Sitting beneath a sound GTM strategy, ABM (AKA Account Based Marketing) or as we think about it here – Account Based Everything – is a game changing tactic for businesses that have growth expectations and have hit caps on their performance marketing, organic programs, or have a TAM that isn’t, well, everyone.

WARNING: ABM should not be the the only tactic employed by teams, but should sit in the GTM mix and be weighted appropriately.

But oftentimes, companies throw all their eggs in the ABM basket and fail miserably because they have forgotten to ensure they have cross-functional alignment. You see, ABM isn’t only about marketing. To be successful it necessitates the inclusion of teams like sales, product, customer success, and even finance. Most importantly it requires clear cross functional reporting – more on that below.

GREAT FOUNDATIONS

Great ABM starts with great foundations. And the first step is truly knowing who your customers are. This means understanding not only their names but what makes them tick. Having this deep understanding will allow you to both count them (a necessary step to build engagement models) but equally communicate with them effectively. The second is ensuring the buy in of key stakeholders across your business. This is required because ABM is a long term tactic and requires some balanced focus from folks other than just marketing. Last but not least measures and benchmarks need to be finalised and agreed on. Measures need to include data points like the number of accounts in cycle as well as conversion rates across the funnel. Most importantly the data measured needs to include quality measures too especially in the time just after launch.

BUILD AND TEST

A good plan is only as great as the speed to flawless execution, especially when you’re racing to hit targets. The build phase is all about – what and how. Namely: what message and engagement points are you going to test and how are you going to do it. We recommend engaging your product marketing and customer success teams to ensure your messaging is right while huddling with sales to make sure that they are going to execute on the engagement steps they will need to undertake. Yes, sales. They are going to be an equal half of the ABM program and they should know this already as part of step one above! Depending on your budget, there are a truckload of tools out there to make ABM easier for your marketing and sales teams, but harder on your ops teams. But, you can do all of this manually too and we can help balance the right approach for you when we meet.

MASTER THE PROGRAM

It’s our recommendation if you don’t have a revenue operations, or sales operations team that someone with “mad spreadsheet skillz” understands the mechanics of the ABM effort deeply. That is because ultimately the success or failure of your investment in ABM will come down to knowing what on earth is going on in the funnel you have created. For example, was it the last direct mail piece you sent or the call from a sales person that led to the meeting. Or more simply what message is leading to great click through rates. This person will also need to be empowered with the ability to demand change from team mates not in their department when they spot opportunities for improvement. A great example of this is telling marketing that their first round of emails needs to be better or sales to ramp up calls on day 15 of the program.

reflect, adapt and release

Although you should be reflecting and optimising on the fly throughout the life of your program, it is also important to draw a line in the sand to assess the full cycle of a program. This is because there are macro learnings you will need to consider that sit outside of the day-to-day ABM battle you’ll be waging. Macro thoughts you might find include the quality or ROI of the accounts closed. Or that you don’t quite have the right nurture plan or rules in place to recycle the accounts that have been through your program but not engaged. Take the time to retro, not too frequently – but enough to capture macro trends and insights.