. So making sure that the vision on ABM aligns with our customers is what make, you know, it was make the revenue and the pipeline. are healthy for us.
Mike: I mean, that’s interesting. My next question is to ask you, you know, what do marketers need to do to get ABM right? It sounds like one of the most important things is to understand who you’re targeting. I mean, is that the primary thing you need to do to make an ABM campaign work well?
Anna: Well there are many things that you need to do. So ABM is not just a marketing initiative. So ABM can’t be something that a couple of marketers are doing in their free time because it’s just not going to work that way. ABM is a long term commitment and it’s a commitment from marketing sales and operations and With ABM, your stakes are very high, especially if you want to aim for a one-to-few, one-to-one campaigns. The stakes are super high. If it doesn’t work and it takes a year, then you’re screwed at the end of the year. So figuring out the right set of accounts and making sure you have the information like you’ve done your research. is something that is fundamental to a successful ABM campaign, but that’s not a guarantee, obviously. The execution also plays a role. However, I have gone through the process of where I was like, oh, let’s just pick the best 10 accounts that we want to convert from like different verticals. They are different a little bit, and we’re just going to be doing one-to-one. that’s how you end up in a situation where your messaging is the same for everyone you’re just slapping their logo on the ad and then you basically fake personalization because like my understanding of personalization ebm has also evolved to you know understanding that personalization is relevance and timing and if you are just pushing them through a funnel that you have imagined in your head without matching the reality that they’re in, it’s not going to resonate. And, you know, you can have the cutest creative in the world, you can have the best landing page, if it’s not resonating in that specific moment with that specific person, it’s not going to work.
Mike: And that’s really interesting. I mean, early on, I didn’t ask you about this, but you mentioned how important the reporting was within fleet two. And it sounds like what you’re saying is you really need that data of who’s ready, who’s in market. So you get that content to resonate and you get the timing, right? I mean, is that a key part of success?
Anna: I don’t think there is reliable technology that tells you that someone’s in market. I think the only reliable source to know that someone’s in market is actually talking to those people. Because you can be getting, you know, G2 in 10, you can be getting 6 cents in 10, you can be getting all sorts of intent, but it’s just like, it’s signals. It’s showing you activity, but it doesn’t paint a picture for you. Intent is not how you select an account, I think that’s how you prioritize. And intent also has an expiration date. So when you are, very often, when you’re building your ABM, like if you go with the very traditional ABM, route and you’re like I’m gonna do account scoring to make sure that the account is warm enough and that they are going to be Receptive to what the sales people are saying because if I give them to the sales too early Then the sales will stop trusting my judgment and my MQL account qualification like that’s that’s that’s why you’re trying to have this shield of being reasonable through through giving them a score. But intent is like, it’s people, it’s human behavior. Like one day I really want to buy something and the other day my boss comes in and says, we have a complete change of trajectory. We’re changing, and especially in marketing, because we saw in marketing, especially in marketing, they’re like, everyone’s all over the place. So capturing that human behavior when there is interest is what I think the role of intent is right now because in the past we would just score them and then hope that the sales say the right thing and it’s not the most effective way and I think that’s why a lot of like legacy ABM tools users complain that the sales are just ignoring their signals because the sales then have to go and talk to those people and those people are like How are you? I’m not, I don’t remember this because it’s been three months ago when they were, you know, when they started getting those imaginary points in your CRM. So, yeah, I think I kind of wandered away from the question.
Mike: No, but I think that’s a really important point about trying to assess intent, particularly through scoring, is that there’s a real difference between someone that builds up to a score over the course of a week or two through intense research and someone who’s built up that score over two years and actually probably isn’t really that interested. I mean, what other mistakes do you think people make when they’re running ABM campaigns that they could cut out and really improve what they do quite easily?
Anna: not aligning with sales. I think that’s one of the biggest issues that everyone in EBM faces. And also, because you can’t have complete control over this alignment, you kind of share this responsibility. A lot of people just avoid it. And I don’t blame them. I mean, alignment is hard like it’s human communication so very often when people start out ABM they’re like okay so we’re going to be doing this and they’re like okay and then they start meeting week after week and then it becomes repetitive they have nothing to discuss and then they start skipping the meetings so because there was no initial foundation for this alignment, this alignment, it just falls apart. And I think that the foundation for a successful EBM program is aligning on the audience with your sales from the very beginning. So, of course, it’s gonna, like, you need to sell the idea of the signals to your sales team, right? Because someone clicked on the ad and they get a notification, they’re like, oh, it’s just a click on the ad, they don’t score. But if that’s someone who they would be prospecting cold, and they’re, you know, instead, if if you work with the list of people who they would be called prospecting anyways, then the signals look like they appear in a very different light to them. They’re like, Oh, this is cool. It’s not an additional work, it’s actual air cover and that’s how you align and that’s how you actually avoid a lot of meetings because you don’t need to meet and be like, oh, did you write this email or did you talk to this person? Because it’s just in the dashboard. And I think everyone can appreciate a project which does not require additional meetings.
Mike: No, absolutely. I mean, one thing that interests me is obviously, you know, ABM is very sales related, as we’ve talked about a lot. And quite often, I think when marketers feel the ABM campaign is not working, they switch all their effort into lead gen and they’re generating leads and the quality probably isn’t as good as it should be. I mean, how do you as an ABM expert balance the need for, you know, more sort of brand type marketing against that pure lead gen?
