Succeeding with ABM depends on whether you’ve laid the right foundations for results. If you don’t know where to start, ABM Strategy Director, Adam Emslie shares his tips to get the ABM ball rolling.
ABM can be a powerful framework that aligns your Sales and Marketing strategies towards the same goals. It can also fall flat without the right account insights and expertise. So, how do you evaluate whether your business is ready to adopt an ABM strategy?
The first step to being ‘ready’ for ABM is to know you’re targeting the right accounts – an all-too-often overlooked aspect of ABM. Account lists are created with the best intentions in the world. After all, the principles of targeting the most important accounts and customers are well-established norms in our field.
However, sometimes these account lists are based on some questionable assumptions and reasoning. The question then becomes, “Why point your precious ABM resources and effort at an account list which may contain a large number of challenging assumptions?”
The natural response to this is understandably, "Well… how do you know if you’re targeting the right accounts?" It’s a very valid question we often hear from our clients and one for which there’s no easy answer.
The answer lies in the detail
Knowing which accounts are ‘ABM ready’ means taking a bigger picture view of your account list and harvesting rich sales and marketing data from across the organisation.
At its simplest, you need to gain visibility across all your most strategic accounts. Answering the readiness question requires a hard look at the accounts and the data you have on them in a few different ways. This includes a view by opportunity, a view by relationships, and a view on the potential risk to the business.
Successfully gaining insight and answers for these fundamental areas of your accounts will allow you to truly understand whether they’re the right accounts to target.
You’ll have a detailed grasp of the accounts that represent the best opportunity (and the least), the accounts that represent the highest risk of being lost (and those that are low risk), and those that have the strongest (and weakest relationships) to build on – along with numerous other insights to take back into the business.
And that’s before you get started on any of the other elements of ABM.
Why is all this important for your ABM programmes?
When it comes to crafting and running a successful ABM programme, targeting the right accounts and assigning budget appropriately are fundamental. Do it right and you’ll know your marketing budget is working to support Sales on the accounts that truly represent a growth opportunity for your business.
Unfortunately, the flip side is that without a thorough understanding and investigation of your account list, you risk throwing marketing budget into programmes purely in the hope of success.
A certain granularity in your approach to building out account lists is necessary to create high-performing ABM programmes. And that starts by driving out ambiguity and subjectivity when preparing your accounts for ABM programmes.
So, how do you become ABM-ready?
It’s an ABM truism, but it should come as no surprise that it all starts with bringing Sales and Marketing together and unearthing the rich account data and information in a robust and clear manner.
When the two functions work collaboratively, you reduce the potential for friction that can cause challenges in the future. Internally, both functions will clearly understand how and where they support each other in the ABM strategy. Externally, on the other hand, prospects will enjoy a seamless customer journey that serves them the right message, at the right time, on the right channel.
If you’re looking to answer the ‘Am I ABM-ready?’ question, we can help. Transmission has been successfully doing this for clients across the globe for a decade – let's chat.
p.s. If you’re at the beginning of your ABM journey, this piece on piloting ABM offers insight into the common considerations you’ll encounter along the path to success.