Being Part of Your ICP and Showing Intent is Not Enough: The Role Challenger Should Play in ABM
Kristina Jaramillo
President of Personal ABM & Host of the ABM Done Right Podcast: My Team Drives Revenue (Not Leads!) with Your Winnable Accessible Market - The Ones That Have the Greatest Probability of Landing & Expanding. at a High ACV
As I mention in my podcast, "How Your ABM Strategies Should Impact More Than Your Pipeline," we need to focus on where/how to move the needle (sales velocity, stage progression, sales cycle time, win rates, deal size, retention. and expansion) and the impact we can have on revenue. ?This is why we've been having conversations with CEOs, CMOs, CROs, and VPs of Marketing at cybersecurity, digital asset management, AI, supply chain, ITSM, and unified communication platform tech firms.
Many are already using ABM platforms like Demandbase and Terminus, predictive analytics platforms like 6sense and intent data tech like Bombora. They are driving the top-of-the-funnel and increasing pipeline KPIs. But, the common thread we're seeing across the different companies in different industries is that they are challenged to drive stage progression even though the accounts they are now targeting are in-market and are in their ICP. There is a huge discrepancy between the pipeline revenue and actual revenue. And, in many cases, when deals are signed, the deal sizes are less than desired.
What's going on?
The sales and marketing motions that GTM teams are following are allowing accounts to stick with the status quo. ABM is not changing sales and marketing motions the way it should. Below, I discuss the sales and marketing motions that we need to change if we want to drive stage progression -- and the role Challenger should play with the new motions and ABM.
1. Sales and Marketing Teams Are Not Taking Control of the Customer Conversation with Key Accounts Along the Buying Journey.
The Challenger sale is focused on teaching for differentiation, tailoring for resonance/relevance and taking control of the customer conversation all while providing constructive tension. However, marketing simply reacts to 3rd party and 1st party intent data and pushes out more content based on what the target buyer is consuming or searching for. Marketing is simply reacting to the same information as their competitors that are also investing in intent data platforms vs. looking for "why" there is intent in the first place. There is no differentiation in the sales/marketing conversation, in the approach or the technology. However. when you uncover the why, you can provide content and messaging that focuses on their strategic objective and create the buying vision that leans in your direction. Through marketing content and messaging, we should be shaping the conversations that sales need to have with key accounts.
Sales teams are also reactive. One of the challenges that I heard from product marketing at Uniphore is around ensuring that sales teams have the right initial conversations with accounts that showed signs of engagement with ABM campaigns. Accounts and buyers are going cold and becoming unresponsive after sales engagement. Most sales methodologies are forcing sales to be reactive. They require sales teams to perform extensive discovery with the potential client. They require sales to ask probing questions to uncover needs, which are merely departmental/individual wants. As sales teams react to this information, they become pigeon-holed and are forced to cut deal sizes and margins as they are not aligned with the strategic priorities of the business.
As I mentioned before in a recent podcast, ABM should be an offensive, proactive move to win, protect and expand key accounts (the 20% of accounts that can deliver 80% of today's and tomorrow's revenue growth!) It should not be reactive. Sales and marketing teams need to take control of the conversation at every touchpoint.
2. Sales and Marketing Teams Are Not Tailoring for Relevance
According to ITSMA and Tech Target, 66% of ABM programs under-perform. These programs only involve 1:few and 1:many ABM execution and lack key areas of relevance even though the image below shows that buyers want sales and marketing teams to demonstrate a strong knowledge of:
With one-to-many ABM programs, you speak at "industries" and "personas." You focus on general assumptions and pain points. With one-to-few, you speak at target accounts and target personas that are in similar industries, are showing similar intent signals, and appear to be in similar buying stages. And, in both cases, ABM is campaign-based, and sales and marketing teams are pushing out content and messaging and hoping that something sticks. It's marketing as usual, but now we're using intent data and ABM technologies to take a more targeted "spray and pray" approach. Eighty-six percent (86%) of communications by sales, marketing, and account teams are still off-target and irrelevant.
1-to-1 personal ABM speaks to and with the human buyers within target accounts that we want to win, protect and expand. When you take this approach, you go directly to key decision-makers and influencers with insights that are specific to?their?gaps,?their?impacts, and?content that speaks to them specifically. You focus on each and every single interaction and touchpoint that GTM teams have with the human buyers and how you are relevant at the industry, company, rank, division, operational, financial, personal, and customer levels.
Some organizations think they are doing 1-to-1 as they are personalizing ads to targeted buyers and sending them to personalized landing pages. They may do outreach via phone, email, and social but they are just personalizing templates. So, in reality, they are speaking at people because they are taking a one-to-many or one-to-few approach and applying it to one-to-one. They are still telling "everybody's" story. As Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson mention in their book, "The Challenger Sale," in most cases, buyer unresponsiveness is not because you failed to make a logical argument. It's because you failed to make an emotional connection. It's not that buyers didn't believe your story. It's because they didn't see it as "their" story. This is what happens when you focus on industry relevance, some company personalization and persona messaging.