Anna: So basically, ABM, it’s again, it’s the audience question. If your job is to build brand awareness within the range of your accounts, it is still ABM. It’s some, you know, a tactic from ABM that you are, that you surround them. For instance, I, when we just started doing, started aligning with SDRs and how we work through the audience together, we would put the audience in batches and run the batch for three months, just, you know, showing them a journey of content. And then we’re like, okay, it’s at fatigue. How about they rest? How about we don’t touch them for a while? And then, you know, our quota increased, and we needed to find, you know, we needed to generate more opportunities. But I didn’t have more audience. I was, you know, it is what it is. So we were like, Okay, why don’t we try out to nurture them? Why don’t we do like an ad nurture campaign, and then we don’t prospect them so aggressively. And actually, to my surprise, that worked. And we had a lot of conversions simply because we managed to stay in front of them and top of mind when the timing was right. And we didn’t know whether the timing was right or not. We were just there. So basically, maintaining a certain level of brand awareness with key decision makers is something that will help you catch the the right timing which is everything because you know again you can have the best creative if if they have a new CMO they’re not buying you. And you asked about lead generation I’m just it’s I think it’s a comp structure question as well because Marketing is going to be driving everything towards what they’re compensated on, just like the sales. So making sure that the comp structure is correct means that you don’t have a choice to give up on ABM and turn to low quality lead generation just to You know, just for it to look more effective, you’re just stuck with experimenting and figuring out how to make ABM work in your case. And there are so many ways you can execute on ABM. You can be doing two completely different things and still call it ABM. A podcast can be a complete ABM strategy. Events and getting meetings at the industry events or doing parties. There are so many things that whatever you’re doing for the target accounts, it’s ABM.
Mike: I think that makes a lot of sense. I want to go back to something you said earlier that I thought was really interesting. You talked about running a community of millions of people online, and that actually taught you things that you’ve now brought into your B2B marketing. I mean, we hear a lot about, you know, B2B becoming more like B2C. So, you know, how do you think having that experience has changed what you do and made you a better B2B marketer?
Anna: So, I don’t know if that’s the case for everyone, but at Amplitude, we’re a pretty fed up with all of this leveraging and unleashing and all of the, you know, overused terms that everyone’s using in almost every industry. And what I learned from my B2C experience is that, you know, human behavior is at the core of any purchase. And that’s what I always keep in mind that people are people and they’re going to be behaving the way people behave and it’s not like a funnel. We don’t behave in funnels, we behave kinda. There are so many factors. From outside it does look chaotic sometimes. I really, especially from the targeting standpoint, like you can google table and you’re gonna see 20 more tables in the same price range on your social media, on every website that you go to if you don’t have like the ad blocker. And it’s actually helpful because I did Google it and I mean, it’s a, you know, some people are like, oh, I don’t like that, but you can, you know, use the settings to turn that off. But for me, that’s helpful because I don’t need, I can be doing my own thing and having that research in the background because I do have the need. So, and I think with B2B, we are still in this early process of being relevant for our audience. Like, I am constantly advertised some rubber conferences, a conference for rubber production. I’m like, I don’t know anything about rubber. I’m not going there. Why are you showing this to me? And very often you don’t know who you’re targeting and what you’re like, Who is your audience? What happens at the other side? We did test some like native advertising on X, X Twitter. It’s wild, like it’s not what they say it is. So I think being relevant in your digital advertising is something that I took from B2C and also like the tone of voice and the way we describe things. We really want it to be simple and, you know, common language, not a made up corporate slang, I guess.
Mike: No, absolutely. I totally get that. Anna, this has been fascinating. I feel like we could keep talking for ages. But before you go, there’s two questions we’d like to ask everybody who joins the podcast. The first is, what’s the best piece of marketing advice that someone’s ever given to you?
Anna: That’s a hard one. That’s a hard one. I used to think that the best piece of advice was find something that works and scale it. And when that didn’t work, I kind of stopped listening to advice. So I wish I could give you some nugget, some golden nugget of wisdom, but I don’t have it. I don’t have it. I think every situation is so different. Every marketing situation is so different that, you know, you have to do your own thing and figure it out in the field and the trenches before you can trust it.
Mike: And I think that actually in itself is really good advice. I love that. The second question we always ask people is if you were talking to someone who was, you know, just graduated, starting their career in marketing, what advice would you give them to help them have a successful career?
Anna: You know, I actually did German translation as my major, so I did not study to become a marketer. So if you’re looking to try out a new career, I think everyone’s unique, everyone’s different, and everyone has their talents. And you can be the most talented person in something and excel at this thing and like keep improving this part of yourself because you’re already good at it. So I think figuring out what you’re naturally good at and what you enjoy doing is going to give you a lot of advantages in the future just because you’re going to excel faster than any other person who does not have that natural ability. So figuring out what you are good at and what you like doing is how you start trying yourself out in a career and then you become good at something else and then you move on and that’s where you get the experience, that’s where you get this exposure to. What other things could I be doing? I didn’t know I could be doing podcasts when I started writing content. I had no idea I would be doing that. And at some point I was like, oh, actually, I can talk. I can do that. So, yeah.
Mike: I love that. That’s such an optimistic, you know, point of view as well. That’s great. And this has been amazing. It’s been really interesting. I’m sure there’s people listening who’ve got, you know, reasonably mature ABM set up, who would be interested in learning more about Influ2. So if they want to find out more about the product, I mean, how can they find out about it?
Anna: You can reach out to me on LinkedIn if you want to connect. I’m always happy to talk to peers and, you know, I’m active in the ForgeX community as well. And if you want to learn about Enflue 2, just Google it and request a demo and you’ll have a discovery call. And you can also reach out to me and I’ll give you a tour of what I do at Enflue 2, if that’s something that you’re interested in.
Mike: That’s very kind. Anna, thank you so much for sharing all your knowledge. It’s been fascinating. Thanks for being a guest on Marketing B2B Technology.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to Marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favorite podcast application. If you’d like to know more, please visit our website at napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
