10 Proven Tips On How To Reach Sales<>Marketing Alignment For Your ABM Project

We all know that any ABM implementation is doomed without marketing-sales alignment, but getting there is much easier said than done. So how do you actually make this miracle happen??

This is what I do with my clients when I see alignment is an issue (and it usually is):

1. Wait before you start - I actually have a checklist I ask every potential client and it worked for me to filter who is ready for ABM or not. If the need to do ABM comes from anyone who is not a C level, without CEO and head of sales support, it won't work. If the ICP has never been sold to before, it won't work. If sales and marketing have no set pipeline goals, it won't work. So if your company is not ready, just wait until there's more willingness to accept change.

2. Now that you're ready, a great place to start is to establish shared goals and metrics to make sure that both sales and marketing teams are working towards the same goals. This could include revenue targets, the number of qualified leads, or specific account engagement metrics. By having common objectives, both teams can have a unified direction. This drops the need to show attribution for each deal and unifies the teams.

3. Collaborate on creating detailed buyer personas. These personas should include information on the key challenges, needs, and behaviors of the target accounts. This ensures both teams have a deep understanding of who they are targeting and can tailor their strategies accordingly.

4. Try to get a complete list of accounts from Sales as well as their commitment to reach out to these accounts and engage with them intensely if there are intent signals from them.

5. In a lot of cases that won't work (Maybe because marketing is from Mars and sales are from Pluto, who knows).

6. DON'T GIVE UP ON ALIGNMENT!

7. ABM initiatives usually come from marketing but they should start with asking sales which accounts they are targeting or which accounts they find harder to penetrate. Don't create a holistic plan and then present it as is. Ask sales before creating the plan so that when you present it, you'll have their buy-in in advance.

8. Ongoing and regular communication between sales and marketing is essential. Meetings have a bad rep right now but there's nothing like a face 2 face or Zoom meeting once a week on the calendar to pull everyone together and align on the same goals.

9. Use technology to enhance collaboration between teams but before adding new tech, consider using existing one. If the sales team is used to using Slack for lead alerts, send the alerts there. If push notifications is what they want, make it happen. This will ease objections of doing "new" things.

10. If all else fails, and getting the whole team to align is too difficult, what I usually do is find a salesperson or team leader who is the hungriest and is looking to do more. Convince them that you'll be giving them an edge. All they have to do is focus their efforts when you send them a signal. In return, you'll take their target list and show them ads, send them emails and help them create a customized outreach.

After a few months, if you've done your work well, that salesperson's pipeline is going to move faster and be relatively larger than that of his peers.

From that point onwards, all you need to do is wait until all salespeople want to work with you and agree to jump on accounts that are engaged. So yes, you may have used sales competitiveness "against" them, but in a way that everyone wins.

This is the way of the Zen, that account-based marketing zen.