MarTech & ABM: A Worst-Practice Guide

A light-hearted look at how not to do ABM.

Make sure your ABM campaign is embarrassingly pulled after 18 months of no results and vast expenditure on now-redundant MarTech systems with these handy tips.

1.    Make ambitious long-terms plans with no milestone planning and little scope for course correction. The plans you make today will still be relevant 18 months from now. The worlds of ABM and MarTech move very slowly and little will have changed by the time your much-anticipated program sees the light of day. Go for it!

2.    Don’t bother with pilots. Some people will tell you that, since many MarTech tools are available on a ‘Software-as-a-Service’ basis, you should try them out before you make expensive purchases – these people just don’t have the courage of their convictions and should be ignored. And any program working well in one region should immediately be rolled-out globally: if cultural differences prevent it from working unchanged in a different region, then that’s someone else's problem.

3.    With MarTech, more is more. Don’t waste time exploring the full capability of your existing MarTech – spending lots of money on disparate platforms shows you are serious about ABM. Also, FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) is perfectly acceptable as a business case – if one of your competitors has a shiny new platform, then you should have it too! And the tech guys love the challenges involved in making all this function as a single system.

4.    Use a spreadsheet for lead management. When prospects become leads, there’s no need to move them from the spreadsheet you used to plan the campaign into your CRM system: your sales colleagues will take time out of their busy day to check your Excel sheet for updates. And if your content is good enough, prospects will have no problem recalling your proposition when the sales team do eventually get in touch. 

5.    Don’t worry about silos. It’s no cause for alarm if marketing and sales are working to different KPIs or if the central Marketing function has no visibility of Marketing Ops in the regions. MarTech exists to bridge these gaps and will help to overcome the fact that different functions have wildly varying ideas of what success looks like.

6.    Assume everything works ‘out of the box’. ABM is a ‘one-size fits all’ approach and your MarTech vendor has done all the necessary thinking for you. Customising the platform to your specific requirements only complicates matters and slows things down.

7.    Accept that technology replaces insight. Intent platforms and Sales Navigator tell you everything you need to know about account selection. The hard-earned experience of your sales teams is no match for the technology and no further human input is required.

All joking aside, when these ‘seven deadly sins’ are lined up on the page then it seems ridiculous that a company would commit any of them. However, I’ve has witnessed examples of ABM campaigns where one – or more – of these approaches have been taken.

If you want to find out more about doing ABM the right way, get in touch!