Aligning Leadership
Since the pandemic has hit and ABX programs were accelerated, during these years of connecting to executives and ABM leaders we’ve learned that roughly most of the enterprises are setting a high bar for Marketing-Originated Business (MOB), which is expected around 25%. This means that in a year frame, the so-called Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for the originated bookings or revenue coming from marketing and ABX effort, should be around a fourth of the total. There are many other metrics used at the leadership level to align sales & marketing departments including Marketing-Influenced business and what we are seeing are tighter KPIs than the previous MQLs or leads generated.
The business and executives have understood that sales are not interested in conceited numbers, on the contrary, they need support to achieve their KPIs by working together on those accounts they are betting on. Below we summarized a few of the typical requests for help by Sales.
Account-Based Intelligence: Sales demands to understand their accounts more deeply, get a closer look, keep an eye on their latest development, and get early signals before their prospects and clients look out for the solutions sales offers. Sometimes sales are unaware of new potential segments, accounts, and personas that could be a fit and this is especially true for emerging solutions.
Account-Based Marketing: Sales requests to nurture and educated their accounts as most of those are not in-market or ready to purchase the solutions sales are offering. Marketing goes a step forward and provides a personalized customer experience that can drive those accounts throughout the funnel with insightful content. To move the prospects across the funnel, content creation has to be selective and tailored for each of the buying stages.
Account-Based Sales & Sales Development: As mentioned on the Intel side, sales need to learn about the accounts and while technology and research teams can provide the right information, because of GDPR concerns, they can’t give you a level of granularity on the exact person located where you aim. For this reason, human engagement comes into the picture to reach out to certain personas with legitimate interest that they might need the solution sales are offering. To accelerate such a process usually a specialized team of outbound and qualification is created so that they can be more effective but also reduce the time spent by sales on these early pipeline activities.
Account-Based Customer Success: As many of you know the roots of ABX programs lay in focusing on existing accounts and maximizing the outcome in terms of relationship, revenue, and reputation. The main resources involved in dealing with the customer are the CS representatives. These roles can contribute significantly to the success of ABX programs by building relationships, feeding the strategic account intel, and collaborating with sales and sales development functions to grow and expand within the account (i.e. upselling or cross-selling programs). This collaboration is particularly important in the case of corporate/enterprise accounts due to the size of the accounts and the high turnover in their target personas.
From the 2021 ABM Benchmark Study by ABM Alliance, we have highlighted here above in the infographics the top 5 points for a successful ABX program. Point number 1 is probably the first step organizations should focus on and it’s exactly the topic we were talking about in the first part of this article. In this sense, alignment at the strategic and executive levels is crucial to obtain ROI and program continuity. Below we try to summarize the most interesting aspects along with our personal recommendations:
What’s working well?
✓ Active engagement with accounts ✓ Pipeline growth ✓ Sales satisfaction ✓ Influence on overall marketing ✓ Return on Investment
What’s still challenging, even for the ABM leaders?
• Positioning ABM as a business growth initiative, not a marketing initiative • Attracting, retaining, and developing ABM talent • Aligning marketing and sales • Standardizing programs and processes across BUs, geos, divisions • Measuring and reporting results
The reality is most companies that practice ABM do not yet have centralized program management or a sort of Center of Excellence (CoE) for account-based programs. Moreover, breaking down the sales & marketing silos requires top-level commitment and constant reinforcement at C-Level. Friction with Sales is ordinary and accountability of a process is key for ABM initiatives, in this sense, the technology in this space (CRM first and foremost) can help with the execution of certain predefined processes and metrics.
In our view, the main takeaway in this report by ABM Alliance is that successful ABM leaders are more likely to include data analytics and insight in their tech stacks.