The other issue with "persona" messaging is that it has sales and marketing teams reacting to departmental wants. This is what happened with our digital asset management client. They were focused on "marketing pain points" and providing similar messaging to their competitors. The led target accounts to do an RFP and compare side by side, the solution capabilities and pricing vs. looking to see which DAM solution would meet the needs of the organization. This led to losses to competitors that would drive the price down or margin pressures.
Our client wasn't aligning with the strategic priorities of the organization and showing target accounts their specific unconsidered gaps across the organization that would impact the achievement of the business vision. They weren't showing the impact their specific gaps would have on the different divisions, on omnichannel operations, eCommerce, their GTM. product management, sales enablement, finance, customer service, the customer experience, and customers. As Doug Landis mentioned in a recent Forbes article: “When selling to larger companies you must come to every social, email and live conversation with a point of view about their business...You have to know what they are focused on as those strategic initiatives for the business will trickle down to every department across the organization.”?You need to show the role you can play in their strategic initiatives and the impact you will have, otherwise, you will just be another item on their list of things to do eventually.
Just by having a different sales and marketing conversation, you are beginning to teach for differentiation, which we cover in the next section. Read this article to learn more about a personal account-based approach that focuses on the human buyers at key accounts.
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3. Sales and Marketing Teams Need to Teach for Differentiation
If accounts are in-market and they are showing intent, then they are looking at your competitors. When the Challenger Sale book was written, only 35% of companies are able to establish themselves as truly preferred over the competition. And, still more troubling, even among preferred companies, when Challenger tested the impact of each of the benefits they believed to be unique they found that customers perceived half of them to be actually relevant to their needs. And, among those, customers told Challenger that they weren't delivered consistently enough to actually influence their preference. When you put it all together. only 14% of so-called benefits were perceived by customers as both unique and beneficial. Being "best of breed", "innovative" and "customer-focused" were not among them.
While the Challenger Sale was first published in 2011, if they were to do a study today, they would get similar results. In fact, Forrester recently completed a study on order management systems. Forrester heard story after story of order management firms embracing what they did (their features) as the “secret sauce” to their competitive advantage.
But…
From the purview of an order management practitioner, the secret was that firms didn’t know their sauce was just simple syrup – commodity features of an unfamiliar class of software.?Then we wonder why we're challenged to capture larger deals and why we're faced with margin pressures.
You see, sales and marketing teams make claims on how they are differentiated. But they are not leading prospects and customers to come to their own understanding on how the solution/approach is different. Through your content and stories, you need to show competitor-specific gaps and the impact they would have on the company, on different divisions. on strategic priorities, on different ranks/personas and on the people you engage with. You need to show through your stories how you would uniquely fill the gaps.
In addition to teaching for differentiation against direct competitors, we need to teach for differentiation against the status quo. As companies invest in platforms like 6sense, Bombora, Intentsify, LeadSift, and others, there is a strong focus on in-market accounts. This is only 3-10% of the market. As they have predefined needs, this is where you will have quicker but smaller deal sizes. 60% of the market is stuck in status quo. This market is a greenfield for sales and marketing where they can create the need and the buying vision.
But...78% of sales and marketing teams are challenged with overcoming status quo objections. Status quo objections = customer resistance to changing their current approach for solving a problem.?In our recent podcast, Eric Gruber (my partner and CEO of Personal ABM), Michael Randazzo (VP of GTM for Challenger) and Jennifer Allen (Chief Evangelist for Challenger) discuss how we need to change sales training, sales conversations, and marketing to beat status quo objections.
4. We Need to Make Challenger About Building Organizational Capabilities and Not Just About Individual Rep Skills
We need to treat each touchpoint and each interaction as a mini sales conversation in the prospects' minds. As I shared in a recent post (shown below), most thought leadership is nothing more than thought curation and thought regurgitation. It does not support the Challenger sale which is about reframing your prospects' specific thoughts and ideas. It doesn't help buyers make sense of the abundance of information that is being pushed out to buyers. And, most content does not support the internal "status quo" conversations that sales and marketing are not part of.
Now, there's more to Building "Challenger" capabilities across the organization then just helping marketing create "more relevant, differentiated" content. We need greater account-based enablement, not just sales enablement.
As you now see that Challenger should play a key role in ABM where we need to tailor for relevance, teach for differentiation and take control of the conversation, check out these podcasts with Challenger:
You can also connect with me (Kristina Jaramillo) to further discuss the role Challenger can play in your ABM program and the growth opportunities that exist