So you want to build an ABM strategy?
By: Phoebe Claire Conybeare
Tags: Marketing Strategies, Strategy, Marketing Technology, Sales, Marketing

Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash

Account-Based Marketing as a concept and strategy has been around since the 1990s in one shape or another (far longer than I have been a B2B marketer).

Despite the explosion of marketing and sales technology solving any need you could dream up and then some, many B2B marketing teams don’t align themselves with sales (and their business) around the common language spoken: CAC, ARR, LTV, Funnel Velocity, etc. at the account level. This creates dissonance, inefficiency, and ultimately isn’t what’s best for the customer experience.

Marketers love people. We love to talk about the humans we market to, we geek out over personalizing interactions with our buyer personas across our integrated channels and LOOK AT THIS CAMPAIGN I DREAMT UP ISN’T IT CLEVER?! We pour over our data (and there’s a lot of data) to understand buyer behavior; we talk to customers to try to find patterns of influence, we rack our brains trying to rationalize and scale a complex emotional process.

I keep encountering dissonance among marketing, sales and business leadership despite our best intentions and shared purpose. As a SaaS company, if we use design thinking to build excellent user experiences at the product level, our marketing, sales development and sales UX needs to use the same principles.

According to SalesHacker:

“In an account based world, landing the biggest, highest-value accounts can only be achieved when all revenue-generating disciplines are closely aligned. Specifically, we’re going to examine the almighty sales and marketing alignment framework.

Let’s get real — silos don’t work. Sure, they’re easy, but they don’t work. Sales and marketing have historically operated in their own way, with their own goals, culture and values.

We all know that buyers are now in control. That means our businesses have to follow suit and move beyond this old-school infrastructure. In truth, disconnected sales and marketing operations only lead to inefficiencies, broken systems and problems at every level.”

I’m fortunate enough to work at a company (Ansarada) and in a region (the good ol’ USA) and an office (Chicago) where marketing and sales have good relationships and rapport with each other.

While we have little brand awareness in the US, we have LOTS of brand awareness in Australia, where our HQ is. Our job as a marketing, SDR and sales team in the US is to build brand awareness and convert interested accounts into ARR.

When there are disagreements in quality or quantity of leads or how sales are working those leads, we resolve them and work together to do what’s best for our customers.

However.

We’re still speaking different languages. The marketing team speaks in top of funnel (campaign and website metrics) first and down-funnel metrics second.

Sales and business leaders care about down-funnel metrics first and top of funnel metrics second, and barely, at least on a macro level.

When we take a step back, we need to understand how everything is working together. How do you make strategic marketing decisions that will help scale your business quickly? I’m really understating this when I say it can be incredibly hard to measure marketing attribution and influence.

From a write up on TOPO’s ABM report (from 2016 — bit old, but the insights still ring true):

“The MQL is not marketing’s ultimate milestone.” The study found that the top ABM metric is Pipeline — 4x more ABM marketers focus on pipeline compared to MQL or MQA [Marketing Qualified Accounts]. It’s a total shift in focus to down-funnel metrics. When your ABM focuses on the opportunity stage (pipeline), you are able to manage your resources and optimize for the metrics that really matter. In addition to pipeline, metrics like velocity, win rates, ACV, and LTV are all down-funnel and related to the opportunity stage.”

It takes what, something like 86 touchpoints¹ to convert a lead to a sale? It takes your entire marketing technology stack to influence the average 5.4 decision-makers involved in a buying cycle and then you’re still wondering which levers work the best so you can turn up the volume. Marketing efficiency is a huge problem: limited budget and a mandate to grow exponentially.

In an ideal brand awareness + pipeline building strategy (ie. inbound inquiries are few):

Marketing and sales use predictive tools to intelligently identify accounts that are showing buying intent — no more ‘gut feel’ or ‘Forbes 100 and Inc 5000’.

Marketing intelligently engages the account to cut through the noise.

SDRs reach out to specific people (you can call them ‘leads’) at engaged accounts and creates opportunities for Sales to work. SDRs are the only team who should be owning the lead conversation.

Sales works the account until it becomes a customer. (Marketing helps with funnel velocity nurturing, too.)

Customer success serves the entire account to ensure they’re successful, reduce churn, and upsell (with the help of Sales).

Customer marketing markets specifically to accounts.

etc. (Do you see where I’m going?)

We still use segmentation. We still use all of our marketing channels and tactics. But what sits on top of everything — what guides decision-making, is the account lens. ABM provides a common language and unifies all of our efforts around an account list. It’s efficient. It’s smart. It makes sense.

For example:

Traditional SEM: Serve ads to lookalike campaigns based on buyer personas — spray and pray.

ABM SEM: Serve ads only to buyer personas at target accounts we know are showing buying intent signals.

Marketing, SDR teams, Sales — we all want to know which tactics/channels/strategies work so we can do smarter things to hit our goals, build the business, and cut through all of the damn noise to build relationships with humans and the companies they work for.

I’m not saying I know the magical answer for b2b teams — but I have a hunch

I work at a company where I have the freedom to explore this hunch. Where I’ve been trusted to build an Account-Based Marketing pilot to prove the concept and then scale the strategy.

The point of this writing (and subsequent writings after) is to document the process and journey I’m embarking on as a US-based marketer building a program that includes stakeholders from multiple departments across 3 (or more) time zones.

I recently attended Demandbase’s Advanced ABM training and found it excellent and chock full of information for a relative ABM newbie. As helpful as it and many resources are — I learn kinetically. By rolling up my sleeves and figuring things out.

I’ll take what best-in-class SaaS companies have done and apply it to Ansarada because reinventing the wheel when others have done exactly what you’re trying to do is stupid. We’re still our own unique flavor — with just over 200 people globally and only 25 of those in the US. We just raised our Series B with sights on an IPO. It’s time to GROW.

The Brief

Hypothesis

If we use Account-Based Marketing as a focused marketing strategy then we will see increased engagement from our ideal customer profile at target accounts, reduce operational waste and increase efficiency over time.

Why are we doing this?

Best-in-class SaaS companies use ABM as a strategy in their marketing mix. ABM reduces waste and promotes focus around target accounts, providing increased ROI and operational efficiency that compounds over time the longer the strategy is in place. This pilot is to prove the concept and build the business case and processes to scale.

Pilot goal

25% lift (18 accounts) in website engagement from 75 target accounts in the US and 75 target accounts in UK.

(I’ll explain why these numbers for the pilot in a subsequent post. There’s methodology behind it.)

Moonshot goal

5 Opportunities

Ideal Customer Profile

Tech Leader — Middle Market CEO & CFO

Risks

This is a project that will require collaboration across stakeholders from multiple departments across 3 time zones. It includes bringing people along a journey and selling the value internally through limited face to face interaction.

This project includes adding a new technology into our marketing mix and unforeseen potential problems that can arise with it.

Measurement

Tying everything together will be Domo ingesting data from Salesforce, the Demandbase platform, Google Analytics, Pardot, qualitative debriefs from SDRs and Sales, etc.

How

Next time

I’ll talk you through the process of how I went from “Hey boss, I have this idea…” to “stage 0” or creating something from almost nothing.

What are your thoughts about ABM? Hate it? Love it? Does it guide your entire sales/marketing strategy, or is it just a part of your marketing mix?