When sales and marketing leaders signed up for our training on "why 2/3 of ABM programs fail", they shared with us their biggest ABM challenges and questions including:
- How should we measure our ABM success?
- How can we gain team alignment, and how should we coordinate our ABM efforts?
- How should we be scaling our ABM program while keeping personalization?
- How do we get sales to stop shifting targets too fast?
- How do we get buy-in and get multiple resources to focus and take actions on target accounts?
- How do we know that ABM is right for us?
- How should we be engaging with the buying committee within an ABM account?
- How can we be sure we're targeting the best accounts?
During the next few weeks, I'll be creating content that answers the questions above, and I'll be sharing it in my ABM Done Right Newsletter on LinkedIn. But today, I want to start tackling the question that most of the registrants had:
How should we be getting started with ABM and where do we first start so our ABM program doesn't become like the 66% of ABM programs that underperform?
If you want to be part of the 1/3 of ABM organizations seeing significant business improvement from ABM, you need to understand what ABM should be. At Personal ABM, we believe that ABM’s definition and direction have gotten diluted. ABM has always been about focusing on the accounts that can provide maximum lifetime value – getting new key accounts to revenue and existing accounts to greater revenue. But the term “ABM” has become synonymous with the technology that enables it (6sense, Demandbase, Terminus, Madison Logic, etc.) Ultimately, companies are treating ABM as a thing to do and with shiny new tools. It's "marketing as usual," just more targeted. In fact, Gaetano Nino DiNardi (Head of Growth and Demand Gen for Nextiva) mentioned on LinkedIn: "ABM is code for marketers doing sales + a lot of ads. The concept of narrowly targeting a focused set of accounts has been around forever, but vendors needed a clever way to brand their software. They influenced the industry to buy their expensive tools - and the official category of ABM was born to fuel this purpose."
But, as I mention in the video below, ABM should not be synonymous with your ABM tech stack: 6sense, Demandbase, Terminus, etc.
ABM should not be about campaigns. It should not be a bunch of tactics (retargeted ads, emails, Outreach campaigns, etc.) It's not about getting accounts into the pipeline. The 66% of organizations that focus on pipeline KPIs and marketing sourced revenue are only doing account-based lead gen, account-based advertising, and account-based awareness.
ABM is about how leadership, sales, marketing, revenue, sales enablement, customer success, and product teams together will hit the numbers the business needs to get to the next level. It's a strategy on how the teams will fix business challenges that are tied to the fundamentals of revenue: win rates, deal sizes, sales velocity, stage progression, sales cycle time, retention, ARR, margin growth, and expansion. I discuss this further in my podcast on "How ABM Should Impact More Than Your Pipeline." The podcast is only 4 minutes so take a listen.
We have to stop thinking of ABM as a thing to do using technology and prospects as another lead to be processed in the pipeline. It's this thinking that led ABM to become merely just a bunch of tactics thrown together - LinkedIn ads, retargeted ads, email campaigns, events, phone calls. It's why there is no orchestration and no plan to get accounts to revenue. As a result, there is no real ABM strategy.?It's also why a? study by Chicago-based B2B marketing firm LoSasso shows that about 63% of buyers believe that sales and marketing actions are a waste of time. They’re trying to force prospects into paying attention rather than making them want to pay attention.
So, if ABM is a business strategy - how do we get started in creating this strategy? Here's a template to help you get started with your ABM strategy and account plan:
Part 1: The Top-Level Marketing Elements That Will Impact Your ABM Strategy
- What are all the different ways the product/services/solution is being used?
- What are the use cases that are not being considered? Why aren’t the use cases considered yet?
- What are our points of differentiation beyond product/service/solution features and benefits??
- What are the overall gaps that you are filling – and the impacts at the organizational, operational, financial, divisional, employee, personal, and customer impacts?
- What are the competitor-specific gaps that you are filling?
- What stories do you have or can put together to help sales and marketing teach for differentiation?
- What are the reasons behind the company engaging in an ABM program?
- What are the business challenges that you are trying to fix with ABM? For example, do you have accounts that are not progressing through the buyer’s journey? Do you have weak win rates with tier 1 accounts? Are your sales cycles too long? Are you challenged to penetrate a specific market?
- Where will ABM be focused initially – customer acquisition, account retention, changing buyer behavior (margin growth), account expansion? Why?
- What would you like your ABM program to look like immediately, in 6 months, in 12 months?
Part 3: Leading ABM and Team Roles:
- Who will be leading the charge when it comes to ABM – we believe it should be the CMO and CRO or a VP of Product Marketing vs. handing ABM to demand gen, which focuses on campaigns?
- What roles should product marketing, marketing, sales, sales enablement, sales operations, marketing operations, RevOps, and customer success/account management teams play in ABM?
