How to Achieve ABM Success

Account Based Marketing (ABM) represents a shift in focus from broad inbound marketing to those specific accounts that have the greatest propensity to buy. With over 7000 vendors in the Martech landscape today, it’s more important than ever to choose your tech stack strategically when building out your ABM program.

Many marketing departments are quick to select an ABM tech vendor before thinking through strategy…leading to disappointment, underperformance, and sunk costs. Developing an ABM strategy takes far more than signing a contract with a vendor; it’s about aligning all go-to-market teams around those accounts most likely to be your next best customers, and operationalizing a well thought out process and workflows to move those accounts down the pipeline.

Developing an effective account-based approach involves more than just the marketing team. Focus on the pain points of all go-to-market teams and only then develop a strategy to support these interdependent teams.

Some pain points we hear from our clients that involve more than just the marketing department:

  • “We’re not growing as fast as we want to.”

  • “Our marketing team is generating a ton of leads, but very few of those leads are converting to opportunities.”

  • “Our sales team has a hard time prioritizing and focusing on high value leads and accounts”

  • “Our marketing, sales, customer success, and partner teams are not aligned…they’re all working on their own initiatives”

To design a well-designed ABM approach, it’s important to first understand the pain points and include input from all go-to-market teams and leadership. Unless you understand all stakeholders challenges well, you’ll miss the larger organizational challenges and design a piecemeal solution to larger problems.

Alignment and buy-in is key. While ABM may be popular within marketing, an effective account-based approach often requires a cultural shift within all go-to-market teams and leadership. This demands a top down approach. Business leaders need to champion the account-based initiative and operationalize the vast organizational changes needed.

Marketing may own and drive the account-based strategy forward, but an effective ABM program requires organization-wide changes in strategy, priorities, measurement, and KPIs. This requires tremendous commitment and focus over quarters and even years to pay off.

LEAD WITH STRATEGY

The first step to an account-based approach is to develop a data-informed target account list. Which industries, account sizes, and buyers are your best future customers? Which current customers generate the most revenue for your company?

Developing your target account list requires careful deal analysis and collaboration between GTM teams. Bringing in predictive and intent technology at this stage can help you model your account list based on those accounts that are already your customers.

Once you have your account list, you can then develop your go-to-market strategy to reach these accounts. Continued collaboration between sales, marketing, customer success, and partners is needed to help you answer some fundamental questions.

• What is it that these target accounts and buyers most need?

• Is this a sales first or marketing first initiative?

• Will you need content and support from the marketing team?

• What metrics are you using to determine success?

Answering these questions will allow you to create and document the processes for your ABM playbook. The resulting go-to-market strategy can often be complex, involving many stakeholders. Going through this process, we find that some companies come to realize that they may be lacking the expertise to design, execute and iterate effectively on a full ABM program.

LINE UP THE RIGHT RESOURCES

The biggest roadblocks we see in delivering an effective account-based approach is lack of resources, internal knowledge, and alignment. We’ve seen too many teams get stuck with annual vendor contracts that they don’t have the resources to implement or fully leverage. Ensure that you have the resources in place to design, execute, train and iterate on your ABM strategy before selecting new technologies.

Creating a lasting, cultural shift towards an account-based strategy demands that all GTM teams shift their thinking from lead generation and awareness to relentless focus and enablement around target accounts. This shift takes persistence, operations, and resources to execute.

If you don’t have the internal resources or expertise to design and execute a account-based approach, bringing in a consulting team that understands an account based approach can help align your teams around this cultural change.

SELECTING YOUR ABM-ENABLING TECHNOLOGIES

After you’ve gotten buy-in and alignment from GTM teams, developed your ABM strategy and identified the resources needed to execute, only then you should begin to consider new technology. You’ll now be able to easily identify holes in your technology stack to help you roll out the ABM approach. While there are many vendors to choose from, ABM technology generally falls into four buckets:

Vendors in the ABM space have significant feature overlap, so it’s not necessary to sign with a half a dozen or more vendors before launching a program. It’s also possible to operationalize a lot of processes manually in your marketing automation and CRM before committing to new technologies.

SUMMING IT UP

While ABM offers exciting new go-to-market strategies, it’s important to do the groundwork before committing to new technology. Aligning all go-to-market teams around goals and then operationalizing strategy and workflows will help ensure your ABM programs success. After surveying and filling any gaps in resources, then and only then should you start looking at vendors to help enhance your ABM program.

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