- How should the teams be collaborating, and what feedback loops need to be put in place?
- How should the teams be orchestrating their efforts – this goes beyond alignment?
Part 4: Change Management
- What are the changes at the organizational level that need to be made?
- What are the mindset changes that need to take place?
- What does the sales/marketing infrastructure need to change?
- What is not working with the current GTM approach – and what needs to change so the team can GTM using ABM?
- What are the changes in sales, marketing, and account management/customer success team motions that need to be made?
- How do prospect/customer interactions across all channels (including social) and the experiences you’re delivering need to be changed?
- What are the current processes and reporting metrics that no longer make sense in an ABM organization?
- How will you align sales, marketing, and account teams under one process such as “Challenger"?
?Part 5: Defining Your ICP - The Accounts You Want to Target
- ?What internal data should you use to get the complete story on your existing accounts?
- What clients see the highest success and why?
- They say that 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your accounts. What accounts would be part of that 20% that deliver a great rate of returns, have high margins, and provide additional room for growth? What are their key characteristics? How do they like to engage? Where would they like to see improvement?
- What are the accounts that have lower rates of return, cost more to serve but offer strong revenue growth opportunities? What are the key characteristics of these accounts? How do these accounts like to engage, and where would they want to see improvement?
- What are the accounts that have diminishing rates of returns? What are the key characteristics here?
- Where are you winning – and why are you winning?
- Where are you losing - and why are you losing?
- What are the accounts showing intent, and why are they showing intent? What is happening within these organizations? What trends can you identify?
- How will you tier and prioritize accounts and the approach you take as all accounts should not be treated the same?
Part 6 - Aligning on Account Selection and Success KPIs
- What are the fundamental KPIs to revenue growth that the teams want to impact? What are the two metrics that you want to focus on 1st? Where does the prioritization lie with the other success KPIs?
- What are the overall revenue goals? What portion of the revenue goal needs to come from strategic accounts? What percentage of the revenue goals need to come from existing accounts? What is the current revenue from net new and existing customers??
- How will you select the strategic new and existing accounts to target to achieve the business goals?
- What is the account selection process??
- What are the account disqualification/qualification processes?
- What role will intent data play in identifying accounts?
- When do you use one-to-one, one-to-few, and one-to-many?
- How will you use ABM to drive continued engagement with those accounts showing intent and are already consuming your content?
- How will you use ABM to drive engagement with those accounts (60 % of the market) that are stuck in the status quo and do not respond to campaigns as they do not yet have a relevant business vision?
- How will you use ABM for those accounts that get stuck in their buying journey?
- How will you use ABM for those accounts where you cannot get a buying consensus?
- How will you use ABM for accounts that slowly progress through the different buying stages and take up sales resources?
- How will you use ABM for at-risk accounts and those accounts where you can drive expansion?
- How will you integrate social, email, video, content, and interactive tools/events into your ABM program?
- How will you ensure all tier 1 interactions demonstrate relevance across all channels, including having a relevant LinkedIn profile that speaks to target accounts and the human buyers within those accounts?
- How will your ABM program impact the complete buyer’s journey?
- Why isn’t sales using your content today with prospects?
- Where do your content gaps lie?
- What commercial insights need to be added to your content?
- How can your content teach for differentiation against your competitors (including your biggest competitor – the status quo)
- What existing content can you take and tailor it for target accounts?
- What stories need to be told within your content to create an emotional connection?
- What reframes should your content focus on – you need to create an a-ha moment with target accounts?
- What middle and bottom of the journey content needs to be created?
- How can you tell a better story within your case studies to drive retention and expansion conversations?
- How can you use content to influence your teams' selling conversations and the internal buying conversations that the team is not privy to?
- What content is needed to enable buyers along with your sellers?
- How is your content going to teach to outsource?
- How can your content create alignment across the target organization and even win with the CF “No”?
- What processes do you need to put in place to have real-time content for the conversations that are happening now – and the ones that should take place.?
- What technologies will you use to bring all your 1st party customer data together?
- What technologies will you use to complete win/loss analysis?
- What technologies will you use to manage one-to-many and one-to-few ABM programs?
- What technologies will you use to measure revenue KPIs along the buyer journey and complete customer lifecycle?
- What technologies will you use to provide greater visibility among teams and enable greater collaboration?
- What technologies will you use for account planning (especially if you are targeting existing accounts)?
- What sales enablement/sales performance technologies will you use?
- What intent and technographic data platforms will you use?
- What other technologies will you need to support the ABM strategy?
This should help you build an ABM strategy that focuses on your business goals/challenges and the experiences you need to deliver to hit your revenue numbers. If you'd like the complete PDF that includes account plan templates for new and existing accounts, please connect with me and let me know that you want my ABM strategy template.
To help you get started with ABM, you may also want to check out these additional resources:
